G'day everyone,
Who here has their own training facilities?
For those of us who don't (and Perl Training Australia is definitely in this
boat), how do you handle arranging labs in another city when it isn't convenient
for you to go and check them out?
Do you try to get someone you know to give them a look over? Do you always make
the time to fly out and ensure they're sufficient? Or do you just trust that
things will probably be okay?
What do you look for in a training facility? Do you care about the machine
specifications? How important is it that morning and afternoon tea are served?
Do you test their coffee? Do you make use of lunch vouchers or in-house
catering or do you let attendees buy their own lunches?
I'm curious as to how you arrange labs for your training courses. Please feel
free to add questions. For us:
We often don't make the time to check out labs in other cities before training
at them. We usually want to do so, but time often gets away from us. This has
bitten us badly once when the staff at the facility turned out to want to close
the doors at 4:30pm when we had pitched our class to run from 9-5.
Unfortunately, sometimes even checking out the labs isn't enough to find out
whether or not they are suitable. A room can seem quite pleasant when it's
empty and you walk in half way through the day; but it can be down right nasty
by 4pm on a warm day with all the machines turned on and 15 bodies working away.
Separate air conditioners for each room are important.
In a training facility we look for:
* Clear, large monitors. 17" minimum with a decent resolution.
* Lots of elbow room between attendees
* Quiet, very sharp data projector
* Decent air conditioning.
Machine specifications are typically irrelevant (we don't teach anything which
can stress a low-end machine), so we often laugh when we're offered RAM and
processor upgrades.
Morning and afternoon tea is nice, although we'll cope okay if there are just
biscuits as well. Good coffee seems to be really hard to find. What is it with
training facilities providing "freshly brewed" sludge?
We always use lunch vouchers, although we prefer it if these vouchers are
accepted in more than one location. Our most recent course only had a single
location (we were assured there would be more) and although none of the students
complained I was a bit disappointed.
A new training room criteria I'm thinking of adding is a question regarding fire
drills and floor wardens. I know this sounds hopelessly paranoid, but it isn't
really. In our course today we stopped for morning tea at about 11:10 and came
back at about 11:25am. At 11:30 we were told that there was going to be a fire
drill in about 5 minutes but we wouldn't have to evacuate. At 11:35 we were
asked to leave the building. The fire warden for the training facility then
proceeded to leave; rather than ensuring that the floor was cleared etc. In the
mix-up of people on the stairs we lost some of our students too. :(
The whole thing took about an hour, so I'm glad we decided to solve it by
breaking for lunch really early, and then having 2 afternoon tea breaks.
I'll be asking my next facility when I book:
* Is there a fire drill scheduled that week
and
* Who is your fire warden, and do they know what they're doing?
If it were possible to mark the fire wardens on their jobs I would have had to
give ours a 1/10.
All the best,
J
--
("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._ | Jacinta Richardson |
`6_ 6 ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`) | Perl Training Australia |
(_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-' | +61 3 9354 6001 |
_..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,' | [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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