Citrix Training on the Rise
BackBy Lindsay Edmonds Wickman —
Citrix Systems has become a giant in its own right, growing from a small start-up to a $1.4 billion global leader in application delivery infrastructure, according to an article in San Jose Magazine. Consequently, there has been a corresponding increase in Citrix training.
“Citrix as a product has increased its presence in corporate America. Because there’s a bigger volume of product, there’s more of a training requirement,” said Jeff Brambir, manager of education services at Alternative Technology Inc. (ATI), a Citrix Authorized Learning Center (CALC) that provides education and certification programs on Citrix technology to IT professionals.
“There was a period of time where it slowed down [and] a lot of instructors got [out] of that particular technology, [but] the business has picked back up [and] there’s more demand than there are instructors available,” Brambir said.
For those who already are Citrix certified trainers, the best way to get your name out there is to make yourself known to Citrix and the CALC community, said Lee Fawcett, vice president of professional services at ATI.
For trainers not certified by Citrix, Brambir said the first step is to get authorized.
“If it’s somebody who is brand new — let’s say he or she is a Microsoft trainer and they want to get involved with Citrix — there is an authorization process that individual has to go through,” he said.
At ATI, all Citrix training is done through face-to-face instruction.
“When you deliver online, even if it’s a virtual class with an instructor, it’s very easy in that scenario for the student to get distracted,” Brambir said. “He or she gets an e-mail or a phone call, [and] they go deal with that. The quality of the training is much less effective.”
Because ATI teaches classes in a face-to-face environment, instructors must have presentation skills, personality and “all of those things that make an instructor interesting to listen to [and] add great value to the standard vendor curriculum,” Brambir explained.
“The instructor doesn’t teach out of a book [but] has real-world experience, so there is tremendous value [in] getting that person in front of the students,” he said. “You [also] have the students interacting with one another and the instructor — their war stories [and] their requirements. All of that information gets exchanged during the class and adds value to [the] overall training experience.”
As a result, when ATI hires an instructor, the individual goes through a test teaching scenario. Then ATI follows up with student evaluations from every course, Fawcett said.
“We get student feedback, and that’s one of the ways we track the performance of our instructors from the customer’s perspective,” he said. “So we continue to help them improve.”
– Lindsay Edmonds Wickman, lwickman@certmag.com
