Choosing a PM Training Organisation

How can you maximise your project management training budget by ensuring you are choosing the right training organisation and training course?

There are lots of project management training courses to choose from and your limited budget needs to deliver the right results for your project management career development.

This short guide provides some questions to ask when talking to your potential project management training course provider.

Originally printed in our How to Manage a Camel blog by Paul Naybour of Parallel Project Training, here is our guide to ensuring you are picking the right training partner for you.

An Insider’s Guide to Selecting Good Quality Project Management Training Providers

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 project management training provider for your course. The key factors are:

1. Level of pre and post course support and logistics?
2. Quality of the venue and number of delegates?
3. Quality of the material?
4. Quality and experience of the trainer?

We recommend asking the following questions to evaluate the quality of your potential PM training 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 what 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 project management 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.
 

Does the training include time to apply new thinking to current real life situations?

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?