Building an Effective Learning and Development Plan for Cloud: The Right Questions to ask Your IT Leaders [Webinar]

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Building an Effective Learning and Development Plan for Cloud: The Right Questions to ask Your IT Leaders [Webinar]

Cloud transformation will continue to accelerate and evolve. To remain competitive and maximize advantages, organizations must make strategic decisions to complete cloud computing initiatives. These initiatives include enabling your IT team with training needed to adopt new cloud technologies.

A move to the cloud generally involves a lot more upskilling than simply taking a couple of classes from your organization’s cloud vendor of choice. Understanding the right questions to ask your IT leaders is essential in building an effective training plan that meets your business needs. ExitCertified has worked with many Learning and Development teams to help craft probing questions to understand the full range of technologies and techniques involved in their organization’s cloud journey.

Watch our webinar and discover how ExitCertified can help you build a learning and development plan designed to accelerate cloud growth within your organization.

Speaker: Myles Brown, Senior Cloud & DevOps Advisor | ExitCertified & Brian Carlson, Director of Sales | ExitCertified

Myles Brown is the Senior Cloud & DevOps Advisor at ExitCertified (Tech Data). He has over twenty-five years of experience in the IT industry across a variety of platforms. Recognized as an AWS Champion - Authorized Instructor and a Google Cloud Professional Architect and Instructor, Myles has delivered award-winning authorized IT training for the biggest Cloud providers.

Brian Carlson is the Director of Sales at ExitCertified (Tech Data). He has over twenty years in the IT Training industry and works with large and medium-sized clients to build enterprise-scale skilling programs.

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ExitCertified: hello, and welcome everyone to today's webinar titled building an effective learning and development plan for the cloud.

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ExitCertified: My name is Hillary and I will be your MC for this webinar Thank you so much for joining the conversation.

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ExitCertified: Before we get started let's cover some of the webinar functionalities.

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ExitCertified: So during this webinar everyone's microphone will be muted, but we want this to be an open conversation so.

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ExitCertified: If you have any questions, please feel free to enter them into the Q amp a box or the chat window at the bottom of your screen, there will also be a dedicated q&a session after the presentation.

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ExitCertified: today's webinar is being recorded and i'll link to the recording will be sent to all registrants by the end of the week.

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ExitCertified: joining us today as panelists we have our very own Brian carlson and miles Brown.

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ExitCertified: Brian carlson is the director of sales at exit certified and has over 20 years of experience in the IT training industry working with large and medium sized clients to build enterprise scale training programs.

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ExitCertified: miles Brown is our senior cloud and devops advisor and has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry across a variety of platforms.

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ExitCertified: recognizes an aws authorized instructor and a Google cloud platform professional architect bios has delivered award winning authorized it trading for the biggest cloud providers with this set of miles and Brian please take it away.

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Myles Brown: Thank you, Hillary.

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Myles Brown: You in a car.

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Brian Carlson: yeah it's gotta be kind of a funny way to start here, so we have a major major outage at amp T has here my area, and so I zero in Internet I don't have cell service.

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Brian Carlson: don't Have you had any tab text service at my house, so I went to the starbucks, but it was a little too crowded to do this so i'm sitting in my in my car right now doing the webinar So if I if I suddenly disappear.

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Brian Carlson: One of a few things happen so.

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Myles Brown: All right, well, I got your back, I think I can cover it if you can't make.

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Myles Brown: So I thought i'd pop up the agenda here we're gonna talk a little bit about the challenge for learning and development teams when it comes to.

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Myles Brown: You know, finding a new training partner in general but but really specifically dealing with requests for cloud training because it's a pretty nebulous term, it could mean a lot of different things.

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Myles Brown: And so we'll look a little bit at the cloud training landscape and then try and talk about what's the best way to elicit those.

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Myles Brown: requests to find out exactly what people need when they say we need cloud training.

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Myles Brown: And then we'll just do a little little sales pitch at the very end, talking about why exit certified would be a good partner, we will have some time for questions at the end, so if you have questions in the meantime, you can throw it in the chat it's probably the easiest way.

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Myles Brown: Both Brian and I will see it there, so I thought we'd start with the challenge for learning and development teams and we have a few stats here, but just in general, Brian, what do you see, as some of the big problems learning and development.

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Brian Carlson: You know first off, you know softness it's around technology.

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Brian Carlson: And or technical terms or technical concepts they're constantly changing and so many of the customers that we work with it, or an l amp D roles.

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Brian Carlson: or even project manager roles, or you know, sometimes even like a director or VP and they do struggle to kind of understand the overall shift in technology.

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Brian Carlson: and, especially, you know kind of where they bring in the skills that are needed and identify those correct skills and all those things.

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Brian Carlson: So it is, it is a lot to wrap your arms around and that's you know that's why we exist right is to help folks get through that we're kind of like your consultant to help help get through get through these kinds of things.

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Myles Brown: yeah and especially around cloud, because we do see such such a need, and you know here's some stats 44% of business leaders.

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Myles Brown: Already accelerated or plan to accelerate their digital transformation, I mean every every.

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Myles Brown: Customer We talked to is either already moved partially to the cloud or or is planning to you know at this point, almost every size organization, we deal with is doing something with the cloud and there's some real business challenges around skilling.

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Myles Brown: You know sourcing and managing that training, especially for those emerging Open Source technologies, you mentioned.

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Myles Brown: That that's an area where you know, things have really changed because saying 1015 years ago it was a very different landscape for training right, and then you and I both worked in that training business for a long time and and what we used to see is what you know.

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Myles Brown: You would have sort of one vendor you mean IBM shop or maybe an oracle shop.

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Brian Carlson: Or the trends, then, where you know I remember networking and Cisco is all the rage and.

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Brian Carlson: And so customers were moving very quickly and spending their money, and when hiring on folks to get their Cisco infrastructure up and running right.

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Brian Carlson: Basic networking that voice became really important security all those topics and so every time you ran into this new technology, you started adding adding new products to to your to your infrastructure.

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Brian Carlson: The vendor was right there with a learning path and the classes all aligned and it just worked really well and really easily but that's that's changed.

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Myles Brown: yeah for sure, and these days, what I find is you know when we're talking to customers a lot of times they say you know we need cloud train.

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Myles Brown: And you're like well, what does that mean they may not know right so So what do it leaders mean when they when they tell her and development we need cloud train sometimes it's very easy right.

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Myles Brown: Like they come to you, and they say hey we're moving to aws we need some aws training right, so your cloud vendor of choice.

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Myles Brown: And and there's some great you know authorized content from each one of those cloud vendors and exit certified we've been partnered with in all of these for for a long time now, we started probably 2014 is when we first started with aws.

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Brian Carlson: And i'll even jump in miles and say you know, sometimes when it leaders say they need cloud training they're not entirely sure.

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Brian Carlson: totally honest, they have a general idea, obviously, but you know they they they they haven't had the time to dig down and get into the into all the different job roles and technologies that the organization is using and sometimes not even aware of everything.

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Brian Carlson: Oh, it certainly takes some investigation, regardless of whatever company you're in.

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Myles Brown: yeah now what I find is that you know that those each cloud vendor is sort of very good at teaching you about their infrastructure right, but when you're running in what kind of workloads you're running in those.

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Myles Brown: In that infrastructure there's there's a lot of different things you could do be doing you could be taking your existing Apps and just do it lift and shift.

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Myles Brown: But more likely you're trying to embrace the cloud, and this is a term that you and I both very familiar with cloud native development.

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Myles Brown: that's a big buzzword these days, and what it really means is you know sort of adopting this kind of devops approach, maybe embracing the concept of microservices architectures.

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Myles Brown: and using things like containers and Cooper 90s and automation.

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Myles Brown: Right and so when they say we need cloud training, it might be a lot more than just I need to take a couple of intro classes on aws right, I need to change how we develop software to really fully embrace the cloud and get all the advantages of it and so that's sort of one approach right.

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Brian Carlson: If we're to give you an example there to we're working with a large customer who they're moving over to red hat open shift.

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Brian Carlson: And it's easy for somebody higher up to say Oh, we have a big open shift initiative, but the reality is the first step in that whole project is not even open shift training it's more around.

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Brian Carlson: microservices containers Cooper daddy's those kinds of concepts that their folks need to understand before they can effectively move over to open shift.

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Brian Carlson: And so, although the company mandate is a tool like open shift or a platform like aws oftentimes there's fundamental conceptual training that's that's key before you really get into those product specific trends.

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Myles Brown: yeah for sure.

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Myles Brown: Another big thing we see in the cloud is the concept of service and that usually.

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Myles Brown: it's another way to implement microservices it's a it's a it's usually that you can get from the vendor specifically right but.

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Myles Brown: But there's there's all kinds of areas that are dealing with cloud a big thing that we find is once people start moving a lot of workloads to the cloud.

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Myles Brown: Now they're generating a lot of data in the cloud, and so, if they're an analytics group saying we need cloud training.

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Myles Brown: Well, that might mean that they're getting rid of their traditional stack of tools, maybe, maybe they're using hadoop on premise in data centers.

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Myles Brown: they're using some old legacy data warehouse appliance now they're moving to the cloud they're embracing cloud analytics and so maybe that's really their their view of of the cloud is how do we do analytics in the cloud, and then the other sorry I.

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Brian Carlson: Was gonna say going back to the same point I just made that's another, this is another great example of books for saying hey we're moving to the cloud for analytics.

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Brian Carlson: Well there's new methodologies new things that are happening and just analytics in general things like Ai and machine learning and those types of things.

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Brian Carlson: But we have a ton of customers who are starting off with basic Python training because that's a language used in a lot of analytics groups.

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Brian Carlson: But they're also.

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Brian Carlson: Doing basic not basic but they're doing data science type classes statistics those things because that's all key to you to do to moving analytics to the cloud, so to speak, right.

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Brian Carlson: And then, when they understand those fundamental concepts now they can use the cloud vendors provide the cloud providers tool for analytics so now, they can do analytics in the cloud.

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Brian Carlson: But they had to learn the basic statistical methods and those kinds of things before they can work those tools.

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Myles Brown: yeah exactly and then the last one, maybe dimension is is this idea that they're moving to the cloud, but you still have existing data centers and so you're in this sort of hybrid architecture.

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Myles Brown: And, and so you might be running some workloads in your on Prem data centers others in the public cloud there are frameworks around that to help in that situation, and one of them is the one you mentioned earlier, open shift.

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Myles Brown: And so that's just one of many of these frameworks that can help so when somebody says we need cloud training, you know, really, it could mean any of these things.

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Myles Brown: And so to look at the cloud training landscape economics it's best to kind of, say, well Okay, what is a cloud journey, what does it mean to move to the cloud.

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Myles Brown: Because it's very rarely just you know hey we're going to stop running our data centers and land Amazon or Microsoft or Google do that right.

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Myles Brown: So what I found is that there are three things that happened at once, and they go hand in hand in hand, one is yes we're going to start using a public cloud provider.

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Myles Brown: But the next is the cloud really helps us embrace devops in a in a deeper way and a lot of people have been doing a little bit of devops devops is a huge collection of processes some tools right but, but overall culture change of how you develop and ship software.

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Myles Brown: And yeah.

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Brian Carlson: I was just one comment and devops so for those that have gone through agile training or cultural transformations.

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Brian Carlson: Over the past 20 years or so and you've heard about those things devops is very similar culturally to agile right it's a different way to work and as a team.

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Brian Carlson: So those kinds of those two things do go together to help some of the folks that have done that job kind of make some make some connections.

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Myles Brown: yeah and the last piece, I would say is that concept of taking these huge monolithic applications and breaking them up into microservices.

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Myles Brown: Right and so and then there's technologies around you know how best to implement that so in.

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Myles Brown: Overall, what that really means is that moving to the cloud can mean having to learn all kinds of new skills and various technologies.

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Myles Brown: And so we tried to capture that in the diagram where we sort of at the Center we've got this public cloud training, from whatever your cloud vendor of choice is, but then we've got all these different categories of different kinds of training around it.

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Myles Brown: Whether it's it's a cloud native and containers stuff whether it's those Those sort of hybrid environments like vmware or open shift.

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Myles Brown: All the different kinds of cloud analytics devops automation security and so there's there's a lot there and it doesn't all come from one vendor and and, to be honest, this diagram could be twice the size that he there's so many more logos that we could include.

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Myles Brown: But what we're trying to capture is that you know moving to the cloud can touch all these different things.

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Brian Carlson: it's amazing how many times we share this cut in this diagram to customers and they're just talking about aws so they're just talking about Java, or maybe.

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Brian Carlson: they've got a snowflake need and we start looking at this and they go Oh, thank goodness, because you know that thing over there.

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Brian Carlson: we're also doing a lot of Apps right and and oftentimes that gives us an opportunity to talk to them and help them explain like hey these things are actually working together.

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Brian Carlson: Right, do you know snowflake and Python aren't completely separate because you know snowflake houses, a lot of the data doesn't have the analytics.

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Brian Carlson: But that same team is using other tools like data bricks, but they need to learn Python to be able to do those kinds of things right, and so a lot of times there's there's parallels between these things and.

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Brian Carlson: it's just it's amazing to see how many of these different tools all of our customers are using.

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Myles Brown: yeah so I thought I would focus a little bit on this cloud native piece because that's the part where I think learning development folks.

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Myles Brown: You know it's really for a new thing and so just to get some terminology out of the way I thought I gotta run through the slides where.

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Myles Brown: Well let's talk about cloud native you know that is a big buzzword it is that idea of incorporating these devops concepts to get the most out of your public cloud.

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Myles Brown: And so there is there is a consortium of companies, called the cloud native computing foundation and they sort of set the standard for what is cloud native and they actually how's a lot of these.

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Myles Brown: Open Source projects on Cooper nettie and so you know, the idea is that this collection of techniques, should enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient manageable observable right and they just take them the.

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Myles Brown: The advantages of the cloud full right and so part of that cloud native idea is this concept of microservices.

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Myles Brown: And you may have heard this term before it's basically a way of building software where instead of deploying one huge deliverable that takes you months and months to build.

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Myles Brown: You deploy it and then every six months, you make a change to it, and when the operations people put it into production there's all these problems we've got to figure out.

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Myles Brown: And instead says let's blow it up into little little pieces right these pieces can be independently worked on by different teams, they can be scaled separately.

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Myles Brown: We can iterate upon them, and so each microservices independently build test and scale, and so this kind of fits in nicely with that devops idea of you may have heard that term to pizza team.

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Myles Brown: This was going back in aws in the early 2000s where they said we're going to make these teams that are cross functional.

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Myles Brown: mean there's some developers and testers some operations people and but not to men, you know, maybe 810 people at the most.

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Myles Brown: Or you can feed them with two pieces and they'll be in charge of this set of microservices from end to end right, and so, how do we implement those microservices well, these days, probably the most popular way is with containers.

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Myles Brown: Containers is a newer technology really it it's been around for a while, but when docker came out in 2013 it became wildly popular right because this idea of a small reusable piece of code.

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Myles Brown: that's very lightweight I can launch it quickly, I can get rid of it quickly.

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Myles Brown: And I can kind of run it anywhere, I can as a developer, I could launch this container on my laptop or later we could deploy to the cloud or where and it's a great way to encompass one little micro service, and you know docker became very popular very quickly.

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Myles Brown: For for a few of these reasons, came along at the right time, had a great logo, you know you can't you can't get a discount that right, it became very popular, but the problem was.

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Myles Brown: You know as the popularity of containers grew We found that well if I am going to break my huge application up in the hundreds of these little micro services.

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Myles Brown: And i'm going to run and maybe multiple copies of them now i've got hundreds, maybe thousands of containers to run on some servers.

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Myles Brown: Now we need to figure out how to manage that how to orchestrate them and so at docker they built something called swarm.

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Myles Brown: aws built something called PCs but the one that really stuck with Cooper 90s, this was started at Google and now it's kind of the de facto standard.

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Myles Brown: And in fact all the cloud vendors have embraced it so they all have some kind of service to help you with it, so if you're going to be running containers and Cooper daddy's in aws.

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Myles Brown: You might be using the Ek, a service and, in fact, if you go to aws you start taking some training you take some basic architecture, training, you can then go take a three day Ek X class.

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Myles Brown: But it sort of assumes that you already know containers and Cooper nettie where you're going to learn that, not from aws right that's where all of a sudden, we started to realize hey, we need to supplement that that.

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Myles Brown: authorized training content that comes from our vendors with you know various open sources pieces.

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Myles Brown: The other big way to implement microservices is through server lists or what some people call function as a service.

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Myles Brown: And so aws Lambda you know popularized this but, as your eyes at Google cloud has it it's just a way of really trying to say, instead of the cloud vendor just taking care of my physical data Center.

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Myles Brown: i'm going to let them take care of my all my servers as well, so I don't want to think about Linux or windows administration.

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Myles Brown: And so kind of moves, you know whose responsibility, all of a sudden my cloud vendors more responsible for low level operations and now my development team becomes much more.

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Myles Brown: focused on just development.

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Myles Brown: And so you've got all these different kind of competing.

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Myles Brown: concepts, some of them are complimentary some of them are competing and so you know different organizations pick different ways to do things, and so we ended up with a lot of different.

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Myles Brown: Training offerings, and so this is where it really we came up o'clock central maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

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Brian Carlson: So, again kind of going back to all I was saying earlier, with all these different technologies that we see all of our customers using it really did get confusing, especially for us to.

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Brian Carlson: um where everything fits and what we're all the important pieces and So how do we break it down and put it into a somewhat easy way to digest and so.

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Brian Carlson: This particular diagram breaks into eight different categories, you know the public cloud providers at the middle there.

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Brian Carlson: But then it also pulls in seven other areas where there's complimentary trainings and technologies, where Customers need training on those as well.

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Brian Carlson: And so, like, I was saying earlier, the things that these things all play together.

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Brian Carlson: it's not like our example before where you go to Cisco and they give you a top to bottom training plan it's all Cisco or Microsoft same thing Oracle ASAP it's it's it's much different now because it is multi vendor and there's lots of open source, where there is no.

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Brian Carlson: There is no vendor per se, to go to, and so this is a attempt to kind of summarize the most popular organized in a way that's easy to say, easy to understand.

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Myles Brown: yeah for sure I think will drop the link for this cloud centric a little later in that presentation, so people have it.

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Myles Brown: But I guess what what are learning development customers really want to know is like, how do we go about assessing those cloud training requirements when somebody isn't very forthcoming they just say hey we need cloud tree.

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Myles Brown: What do you see you know our larger customers doing as far as trying to get back what is the skills gap.

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Brian Carlson: Well it's, the first thing to remember is it's always it's a conversation, you know there's never a let's send out a questionnaire and then we'll know because it's not.

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Brian Carlson: it's not how it works and there's a few things at play there you know typically the successful model is.

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Brian Carlson: Either some interviews some some some calls or some a survey and then some conversation back with our technical team, where we kind of refine the questions.

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Brian Carlson: asked some additional questions and then they only the team goes back and ask those questions and so it's a little bit of back and forth really narrow in on what the true requirements are.

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Myles Brown: yeah for sure, and so, starting with that idea that survey, you know we we see most led teams will pull her it leadership periodically and asking for what are your top three top 10 whatever training requirements.

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Myles Brown: I guess, the first thing is how often are you asking right we we get some people who asked like once a year right when they need to figure out their budgets right.

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Myles Brown: But, but what I find is that you know cloud moves at a very fast pace and sometimes you start the year saying okay we're gonna.

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Myles Brown: Go we're gonna need aws training or Google cloud or whatever.

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Myles Brown: And then, when you get in you, you realize Oh, you know we haven't been doing containers on Cooper daddy's so we're going to need that to you know so it's something that you kind of have to.

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Myles Brown: You know, maybe revisit a little more often at least do that check becky.

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Brian Carlson: miles on the first bullet there, we have a customer recently that we've recently engaged in a large publisher and the learning and development person we're working with they're.

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Brian Carlson: Talking about a training to data analytics learning path putting that together for them, but we asked you what else you guys looking at she said, well, I did a survey and I have a spreadsheet with 84 topics on it.

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Brian Carlson: And I did.

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Brian Carlson: not know what they are right and so that was just happened last week, where she where she was able to share that over with us, but that's a great example for that first bullet yeah you pile all the leadership and you get back a huge list of topics.

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Myles Brown: yeah for sure.

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Myles Brown: And I guess the question is, are you just pulling the it management or you or is it like kind of a more general survey that you send to to all the it practitioners we've seen both right.

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Myles Brown: When you send it to just it management, what I find is that.

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Myles Brown: What you really find is, what are the main priorities right they'll each tell you hey This is my top two priorities and so it's really good at finding, what are the biggest things.

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Myles Brown: But a lot of times what gets lost in the cracks is individual practitioners what they're struggling with right.

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Myles Brown: And it might be hey this team only has one or two people, but so is this team, and this team, and this team right and so that's how those major training requirements fall through the cracks.

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Myles Brown: Another thing we find is you know, are you just asking like a free format question like hey what are your top three priorities.

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Myles Brown: that's really good at finding, what are the top three priorities, unless you get something that's not very actionable like country right we just we just talked about how that's too broad.

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Myles Brown: And so what we have done to success with some of our customers is helped them build more of a multiple choice kind of question.

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Myles Brown: Where where we list out a bunch of technologies and then you get a lot more focused hey, these are the specific technologies, we need.

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Myles Brown: Now, if you just do that the problem is especially if you send it to everybody right you've seen that, where everybody just checks everything mean they may not even need it for their work, they just want to learn it, you know.

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Myles Brown: And so you got to temper that with it, and what are the priorities right, and I think we've done that pretty effectively and a couple of these surveys that we've helped build.

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Myles Brown: Which is you know hey, what are the technologies you're you're you're struggling with that you thinking about using but also have all these things you mentioned, what are the top priorities for your team.

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Brian Carlson: And this is again he kind of covered it off again here but i'll pointed out, so you know, one of the chat like we talked about before one of the challenges with with just surveying your management is you get these broad concepts.

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Brian Carlson: Right, a lot of the smaller requirements, but.

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Brian Carlson: Then, when you require the front of when you pull the frontline folks you get lots of small requirements, not all of them pertaining to their job, some of them very small that they could really learn in an hour on YouTube honestly.

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Brian Carlson: um.

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Brian Carlson: And so you got them kind of find that the the the middle there that what they really need, but the Third, the third dynamic to that whole process is, what are the job roles these folks are in because you.

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Brian Carlson: Have the.

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Brian Carlson: same survey to the same job or the same survey at all different job roles right, it needs to be tailored and focused and so, in order to do that effectively.

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Brian Carlson: you've got to understand where those were those technologies meet and and what the crossover is and what the crossover isn't so she could make sure, each of those groups gets the correct set of set of skills that they need.

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Myles Brown: yeah yeah and.

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Myles Brown: Like you said with that with that publishing company when they get that list of 84 topics.

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Myles Brown: What I found was that it wasn't even close to a four because there were a lot of like synonyms in there right.

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Myles Brown: And the learning and development team didn't know that they were sending him they didn't know that you know these things were pretty much equivalent.

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Myles Brown: And so the real question when you're doing that assessment is, are you having somebody technical review those results.

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Myles Brown: Looking for those duplicates of synonyms and figuring out which of these topics require instructor led training and which ones are sort of small enough easy enough intro enough that some simple healer.

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Myles Brown: And so that's that's something that we that's really a big part of what we're doing for some of our largest.

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Myles Brown: Customers is being that trusted partner, where somebody says we had an example somebody said hey I need a cucumber tree and they're like what the heck is cucumber, so I just told them they don't kind of basically what it is.

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Myles Brown: Okay, you know because there's a lot of weird names, you know those Open Source products, you know they just they have to come up with a name that doesn't conflict with something else, and so you get a lot of really, really weird stuff.

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Myles Brown: When when we're when we're first seeing those learning and development people just before we even get to a survey when they start talking to those cloud teams.

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Myles Brown: You know, we thought, maybe we would pop up some good questions to ask right the one the first one is the most obvious right they say hey we want to train with it, what what public cloud vendor or vendors are using right.

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Myles Brown: Because you know a lot of people these days are in this multi vendor environment.

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Myles Brown: They say Okay, well, we want to take intro training, maybe the cloud team is still investigating which of these clouds do we even want to use or are we going to also support azure and Google cloud, you know and so.

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Myles Brown: You know, it might be more than one even but then you know, are we in that kind of hybrid environment and, if so, are we using any frameworks to manage those workloads across both right, we see a lot of people who use vmware.

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Myles Brown: within their on Prem data centers and then, when they bring in the cloud they say hey we want to use the cloud, but we don't want to learn a whole new way to manage those workloads.

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Myles Brown: So can we not use vmware cloud on aws and the answer is yes right that's it's just a different way of using aws or maybe like you said, the Red hat open shift.

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Myles Brown: And so there's a lot of these kind of frameworks that we see in hybrid environments and so you know finding out what that is and whether or not that needs training or not it's a big one.

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Myles Brown: The other one, I would say is finding out what kind of workloads are we running.

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Myles Brown: Or we just lifting and shifting existing Apps well, then you probably just need to learn about the cloud there of your choice right, but are we creating new ask specifically for the cloud.

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Myles Brown: And if so, are we doing them services way are we doing with containers are we using Cooper daddy's or not, are we are, we are people you know starting to do microservices.

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Myles Brown: Then we get into hey are we further embracing devops as part of our cloud journey right do we need some general there was training or do we need specific tools, I can get and get hub.

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Myles Brown: Get lab Jenkins, you know ci CD pipelines automation tools like answerable Tara form right the list goes on and on and on and we don't expect learning and development people.

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Myles Brown: to know all these things right, and so we can help with those questions, we can help.

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Myles Brown: Even build that multiple choice survey.

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Myles Brown: To try and elicit all this information.

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Myles Brown: And then, finally, you know that analytics part right are we using new analytics tools are we using the existing ones in the cloud.

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Myles Brown: And there's there's things like snowflake you mentioned, where you know all of a sudden it's become very, very popular and it's not so easy to find trainings work and so.

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Myles Brown: This is where I think exit certified really can help people fill fill that role of a trusted provider.

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Myles Brown: And so.

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Myles Brown: You know our last little bit here is going to be on a little bit of a sales pitch for exit certified, what do we do.

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Myles Brown: And a big part of what we do these days, you know why our biggest customers, like us, and stay with us is what we're calling our continuous customer care cycle so maybe Brian you can talk a little bit about that.

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Brian Carlson: So five farts that is cyclical So the first piece is obviously gathering requirements.

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Brian Carlson: So we talked a lot about that here, how do you target, you know assess which who's going to to ask questions, how do you ask those questions.

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Brian Carlson: All those kinds of things we get the right requirements, and we can you get a true understanding of the skills that are most important and how they're important for each travel.

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Myles Brown: yeah, so I think I think step one and two are sort of like you said it's very much a conversation right yeah they come to us with some initial requirements, but we're going to have to meet with them.

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Myles Brown: To really understand you know let's delve deeper what what is that requirement and chart that effective learning path and that's that's really step three, which is hey we're going to build that path and and.

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Myles Brown: This is where a company like a certified is great, because we are partnered with.

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Myles Brown: 25 plus vendors so whatever major vendor you're looking at.

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Myles Brown: You know, we generally have that authorized training.

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Myles Brown: And and cloud is really our area of expertise, I would say, probably aws is our biggest.

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Myles Brown: area but Microsoft azure Google cloud even Oracle to a certain degree.

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Myles Brown: You know those those public cloud vendors were partnered with them all.

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Myles Brown: And then, beyond that, like you mentioned, you know tools like data breaks or.

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Myles Brown: Or you know things like that we're partnered with those companies to offer their authorized training.

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Myles Brown: But the authorized training doesn't cover everything right that's where we have that multi vendor where you know we go out and we find out who's got the best Cooper natives training and because.

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Myles Brown: it's Open Source there's no vendor of record so anybody can hang a sign and say we do Cooper nettie stream, so our job is to go and figure out who's got the best of breed training and then we bring that in we've got a huge rolodex of.

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Myles Brown: instructors that have built their own specific training on some Open Source stuff.

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Myles Brown: And you.

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Myles Brown: You know you've been dealing with.

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Myles Brown: This industry, for a long time you've got.

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Myles Brown: far reaching and kind of rolodex and that side of things.

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Myles Brown: So, yes.

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Myles Brown: Yes.

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Brian Carlson: I have years of working with with with a vital lots of different instructors in line and lots of different content areas, putting putting these kinds of programs together.

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Myles Brown: And like you said, the important part is to look at it and say you know hey it's not just one plan for everybody in an organization right we got to look at a different job roles.

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Myles Brown: How much how how technical do they need to be.

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Myles Brown: You know, can we do it with just a one hour webinar right for the non technical people for everyone who's going to bump up against cloud we've done that a lot where where we say hey we've got a one hour thing.

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Myles Brown: You know, send everybody your executives everybody and then we've got maybe a one day, and then we got a three day you know we we do a lot of that kind of you know, building a specific plan based around all these different job roles.

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Myles Brown: I guess the next step is the actual training we deliver your inversion training self paced training we do live virtual classes, you know we do a lot of virtual classes these days.

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Myles Brown: Our training centers across North America are now open we're just not finding that many people that are interested in in traveling somewhere and taking a class but it's starting to ramp up a bit, we are sending a lot more instructors, you know into companies to do on site training.

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Myles Brown: Then.

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Myles Brown: Yes, sir.

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Brian Carlson: One thing we are seeing more and more of and i'd be curious if anybody on the webinar today is seeing it is.

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Brian Carlson: Longer programs for the one for support existing employees and and technology shift, but the second is onboarding programs there's a huge skills gap in the market.

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Brian Carlson: And so we see a lot of our customers come in and saying hey we need.

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Brian Carlson: we've got folks coming in with you know, maybe an IT background, maybe not and we need to put them through this you know 2468 week 10 week boot camp that's going to get them to that you know from here to here.

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Brian Carlson: And we've delivered over three months, you know you know, fewer days per week that kind of thing so we've seen a ton of that and again the interesting to see if anybody out there is saying that request.

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Myles Brown: yeah and a lot of those ones we've done end up being a blend of you know, some E learning and some in person.

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Myles Brown: Because you know there isn't just one learning style for everybody, and so the more touches you get the more different points of view, the better we find.

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Myles Brown: E learning is great because it's self paced you could do it at your own time and it's generally very cheap but you know.

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Myles Brown: it's only the most highly motivated self motivated people that can just go and pile through a bunch of E learning and become an expert, I have a lot of people, you know need that.

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Myles Brown: person to kind of really break things down for them and to have bounce questions off of them and so.

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Myles Brown: We still think that the gold standard is instructor led training and ideally in the room, with people would be best virtual is working pretty well because everybody's really embraced zoom.

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Myles Brown: But we use whatever remote in technology, you need well you know whether it's web Apps or teams, or whatever.

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Myles Brown: We, we also have this.

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Myles Brown: custom training portal that we do for large customers, maybe you could talk a little bit about the benefits of that portal right.

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Brian Carlson: It has a few different things that it has a support registration it's got some safeguards in there to be for the people that you want registering.

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Brian Carlson: registering and for the classes, you want them to register for has some ability to host invoices and and rosters and those kinds of things, so it just makes it a little easier to be able to support a large program, for you know hundreds or even thousands of people.

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Myles Brown: yeah and it's good because we get some reporting on the back end to right, and so, if you if you decide to instead of trans actually paying for each class.

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Myles Brown: You know, you can you can buy what we call flat, and then you can see how it's being.

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Myles Brown: burned down over time, so we get a lot of good reporting out of that today yep.

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Myles Brown: And then, after the training, you know for talking about just sort of setting up one training engagement we typically have this follow up after right where.

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Myles Brown: Where the sales REP and maybe even the instructor are meeting with whoever you know wanted this training.

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Myles Brown: And and giving them some feedback talking about the assessments, you know what are the students thing here's what we found you know what did you find and really trying to figure out are there, additional training needs Is there something that's still out there that it's not quite.

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Myles Brown: A dress yeah.

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Brian Carlson: yep.

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Brian Carlson: One of our customer.

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Brian Carlson: Tomas.

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Brian Carlson: So as part of this this let's plan for the future, you know that as Michael said that happens, the minute class starts if we work with our instructors.

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Brian Carlson: Your people spend a lot of time in front of our instructors and we learned a lot about their skill sets and also your organization.

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Brian Carlson: And where your organization is going so it's not uncommon for customers that have a larger programs we deliver the same class over a period of years, sometimes.

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Brian Carlson: For us to hear from instructors or when we go and talk to the instructor for them and say hey and when I taught the class last year, this was.

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Brian Carlson: The agenda was a great fit, but since then it's some things seem to have changed right, I think we should change, you know this topic to this topic, and maybe add this one and remove this one anymore.

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Brian Carlson: or interest here, it seems, maybe the customer has moved on from tools or there's this tool to that tool.

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Brian Carlson: And that's great feedback because we take that back to our stakeholders that the customer and and share it and get their thoughts right and oftentimes.

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Brian Carlson: You know, they say hey yeah let's make this change, and so we see classes, we deliver evolve over the course of you know, months and, of course, years and so that that kind of.

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Brian Carlson: That that that process that the importance we place on gathering instructor feedback helps us to keep the classes fresh and current and engaging for the students.

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Myles Brown: yeah so so obviously this end and customer care that we just mentioned is is a big part of.

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Myles Brown: Why is it certified.

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Myles Brown: But I think I think our real strength is our internal training team, you know we we have we have a large group for training companies of our size, we have a very large group of in house instructors that have been with us a long time.

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Myles Brown: they've all been 20 plus years.

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In the industry.

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Myles Brown: And you know we here we've got some satisfaction ratings on instructor expertise we've they won lots of awards from our various vendors and.

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Myles Brown: You know, we have this type of group that's been around for a while they are professional trainers and then we have sort of that second layer would be you know some very trusted contractors, many of whom only work for just us right so it's almost just.

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Myles Brown: An extension of our instructor team.

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Myles Brown: And so we've got that great instructor team and then beyond that you know we've got.

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Myles Brown: It we've got into that rolodex of hey I need somebody who knows this very specific technology right when we have and there's not that many people to know it, but we can get Ahold of them right.

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Myles Brown: The other thing we do well, I think, is execution with our mvp as what we call our virtual training we've been doing virtual training since 2012 which.

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Myles Brown: That was early days for virtual training and most people were doing sort of one way you know audio you know, using webex or something like that and.

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Myles Brown: So we embrace the two way audio video for our classes and really encourage people to turn on their cameras, to make it feel like a regular class, we also product brought in.

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Myles Brown: You know, in addition to the instructor there's somebody we call an imdb producer who's there to make sure everybody's got the materials everybody's connecting.

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Myles Brown: You know, because what we found was early days of virtual training, you lose the first half hour of the instructors time just trying to.

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Myles Brown: troubleshoot problems that the students are at, and so we think that you know we've been doing a very great job of it.

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Myles Brown: And, and the numbers that we gather on on.

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Myles Brown: customer satisfaction with it, you know kind of bear that out, and I think during the pandemic.

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Myles Brown: What happened was we just kind of.

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Myles Brown: Turn turned it from about 60% virtual 200% virtual for a while.

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Myles Brown: And so.

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Myles Brown: But we were well situated for that, because we've been doing it for so long.

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Myles Brown: So this is a, this is another part of, why is it certified, I think you know we've probably add to this about 10 more things, but you know that the.

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Myles Brown: Deep vendor partnerships that we have.

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Myles Brown: With with all of the major players, certainly in cloud and infrastructure we're really we've got a pretty good list of vendors, that we have the authorized training for and like I said we've we've.

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Myles Brown: achieved a lot of.

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Myles Brown: Partner awards and individual instructor awards across all those different vendors.

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Myles Brown: So.

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Myles Brown: we're starting to wind down, maybe talk a little bit about where to go from here, I would think Brian you're probably the best.

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Myles Brown: person.

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Myles Brown: You know if somebody doesn't already have a sales REP.

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Myles Brown: Maybe maybe reaching out to you with an email, is a good a good starter.

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Myles Brown: We also mentioned our cloud centric portfolio of training.

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Myles Brown: And I think.

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Myles Brown: We just put the link in the chat for that and then again both Brian and my emails are there.

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Myles Brown: And we do have this White Paper called retaining and upscaling it talent 2022 and beyond this is sort of for the learning and developing crowd so I thought well let's throw that out there to just if you're looking for.

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Myles Brown: Any anything else to mention Brian while we're sort of wrapping up.

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Brian Carlson: I would mention, you know not just learning and development for that last piece, you know it's also a lot of our customers that buy for larger groups are project managers or directors or program managers are real job roles like that.

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Brian Carlson: So it's not exclusively learning and development but yeah take take a look at that and then we'd love to have a chat and if you just have a couple questions feel free to email it over and of course we can jump on the phone if you if you have our.

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Yes.

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Myles Brown: So a C we're coming up to time we wanted to leave some time for questions.

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Myles Brown: don't know I don't see any of the Q amp a maybe we have some in the chat.

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ExitCertified: On the we don't have any and the Q amp a so far, but I can say a kickoff one question to kind of get us started, and that would be you know kind of what is the first step and L amp D leader should take to begin the process of building a classroom program for their tech team.

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Myles Brown: yeah The first step is usually you know engaging with the tech leaders in some way right and most l&d is already doing this, but but to.

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Myles Brown: To specifically asked about cloud, I think it starts with saying.

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Myles Brown: What do you mean by cloud training right like let's let's delve more into it, and then we have those sort of probing questions that we added so that maybe they could ask high level and figure out what it is.

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Myles Brown: Before they say, well, maybe we need to give them send up some sort of survey, to find out what are the technologies being used.

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Myles Brown: It you know different organizations, I find you know, some of them are really top down, where the where the organization says, these are the technologies, you must use.

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Myles Brown: Others it's a little bit more, you know you have independent teams working on different things, and then, when you realize oh we've got five different teams that are all using the same technology, maybe, maybe we need a larger training Program.

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Myles Brown: And so I think just starting with that initial discussion with the it people.

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Myles Brown: And then, and then maybe get in touch with us, you know to to help facilitate that next level where we either interview people or help you build those surveys.

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Myles Brown: And that's something we generally do all that free of charge, because you know, the idea is we want you to figure out exactly what training, you need we don't want to sell your training that you don't need.

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Myles Brown: And we want to make sure that we get exactly what you want, so that you keep coming back to us and so that's that's why you know, we want to help as early as possible in that in that.

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Myles Brown: step and then, once we've done that, for a customer you know once they tend to come back to us the next year when they say okay we're figuring out our training budget for the next year, you know, can you help us again.

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Myles Brown: And so that's that's that continuous cycle right where we you know, hopefully we keep coming back and we make you a repeat customer by by helping you do your job better and.

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Myles Brown: I don't know Brian anything else to add to that I think is you know talk to it leadership early bird.

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Brian Carlson: good first step it can go a lot of different ways so have that have had that initial conversation, then you know that's going to kind of inform you where to go next, and after that it's you know which I guess We just have to have more info.

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ExitCertified: So I don't see any more questions in the chat I don't know if you guys have any that you receive often from either customers, or just people that are talking to currently whether that's l amp D or people in a similar area on that you get often.

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Brian Carlson: Most of those into the end of the presentation, but maybe there's some other little coming to my mile sense.

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Myles Brown: know a lot of that like I got this list of 84 topics of what can you can you help me make sense of it right.

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Myles Brown: That that's a big part of it and we got to the point, with one of our largest customers where.

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Myles Brown: l&d people would just send me emails every week just saying hey what is this thing what is that thing right.

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Myles Brown: because they know that i'm able to break that down for them and tell them here's what the technology is by the way, that's a one hour topic that they can learn, you know.

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Myles Brown: Go go look at this free online resource right, and so I think I think it's that it's just trying to figure out is this a big topic, or is it a small talk, you know that sometimes it's hard to figure out when you're non technical.

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Myles Brown: Well, thank you for your time today, I think I think we're probably.

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Myles Brown: Any other questions pop up in the chat.

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ExitCertified: No, I don't think so, so far, so thank you so much miles and Brian for for doing that for us, today, please keep a lookout for a follow up email, which should be sent to you by the end of the week.

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ExitCertified: But should be having the recording for this webinar Thank you so much, everyone for joining and have a great afternoon.

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Brian Carlson: Thanks everybody.

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Thanks.

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