I have actually already answered in other postings but again for the record here's our version of how we screen.
Which you will no doubt pick apart and
prove is flawed but what the hell here I go.
1.
Firebrand Training's website lists the experience we and/or the vendor expects a candidate that obtains the qualification to have. This list is typically developed from what is on the vendors website plus what our instructors believe is appropriate experience for a student to have prior to attending the course. This is both so the qualification that they may obtain ( yes people fail - it's a good thing otherwise the certs are worthless ) and the pace ( we are accelerated not cutting corners ) we go at is appropriate to their existing knowledge. We build on what people know, we do not in the majority of cases, teach people from zero to hero.
2. To the best of our ability we train our staff who talk to students about potentially attending a course to screen candidates based on the experience they say they have by using the content from our website as the basis for calibrating their experience which comes from point 1.
Is this perfect? Course not.
Why?
We are dealing with grown ups spending significant amounts of money to learn and get certified ( hopefully ) in a short amount of time. It's important to them because they are highly paid staff members who need to be fee earning/delivering value to their business and NOT spending days and weeks in training using "slower" methods. So we trust them when they say they have, for instance, 2 years experience managing a 500 server network of Windows 2003 servers. We trust them when they say they've met the requirements listed on our website.
The irony is we do have complaints from people who think "my money is good enough why won't you let me on the course." Another fact.
If you go to a car dealer to buy a car they might ask you if you have a drivers license, and will take you at your word if you say you do given you are paying thousands for the vehicle.
3. Again ask yourself the question why would we want a rookie in a classroom disrupting the other 12 people who should be there? It doesn't make sense the rest of the class would suffer for the sake of one more student, the student would fail and feel like they've wasted their money. We wouldn't train 4,000 people a year in the UK alone if we had a model that mixed up abilities with qualifications beyond people's reach. It would be a disaster. No instructor would work for us because their classes would be a nightmare to teach.
You will disagree that this approach is valid but the fact is we wouldn't continue to succeed and get referrals from our students if they thought what we did was not valuable to them.
Again look at these testimonials
http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/testimonials and keep hitting the "show more" button.
Why would they write this stuff ( and there's about 3,000 of them ) if they thought we were conning them some how?
08-Oct-2008, 03:34 PM
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