Private Seminars

All of the seminars described on the Course descriptions page are available as private or “on-site” seminars. These are seminars held at your site, or at a nearby site such as a hotel meeting room or rental computer classroom, with only your employees or contractors present.

Overview

Private seminars differ from public, open-enrollment seminars in the following key ways:

  • Confidentiality: Only members of your company will be present. So, for example, you can feel free to ask questions pertinent to your future products or other confidential information. (We will be happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement if you require one.)
  • Choice: For a private seminar you can pick any of our seminar offerings, the place, and time. Public, or open enrollment, seminars are limited to the most popular topics from our catalog and are held at places and times of our choosing.
  • Customization: Private seminars can always be customized to fit your needs (usually at no extra cost), while public seminars always follow the stated course descriptions.
  • Cost: The cost per student/per day for a private seminar is about twenty percent lower than for public seminars, as the fee for the public has to cover the cost of the meeting space, snacks and lunch, instructor travel, and our other fixed costs. For a public, you also incur the cost of your own travel and expenses. For private seminars, you, the client, pay only for the instructor’s travel and expenses (one person instead of all of your participants).

The bottom line: Public seminars are usually a good choice when you have only one or a few people who will benefit from the training (provided, of course, that the topics and schedule we offer fit your needs). If you have more students than that, it usually makes more sense for us to come to you. And of course, on-sites have the advantage that we can customize the seminar to your needs.

Seminar Topics and Customization

All courses listed on our Course Descriptions pages are available as private seminars.

Beyond that, we can almost always customize a seminar to your needs and requirements. To this end, we always ask for a telephone consultation with you before a seminar is booked to learn your exact needs. We can omit preliminary topics with which you’re already familiar; we can deemphasize topics not relevant to you; we can even combine material from several different seminars. While some parts of our standard offerings do have a logical sequence that needs to be followed, there is still much room for tailoring to your exclusive requirements. In this way the seminar will be as effective as possible for your people and your organization.

A customized seminar generally costs no more than a standard course of the same length.

Facilities and Equipment

For an on-site seminar we suggest a classroom-style (or, for a smaller group, a boardroom-style) meeting room, with adequate table space for each attendee and the seminar leader to spread out the course manual and to have easy access to the computers used in the labs (if the seminar is presented with labs). The specific lab setup requirements for each seminar (software required to be installed, for example) are available on request.

A data projector of at least XGA resolution is required. Also, we require either a whiteboard (preferred) or a flipchart.

If you don’t have a suitable venue, we have options. We have arrangements with several companies that provide computer-equipped training facilities, and we can often arrange these at favorable rates.

Request a Seminar

Please email us to inquire about available dates, prices, customizations, and so on for private on-site seminars.