Can't come to one of our public course offerings? Bring the training to you!
You provide the participants and an appropriately equipped room and we do everything else.
The Onsite Advantage
Bring the instructor to you. When you bring one of our classes onsite, you get world-class training from a world-class instructor in a location that's convenient for you.
Every onsite course is a custom course. Whenever we teach, we tailor the class to the people in the room. We dig deeper into material that is more relevant and useful for the participants, and skim over or skip the less relevant sections. Onsite classes benefit even more from this natural tailoring process. In a private setting, the group can discuss their real world challenges and examples with the help of a professional facilitator who also happens to be a subject matter expert. The result is a customized class for a standard price.
Onsite training can be very cost effective. When you send people to a public class, there are often travel costs involved in addition to the course fee. In some cases travel costs can double the total cost of a public training course for each participant. As a result, if you have 5 or more people to train, onsite training can be quite cost-effective.
The Engagement Process
Buying onsite training isn't quite like buying a widget. Here's what you can expect to have happen when you contact us to talk about bringing our training onsite:
- Initial Conversations. In our initial conversation, we'll ask you about your learning objectives and why you are seeking training, and we'll also ask you about logistics like when, where, and how many people.
- Scoping the engagement. We'll ask you questions and listen carefully to your answers to understand your objectives and your context. We'll offer a range of options. Ultimately, we will suggest an agenda for the engagement that we believe meets your needs. The agenda we suggest might be a single class, a mix of classes, or even a combination of classes and consulting. We want to deliver value, so we won't try to sell you something you don't need.
- Penciling in a date. Once we agree on an agenda, we'll offer you a selection of dates. You'll pick the dates that work for you and we'll pencil them into our calendar. You are not obliged to use those dates, and the dates aren't officially booked yet. But because we are typically booked three or more months in advance, we find it's usually best to pencil in a date before executing the paperwork.
- Paperwork. In order to confirm the dates we've penciled in, we need to execute some paperwork. You can send us a Purchase Order or sign our Letter of Agreement, or you can send us your standard Contract for external training. We're also happy to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) if needed. (We wouldn't make public any private information anyway, but we understand that an NDA is important to some clients.)
- Logistics and Orientation. Once the paperwork is completed and we have confirmed dates, we take care of the details like making our travel arrangements and printing materials for participants. You just need to arrange for a room and let your participants know about the class. A week or two before arriving onsite, the instructor will contact you to confirm the logistics and to talk to you in more detail about your context. This preparation helps the instructor hit the ground running and make the best possible use of the time while onsite.
Costs
When delivering onsite training within the US, our fee structure is very straightforward. Typically clients pay a course fee plus travel expenses for the instructor(s). Our fee structure is as follows:- A 1-day class is US$8,000
- A 2-day class is US$10,000
- A 3-day class is US$12,000
- Consulting is US$2,000/day
- Creating custom course materials, for example by incorporating your internal documents in the course notes, starts at US$2,000, and goes up depending on the degree of customization. (Because we tailor our delivery of every course for the participants in the room, most clients don't need this level of customization.)
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people can be in the onsite classes?
The number of participants varies from class-to-class, but most of our classes are capped at 25 participants. That said, if you have a large group to train, we can work with you to structure an agenda that combines small classes with larger lecture/demo-based sessions.
We want to do two 1-day classes back-to-back. Does that count as two 1-day classes or one 2-day class? It makes a big difference in price.
We consider it all part of the same class if we have the same participants each day. So if an organization wants to bring in the Agile Testing Series and have the same set of people attend all three days, that's US$12,000. However, if the organization wants to offer the 1-day Adapting to Agile class three times, to three different groups of people, that's 3 x $8,000 = $24,000.
We price our offering this way primarily because we want to encourage clients to choose longer classes. We find that multi-day classes have greater lasting value for participants. First, a team spirit tends to emerge in longer classes, making the learning atmosphere more productive. Second, longer classes enable participants to dig more deeply into the topics. So we set our pricing to make it easy for clients to justify longer classes. ("Hey! It's only $2K more for the 2-day version!").
There's another company here in town that wants to split the cost of the class with us. Can we do that?
Sure! Splitting the cost can be a great way for two, or more, smaller companies to bring in onsite training. However, we'll need to have one of the companies take on the paperwork and responsibility for payment.
Another possibility would be for us to host a "private" public class in which we take care of the logistics and set up a registration system for you. However, this kind of event is like a cross between an onsite class and a public class, and we have to discuss the fee structure in advance. The per-seat cost when we handle the registration and logistics is typically higher than the per-seat cost for an onsite class.
Can we have remote people dial into the classes?
All our classes are experience-based with lots of exercises and discussions. In fact, we almost never use slide decks anymore. As a result, our instructor-led in-person classes are not conducive to remote team members dialing in.
That said, we're working on creating rich, experience-based virtual classes. This is a completely different offering, and cannot be combined with the onsite instructor-led classes. But it may be an alternative for remote people.
We have someone on staff who can teach. Can you teach the class once and then our internal trainer can teach all the subsequent classes?
We have done train-the-trainer engagements, but rarely. This kind of engagement requires a significant commitment. It is only feasible for clients that are large enough to have a dedicated coaching/training staff, and that want to roll our classes out to hundreds or thousands of people.
The issue is that preparing to teach one of our classes requires more than sitting in on the course once. Even training experts with a deep background in the subject usually need to go through our courses at least three times before they're ready to teach the classes independently: once as a student, once as an assistant, and once as a co-presenter. (This is the minimum level of preparation we require for our own instructors.)
In addition to the extra training required to train the trainers, we also typically charge an additional licensing fee for using our materials.
If you are interested in a train-the-trainer engagement, please contact us to discuss your needs.