It was the realization that corporate training could be done better by tailoring courses to a specific business that resulted in the creation of Training Intelligence.
The company, with locations in Monroe, Shelton and Newtown, was founded by three training industry veterans.
Two of the company principals, Gavin Preis and Robert Hardy came from the sales end of corporate technology training while the third principal, Todd Banks was a consultant and trainer.
Hardy said that the three men saw that some of the major training companies were becoming antiquated and bogged down by having to focus on location fees and upkeep.
“We came into this being very flexible, with the idea of being able to offer training throughout the entire country, with the partnerships we were able to bring on board,” Hardy said. “We were able to offer training whether it was onsite in New York or offsite in California.”
The company has independent contract trainers scattered across the country. Most are encouraged to work within corporations to have firsthand working experience with evolving software.
By being flexible, the company has been able to keep its focus on the quality of training. Hardy said in contrast, most training programs are offered on a large public schedule with set times.
“The guy from company X who needs to take a course on Microsoft SharePoint, many not need all five days of material, he may only need a couple of topics,” Hardy said. “If the public schedule option is the way he goes he could have to attend a five-day class to get half days worth of material. Our focus is to be more focused, more concentrated, more customized and work with people to really drill down into the topics that they need so they”™re not wasting all that time and money.”
Going into its fourth year in business, Training Intelligence has become defined with a more personal style of training.
The business is also in the process of rolling out a commercial website that helps business users obtain rates, reviews, schedules, prices and offers from the entire network of training vendors, competitors included.
“It”™s a massive database of training intelligence,” Hardy said. “Think of it as an Expedia or Priceline for the software training world.”
Before holding training sessions, Banks said Training Intelligence evaluates businesses in order to first understand the responsibilities and needs of the client. He said one of the strongest corporate collaborative products, system analysis program or SAP, is one that can take years to learn without proper instruction.
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“SAP can manage everything in a business, but done wrong you can jeopardize the health of your company,” Hardy said.
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“You improve business processes through margins and bottom-line and we can help them do that by focusing on exactly what they need,” Preis said. “It”™s not taking a class and hoping for the best, it”™s going in, finding out what makes them tick and addressing and improving that.”
Hardy said, “A company has a technology they”™re not fully utilizing and they want to leverage its capabilities and be more productive, they engage us to figure out how to do that.”
Training Intelligence clients come from industries across the board and can engage companies in virtual online training with courses that can last for time periods as short as an hour.
Banks said computer literacy in a company requires that everyone is speaking the same language and though new generations of workers are more literate than they once were, technologies and software is advancing at an ever increasing rate.
“We have a lot more end-user training,” Banks said. “Users in general are becoming more technology savvy. When we began in the industry we literally had to teach people how to click and drag with a mouse, you don”™t see that anymore. The fundamental skill level is a lot higher. End users generally need that focused shot to bring them up to speed on a new interface to do the same tasks.”
Preis said that it can be equally surprising the nuances that those who are literate don”™t know.
“It usually can increase the collaborative aspects of these programs,” Preis said. “Skills like that can reduce problems like having multiple versions of files being worked on separately. It”™s all about reducing redundancies within companies, it”™s all about strategy and how you go about the process.”
Hardy said having a software strategy that is implemented correctly can affect a business”™ processes in a huge way.
“If it”™s not done right the first time, not only can it not help productivity but it can actually harm it,” Hardy said. “Those kinds of applications can mean a quantum shift in the way the employee approaches the business.”
Banks said that with the past two years with increased downsizing in companies there has been a noticeable shift toward companies having a vested interest in having their non-IT employees become more efficient.
“They have to increase the productivity and efficiency of workers when you now have one person doing the job of what was two or three people,” Banks said. “That trend is coming from companies going into the ”˜jobless-recovery”™ mode.”
Banks said more managers have also begun to invest in courses when before they might have been above having to know the actual software processes.
“A lot of times they already have this technology in place they just don”™t know how to use it,” Preis said. “By taking a course they”™re able to get more efficiency by not burning out their employees.”
