Executive summary:
- What is a private training course?
- Advantages of private training
- Prices for private courses
- Hosting private courses on your premises
- Running a private course off-site
- Residential private courses
- Maximum and minimum class sizes
What is a Private Training Course?
Private training courses are simply those which are not open to members of the general public — so they are often referred to as ‘closed courses’.
They are typically:
- Bought by a single organisation
- Tailored to the needs of that organisation
- Delivered ‘on-site’ — at the organisation’s own premises
- Designed for training groups on the same subject matter
- Cheaper than public courses — for groups of 3 or more
They may be:
- Run jointly for several organisations
- Customised or specially commissioned for an organisation
- Delivered off-site or residentially
- Delivered to as few as one or two people
- More expensive, but more convenient, than public courses
Advantages of private training
The main advantage of private courses over public training is that they give you more control over:
- Content selection — just the stuff you need/want
- Group selection — size and skills/ability/experience mix
- Pace of learning — e.g. when to go quickly or slower and deeper
- The balance between different topics and types of activity
Other advantages:
- Cheaper — the larger the group
- Less time away from — normal work
- Have work tools and data to hand
Prices for private courses
Depending on the training company, most private courses will work out cheaper than public equivalents if you have at least 4-5 staff to train.
In our case, even a private group of 2 may be cheaper, and a group of 3 always will always be cheaper — providing you qualify for a convenience discount.
For full details, contact us and read our private training course pricing page.
On-site Training at Your Premises
We will be posting a separate page detailing the facilities we prefer for different onsite training courses, but in the meantime, here’s a short list of the minimum requirements for most:
- A room — screened from external distractions
- A data projector and screen/wall — or very big monitor
- Whiteboard or flipchart and pens — preferably both
- 1 square metre workspace per student
- 1 networked laptop/PC per student
- Power and network connectivity for the trainer
- Ability to install/access course software/data on student PCs
If you would like us to provide our own equipment — e.g. laptops, projectors, etc — there may be a small charge to cover shipping, insurance, ‘wear and tear’, etc. This charge is rarely more than £50 per student, per course — regardless of course duration — and is usually considerably less.
Running Private Courses Off-site
A few clients lack any on-site training facilities — while others simply prefer to separate students from the distractions of the normal working environment.
In either case, we are happy to train at another location — and the facilities required will be the same.
If you have any difficulty in arranging such facilities at an appropriate location, we can usually do that for you — at cost.
Our most technical courses can benefit from fully equipped technical training facilities, but none require require them. So we can usually kit out a basic training facility for you in a generic conference room anywhere in the world, e.g. most hotels have them.
When we do provide our own equipment — e.g. laptops, projectors, etc — there will be a small charge to cover insurance and/or ‘wear and tear’. This charge is rarely more than £50 per student per course — regardless of course duration and is usually considerably less.
Residential Private Courses
Residential private courses are typically conducted at a remote and/or isolated location — often for team-building purposes, but sometimes merely to remove a team from the inertia and distractions of a familiar environment.
Although non-residential off-site courses may offer similar benefits, residential courses can significantly improve group interaction and focus.
None of our current courses are dedicated to team building, but we do find residential courses useful for bringing together and integrating the different disciplines within some company web teams.
This is especially true for subjects like SEO, which are intrinsically inter-disciplinary and cannot be done optimally by one group of specialists alone. For example, after sheer ignorance, the most common cause of SEO failure is the tendency for marketeers, writers, designers and developers to undermine one another’s contributions.
Maximum and Minimum Class Sizes
We set no minimum class size for private courses. We’ll happily teach a single person, or a group as small as two people.
The practical minimum of 3 students is determined by cost, i.e. it’s usually cheaper to send 1 or 2 students on a publicly scheduled course, rather than host it ‘in-house’.
Reasons to run a private course for only 1 or 2 students:
- Urgency — no convenient public dates in your timeframe
- Convenience — cost/time to travel to a public course is high
- If there are discounts — bringing costs down to public levels
- Customisation — is worth the extra cost
- Security and Confidentiality — is worth the extra cost
Our maximum class size is usually 8, but we will teach larger groups when the subject and the style of training allow it, e.g.
- Talks and lectures — can be of any size
- Courses with tightly constrained practical work — up to 12
N.B. Large practical classes incur a charge of £150 per extra delegate per day over the normal charge for 8 delegates.