What’s wrong with vendor training?

A recent discussion on Twitter about the high costs of training from NetApp got me thinking more about vendor training. So I’ll lay my cards on the table here: at the company I work for, IDATA, we do sell our own training. We like to differentiate our training from vendor training as being more focused on getting a chunk of information to the customers in as short a period of time as possible. Why? Because attention is currency, and time is money.

I’ll also reiterate something I’ve said before: I think most certification programmes are bullshit. That’s right, bullshit. If you think I’m being rude, well, personally I think I’m being polite about most certification programmes, so we’ll meet in the middle there.

So with this in mind, what’s wrong with vendor training?

Let’s consider what training should be about. It should be focused on the following goals:

1. To give customers enough information to avoid misusing a product to the point of having a disaster.
2. To allow customers to maximise their investment in a product by understanding as much as possible of it.
3. To reduce as much as possible the amount of times the customer needs to engage with the support arm of the company. This isn’t just important for whomever is supplying the support, but also for the customer!

There’s a fourth goal as well – what I’d call a drag goal though, not a primary goal: good training in a good product should turn a customer into an advocate. But this can’t always be guaranteed. The above three are the essential goals of any training course.

So what’s wrong with a lot of vendor training these days?

Simple: many vendors become greedy with training, lose focus on those above three goals and instead turn it into a revenue stream. Now, I’m not suggesting that every single vendor training course falls into this category, but a lot do – and despite mentioning NetApp in the opening sentence, I’m not picking just on them. Symantec, EMC, NetApp, CommVault, etc., you’re all just as guilty at times as one another.

The biggest sign that someone has started to treat training as a revenue stream in its own right, and lost focus on those core three goals of training is when you start to see padding going into the course. Every course should have exactly the same amount of padding: nil.

Here’s some examples of padding:

• Spending vast amounts of time trawling over trivial facts. (E.g., a backup training course once that spent three hours talking about the different generations of SCSI.)
• Labs that go for an hour where the instructor leaves the room or concentrates on email. This usually means it can be done in 15 minutes if the instructor hangs around to help the slower students.
• Courses that don’t start until say, 9.30 and then everyone’s out the door by 4 or 4.30 in the afternoon. That’s not an early mark, that’s a rip-off.
• Courses where the content is clearly just the installation and administration manuals converted into powerpoint slides.

When training is treated as a revenue stream, those fundamental goals of training are being occluded – sometimes a little, and sometimes almost completely. Using backup as an example, Symantec, EMC and CommVault all do 5 day administration training courses. To this I say: rubbish, you can do it in 3. Pull out the padding, run the course for the full day (after all, you’re charging for the full day) and keep the labs well timed and you can do the course in 3 days without any loss of information to the customer. In fact, I’d suggest that in most cases a vendor’s 5 day course could be readily shrunk to 3 days and leave customers happier about the experience in almost all instances.

It’s tempting to turn training into a revenue stream, but in doing so, companies lose sight of the core purpose of the training. Training is not about profits – it’s about teaching customers to use what they’ve purchased and making support work efficiently.