We can arrange training programs that efficiently fit into the time you can set aside for this purpose, from 09:00 AM to 09:00 PM, as illustrated below. Training sessions can be arranged to fit your schedule and to minimize the impact on work assignments in progress. The rates listed apply to training provided in the Toronto GTA area. For training outside the Toronto GTA area you may incur costs for travel and/or accommodation, plus a daily rate of $800 for days spent traveling to/from your venue, if no local affiliate is available. Please contact us for a quotation on your specific training plans. All our seminars are tailored to fit the same basic pattern that has been shown to be the most effective in many settings:

(Costs are exclusive of any customization requested by the customer)

You can combine any number of sessions per day, either to continue the education of the same group of students, or to rotate as many students as you want through on session that is repeated before the next topic is introduced in a future session. You can elect to have the workshop portion excluded: this way you may fit up to 3 sessions in one day (not taking any evening sessions into account). It is even possible to arrange "lunch-and-learn" sessions to minimize your downtime, or to fit 2 sessions into a "flex-time window" to simplify potential scheduling challenges. Day sessions and evening sessions are charged separately. For more in-depth training our one seminar/day that is combined with an extended workshop produces the best overall results, or we can be engaged to continue the support of your staff in a mentoring capacity at our normal services rates.

For the best results each session should be limited to 10-12 students or less, but up to 20 students can be accommodated if necessary (depending on the facilities that you can make available). We can arrange to rent facilities at an extra charge. We can also provide you with a "train-the-trainer" option, whereby you can license the use of our training materials for future in-house courses to be delivered by your own staff, and we can license our materials for use by local training providers. For further information on these options please contact us.             ----- (click here to contact) -----

Each of our seminars can be modified to meet your specific requirements. Customization is charged at $800./day based on a specific estimate of what needs to be changed. Customized seminars can be licensed also for delivery in-house by your own staff to your own employees. We are able to customize all relevant training topics and the associated custom study materials, notes/handouts, and workshop materials. We may also be able to customize the relevant demo tools featured in our training programs as most tools are custom developed by pm4hire.com but we cannot modify freeware/shareware tools that may be used to demonstrate concepts.

All our seminars may be made available for presentation at a public training facility where a per-person attendance charge applies. Two or three sessions may be combined into a single day presentation, and multiple days may be scheduled to cover a complete study program. There is no change in the basic contents of the materials, but there may be some accommodation to add content relevant to the sponsoring organization. Any session can also be delivered as a breakout session at a conference. The sponsor may set the cost of attendance per person that is independent of the on-site presentation costs cited above, and different amenities may be offered by different sponsors.

For information on public training seminars click on the image at right.

Public seminars may actually be a preferred option if you only have a few people interested in attending the sessions, but typically the costs per student are much higher than for comparable in-house training sessions where you may have 10 or more people attend at once. While in a public setting people get exposed to how different companies work, the benefits of arranging an in-house session include an opportunity to stimulate dialog within your organization on how you can use different techniques to best advantage. As more people are exposed to new ideas there is more likelihood that these ideas will actually take off, which improves the value of the training programs. Seminars stimulate people to pay attention and to absorb information that they would not glean from books or study guides that depend on their individual motivation to learn, and the group setting provides the added pressure for people to keep up with their peers.

Based on our experience we are able to provide relevant training on a number of topics that are listed below. For each topic we have produced custom study materials, notes/handouts, and workshop materials that include the relevant demo tools to apply the knowledge gained. Most tools are custom developed by pm4hire.com but we also use freeware/shareware tools where available to demonstrate concepts and to provide you with software to start with. Each section is a summary of a more detailed course outline that is available on request.

THE BENEFIT OF TRAINING PROGRAMS

Based on the cost quotations presented earlier it may be routine to think of training as operating expenses rather than as an investment in people. Based on the course outlines you can see a large number of soft skills that can be difficult to develop without an opportunity to practice. The course outlines may suggest a potential value for improvement in the way your team responds to specific challenges, but how do you quantify that benefit. Here is a formula:

Let's look at what that means:

This is just an average impact on the bottom line that does not show up as earnings, but in the relative efficiency of how work is performed. This is a difficult concept for some people to grasp and without putting a dollar value on the improved contribution it may be difficult to justify that training pays for itself, provided that there is sufficient call for the skills to be used over and over again. However, if you do not need these skills on a continual basis, it may be more efficient to hire skilled contractors from time to time and to pay a premium to someone who has personally invested in skills training to be a more effective contributor.

Our goal is to improve the quality of Information Technology projects by offering training in those areas that, in our experience, have proven to be a weak aspect of the development process. In the original format we created many "lunch and learn" sessions to educate the staff on projects that we were involved in. Over time it became clear that there was a call for more structure and formality in how individual sessions were arranged. The sessions explained earlier are offered as in-house training opportunities, but they can also be used to establish more formal training. To accommodate this we have evolved the following opportunities:

To extend the reach of our seminar program we offer these materials to selected affiliates under a royalty license arrangement. This means that all your training needs can be looked after locally, which eliminates the overhead costs of travel and accommodation. We will only accept highly qualified individuals as affiliates to offer these programs in different geographic areas.

We will also affiliate with selected IT training organizations that want to use our sessions as building blocks in a formal public training context. We do not focus on specific technical "hard" skills that are offered by other training organizations. We are prepared to work in affiliation with established training companies as part of their portfolio of training services that they offer to corporate clients.

For corporate customers with an internal training organization it may make sense to license the training materials directly and, following a "train the trainer" session for selected modules, have the training program offered to a broader audience at a significantly reduced cost to the company. We offer a simple annual licensing process for internal use only within one training location or in multiple locations. If this is potentially useful to your organization please contact us for details.

We also offer our training programs to selected community colleges that have a demonstrated IT program that can benefit from adding selected topics from our series into a (number of) course(s) consistent with the level of depth of courses in that IT program. We can customize the materials to conform to the standards of a specific college or program.

All materials can be customized to the needs of your organization, at additional costs determined by the amount of work required to adapt the materials to your company needs. We are able to combine selected topics into full-day courses or into specific training programs. We are also prepared to create new topics that are compatible in nature but more specific to the needs of your company.

Our training programs include specific custom-designed tools that illustrate concepts and that can be used to support our students as they employ learned skills in their organization. These are all copyright protected original software, except for freeware included with reference to the rightful copyright owners. Our proprietary software tools can be licensed as prototypes for any software that you may want to develop for internal or commercial purposes.

We are prepared to provide introductions to commercial software tools that substantially meet or exceed the functional requirements implied by our training materials. However, we will continue to provide free tools that enable students to master the concepts before they decide that it makes sense to pursue the more robust commercial software.

We practice what we teach, and therefore we will be happy to help you implement these processes in your organization. You can click on the PM4HIRE logo to return to the home page, or on the index below to go to the site map from where you can select further information as required.