4:03

Myles Brown for Training Industry Thought Leadership Video

December 14, 2022

Video Transcript


Speaker: Myles Brown, Senior Cloud and DevOps Advisor, ExitCertified

What’s one of the most interesting changes you’ve observed in the training industry recently?

Myles Brown: I've been in the training industry a long time and I've seen a lot of trends come and go and over the past few years, that idea of self paced offerings that are usually, you know, very economical. have become very attractive. Of course, there's no instructor there live to help answer your questions. So it's not quite the same as the gold standard, which is instructor led training. But increasingly we see organizations are asking, um, for kind of a blended program where there's some parts that are self based, in some parts where, you know, a cohort comes together for instructor led sessions that offers some, some interesting challenges to make sure people did the self paced before they come to the sessions. But we worked through that and we try and at exit certified, get these kind of programs up and off the ground. Um, and they've been pretty effective.

What do you expect the training industry to look like in the next 5 years?

Myles Brown: I think the training industry will probably look a lot like it does now in the next five years, in that there's a real mix between some companies that prefer instructor led training and other companies that are trying to go all self paced. The problem is we've seen a lot of companies kind of go back and forth and and and see some of the benefits and drawbacks of each and so these blended approaches are becoming more popular. But I think the biggest change we're going to see is that instructors are going to have to interact with their students in a more asynchronous way, using slack channels and things like that to answer questions and, and maybe have shorter sessions where the students show up just for on office hours to ask a bunch of questions. Uh, you know, whereas the bulk of the time they're working on their own.

What advantages does ExitCertified offer?

Myles Brown: I think ExitCertified is really well positioned in the training industry for a number of reasons. First off the content, you know, we are partnered with most of the major vendors, 25 plus vendors to offer authorized training, you know, straight from the people who bring you the technology, so they are building the content, they are updating it constantly and we're delivering that in an authorized way, but then we also have quite a network of contractors and smaller training companies that we work with that fill in the gaps that fall in between those vendors. So a lot of open source technologies, you know, things like kubernetes where there's no real vendor of note, you know, a lot of people can hang a sign and say we do kubernetes training, so we find that our job is to go and vet those and see who has the best of breed training in these open source technologies. In addition to the content, we have great instructors, we have a very mature team of professional instructors who have been doing it for 15 plus years. Uh and so it's it's not a stepping stone to becoming professional services or something like that, as in a lot of our vendors that we, we train when they do direct training, um they're not professional, you know, lifelong instructors, uh and I think that our customer care is really good, we have a sales team that really wants to sell you the right product because we know that, you know, if we sell you the right training, we get your people up and running project ready then when you have more training needs to come back to us. And so we, uh, we really think that's important, and we do follow ups with customers after the training, especially after, you know, large private training engagements to make sure that they understand, you know, did the students get what they want? Here's what the instructor said. And, and really, what are the next steps? So I think we do a great job of customer care as well.



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