An insider’s guide to selecting a good quality Project Management Training Provider?
Project management training is a significant investment of your time, cost and effort. The quality of your learning is dependent on several key factors. Asking the right questions in advance can help you select the best training provider for your course. The key factors are:
- Level of pre and post course support and logistics?
- Quality of the venue and number of delegates?
- Quality of the material?
- Quality and experience of the trainer?
We recommend asking the following questions to evaluate the quality of your potential provider.
How many public training courses do you cancel or reschedule?
Many training providers advertise a large portfolio of training courses and cancel or reschedule courses because they are not economic to run. Having your course re-scheduled is highly inconvenient. You will have to re-arrange your diary and re-schedule your work plans and lose the momentum of your pre-course preparation. Ask your provider how may courses they have re-scheduled in the past 6 months to get an indication of how often this happens?
What pre-course material is provided?
Training is not just about want you learn in the class room, modern courses should provide significant pre-course support with e-learning, study material in advance and on-line tutor support. This means that you arrive on the course well prepared and ready to learn.
Ask about arrangements for lunch?
This may seem a rather un-important issue but like airlines the quality of the food is a measure of the values of the training provider. No lunch or a sandwich in the room indicates that low cost is more important to the training provider than your learning experience. On a full week course you will learn better if you take a break and visit an on-site restaurant for lunch. Getting out of the training room for an hour at lunchtime significantly improves your ability to learn post lunch.
What is the average and maximum number of delegates on a course?
The best size for a course is between 6 to 12 people. This is because you get good group dynamics but also enough attention from the trainer. If the maximum class size is over 12 then you may not get the attention that you need. If the average group size is less than 5 then you won’t have the opportunity to learn from others.
Who is the trainer and what experience do they have?
The quality of the trainer is crucial to the success of your learning experience. Ask your training provider who will be teaching the course? What is their experience of project management? Ask if you can speak to the trainer? Any good training provider will arrange a call back from the trainer. This is important because many training providers outsource the course delivery to the cheapest freelance trainer.
Paul Naybour is business development director with Parallel Project Training, which offers on-line, in print, on iTunes and face to face APM Project Management Training
People attend training for different purposes but the key to training is to able to take away what you have you learnt and practically adapt the processes and models to fit your current and future organisations’ needs. In order to do this, the training needs to facilitate exercises with real life examples in other organisations and your current organisation. If your current company is to benefit from the training, the training provider should allocate time to apply new methods to actual requirements. Question the training provider about time allocated to these type of exercises?
Twitter: Parallelproject
Very good comment I shall add this too the list. Even better to base the training on real live projects which are in start up.
Twitter: DrPDG
@Paul,
Having been in the project and program management training business for 17+ years now, my biggest frustration from the OTHER side are clients who send people who are not motivated to learn, but have been sent by their bosses because the training “sounded good”.
Another long standing frustration are clients who expect to take a 2 day course and then become “instant project managers”. Producing competent project managers is not like cooking Quaker Oats for breakfast.
We follow the Kirkpatrick Method http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/ and have found that clients who are willing to work with us presenting a series of courses over an extended period of time, using their own, in house case studies, produces the best long term results.
BUT, in order to get the most benefit, the people who take the training must truly want it, otherwise all they are getting is a two or three day break from work at a 5 star hotel or facility.
And on that topic, no private sector provider can afford to conduct training at anything less than 4 star facilities, especially pertaining to the lunch and snacks. The “cheapest” places we have conducted training are at in-house “learning centers” where it is the client and not the training provider who serves sandwiches or box lunches.
BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.build-project-management-competency.com