qa.com training

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I've been booked onto an SCCM course with them for 5 days in august, courtesy of work.

Anybody used these before? any experiences/thoughts?

 

We use qa almost exclusively at work. Very good. I was on a course in Stockport a few weeks back. The office was pretty decent to be honest.

 

I used QA for MS exam 70-271 through work, very pleased over all, good trainer & good equipment.

I've been told by the father-in-law who has delt with many IT traning course providers and he recons QA to be the best

 

Good to hear, i'm going to their London site for 5 days for the course.

Glad to hear you all recommend them, am looking forward to it!

 

They look like a decent provider, but their prices are certifiable. £500 for a two day CCNA exam PREPARATION course? No thanks. You can get entire CCNA courses over a week for £350.

 

£500 quid for a training course doesn't sound that bad to me. Have seen far higher than that. Prices arn't always comparable either. Depends on the quality of the trainer and the training materials.

You don't always want to go for the cheapest price when it comes to this kind of thing ... you do get what you pay for as they say.

 

To be fair to QA they have good reviews (from this thread alone, not to mention other sites) and I'm sure their services are very good, but the prices are certifiable. You do get what you pay for but when the price is on par with a holiday to Cyprus, you have to question the justification of said price. I'm sure QA can justify it simply through excellent service and end-results alone, but anything more than their prices is just ludicrous.

Sorry Apexes, I don't mean to highjack your thread here. I just want to make it known that better prices are available, for example buying a book and doing it at home

Good luck with the course and let us know how it goes.

 

That's a reasonable price last course I did was over a grand. I think they tend to charge more as they know that comapnies pay for the employees to go rather then people paying the money out of there own wallet.

 

lol no problem.

This course is £1,640 + VAT - but it is over 5 days and will hopefull have me most of the way there to passing the 70-401, if i was to self study this it'd take a hell of alot longer.

Either way, i'll feedback on here how they were, it's not until August yet anyway

 

I think you need to re-jig in your head what you think is reasonable in terms of pricing. What do you suppose it costs to employ a trainer who is really good at what they do and is up to date with all the latest technology? Never mind all the other costs ascociated with running a training facility. £500 would be dirt cheap for a good quality training course. The fact you can have a cheap package holiday for that is totally irrelevant as far as I can see.

A fancy washing machine might cost me £500. Should I judge training courses to be good or bad if they go above or below this?

If you ever go looking for some good training courses mate, I think you will have your eyes opened by why you will have to pay. Either that or you will get someome truly hopeless just going through the motions, but at least it will be cheap ...

 

Last course I took with a professional training provider like QA was over ten years ago, then it was common for a week course to run at around £2k. Prices for most IT courses have actually fallen if you take into account inflation.

These courses are designed for companies who have large training budgets and can write off the tax etc, they are not really designed for the individual. There are IT courses in Cyprus and they are cheaper, take your pick.

Colleges run cheaper courses in the more common areas like MCSA and CCNA.

Course places on a professional course are normally limited to 10-20 people. Independant trainers will expect at least 500 per day, then you have overheads like the office and equipment. I expect they do make a decent profit if run well, but it is a business after all.

The fact other things are so cheap is largely due to automation and labour prices in foreign countries. You can't really compare these things to a local training course which uses local labour and resources and is a largely manual task.

 

Used them for my ITIL course through work and they were reasonably good and I know they have alot of major clients in Edinburgh. Dont seem to offer exams for some of the MS cetrs though.

 

I did the SCCM course about 3 years ago with QA in one of their London offices, was an ok course.

The instructor was very good at the time, I'd had him a year or so previously for a Citrix course in Exeter.

Forget the chaps name now but he was of Malaysian/eastern origin and a really nice guy. If your guy pronounces executables 'exebutables', and says 'earsdropping' instead of eavesdropping then that's the same chap

I've used QA quite a bit for things, not too bad although don't include your accom/food and exam for a lot of certs unlike places like Firebrand. As this is an MS cert there's no exam included, you'll have to take that after off your own back.

Instructors have always been very good there though, my most recent course there (an ISEB one) had a very very good chap teaching it, would recommend anything taken by him highly.

As for pricing, anyone who pays list pricing for their courses is an idiot

As a rule we used to get around 45% discount on most courses.

MS courses used to be (no idea if they are now) £1500 for a 5 dayer, but they used to readily offer up 2 for 1, or 1 for £1000, or 3 for £2000 without much pushing. One period I was offered 2 for £1000, think they wanted the sale before the end of a financial period

Earlier in the year I did an ISEB course that had a list of £2100 and the company paid £1100 for it. And have just been offered another that lists at £2200 on QA's website for £1150.

So I'd say £1640 plus the vat for just the one course is a little high from them, but I guess it comes down to your account and relationship with them.

My previous employer where I used to get great deals with QA was not a big place and we didn't throw much business their way (around 500 people but only 3 or 4 of us would take training with QA).

 

No, but if the washing machine is only worth £300 then saying, "£500 isn't a bad price because I've seen higher prices elsewhere" does not justify the exaggerated price of £500, because the product isn't worth that to begin with.

I spotted a CCNP kit on eBay for roughly £350. It was pretty decent and came with some nice extras others did not. Should I use this £350 price tag as a means of judging the cost of other kits? Yes, yes I should, and unequivocally so. Then again I should buy the CCNP kit that was priced at £500, but came with nothing extra or particularly advantageous over the other kits because well, a higher price automatically wins because it HAS to implicitly promise quality, surely?

I've had a little look around just now, only for a few minutes, and I found personal training courses for an average price of roughly £350-400. That was with a simple, broadly termed Google search of "CCNA training" and only looking at training suppliers in my area of the country. Of course, these are personal, 1:10, trainer:student courses.

I think what I have missed here, as everyone has pointed out, is the fact QA are offering these prices to companies, not individuals (unless an individual wants to pay that price). I was referring to personal, small-scale training solutions aimed at the self-funded student, so I apologise if my statements where ambiguous and somewhat missed the point. I could also actually be out of touch with the training scene and openly confess I don't exactly keep up with it. The latter is likely were I've gone wrong.

 

Im just going through some pricing with QA at the moment and so far they seem pretty good, including our MS training vouchers from our Software Assurance we are looking at about £7k for a total of 6 weeks of training split across 4 people. Not a bad price at all.

 

Well, finished the course yesterday after a seriously intensive 5 days! so here's my short review, i hope others can find this useful.

Left Bristol early monday morning and took the train - if you go straight into paddington station, hop onto the circle line to liverpool st station, and the centre is about a 10 minute walk from there.

Greeted at reception and asked to sign in and make my way to the coffee lounge on the basement floor. HUGE coffee lounge, quite easily fit 100 people in there, and as the morning went on, i realised how big this training centre actually was, it was filling up with people arriving for different courses and training.

Was told to be there for 9am, so i got there at 8:30 - but we didn't get called in until 9:35 - which was a bit annoying.

Anyway, into the course, there's me and 15 others, and we start with an introduction of everybody, what eveyrone does for a living, and what they're looking for from the course. Varied to say the least. One chap was from the MOD, another from Essex police, law firms - everywhere, people were from all types of industries.

Most people had no experience of the system, at all - i was quite lucky as i've been using SCCM for the last few months and have basic experience.

To get on with this course you need a really good understanding of systems like TCP/IP - ipv6 (if using it), DNS, AD, SQL, WQL, DOS Scripting.

The trainer knew his stuff, like seriously knew his stuff.

We had the MSPress books for SCCM - 6451B, and pretty much worked through all the modules each day throughout the course, it was alot of stuff to take in, and i felt a bit more practical work by ourselves would help more, felt like alot of watching the screen and following, i like to get stuck in myself, and if i break it i can fix it.

We had 16 machines installed via Hyper-V - all with different domain controller and AD setups with SCCM.

Systems were decent, quad core HP Machines with 16GB RAM - running server 2008. virtual machines worked nicely and very quick.

I've got alot of reading to do before the exam, and some things to get upto speed on, but overall, a good course! would recommend QA in future for courses if you're looking to do one.

 

Thats the Tabernacle street centre isn't it? Where I did my SCCM course about 3 years ago

What was the name of your instructor?

 

was on middlesex street near, no. 110 i think

instructor was called Carl