Global Knowledge and ctc TrainCanada merged in August 2017. Concept Training, an industry-leading training method, was added to the course delivery. Our Concept Training methodology will be available to you when you take a Microsoft Office course. What does Concept Training actually mean?
It is productivity training
Our clients sign up for training almost without exception because they want to be more productive using the software tools that they have. Because each student has specific productivity needs, we emphasize what the software can do for you, not what it can do.
EXAMPLE: If someone takes Visio training to create flow charts, they don’t need us to show them how floor plans are made. They should be able to create floor plans, but not how the software works. Concept Training is not based on a curriculum. It focuses on the student’s productivity needs.
Traditional training is often curriculum-based. Structured curriculum-based training is a structured approach. The instructor follows a prescribed path through a workbook. Each exercise builds on the previous. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to customize the course progression.
Curriculum-based training has the advantage that all students will receive the exact same training and can have different instructors, with a predictable result.
Curriculum-based training has the disadvantage of wasting time on topics that are not relevant or already familiar to the student.
Concept-based training does not have a fixed structure. The exercises don’t have to be built on each other. Students can add, remove, or alter topics as they see fit.
However, this does not mean that the course is lacking a guiding structure. You can be sure that the instructor will have a plan, but they will also be flexible to adapt the pace and content to your needs throughout the training.
EXAMPLE: A course might be at an introductory level but the student needs to know something that is covered at a higher level. Concept Training does not consider it a problem to cover a topic at a different level, if it is relevant to the students’ needs. It’s fine to skip a topic that is not relevant to the audience.
The student’s needs are greater than the curriculum’s.
Concept Training courses are designed to help students understand their expectations and needs. This is the main focus of the instructor, and the examples and exercises used reflect this.
EXAMPLE: Each student can work on their own presentation during a PowerPoint class. One student might be working on a presentation about HR policies, while another student could be working on a budget presentation. Both students are still learning how to add images, create charts, and apply transitions. However, they are each doing it in a way that is unique to them.
Concept Training does not offer courseware. Instead, we want to give students real work-related assignments, which they then solve individually or in groups using the knowledge and software experimentation they’ve acquired in the classroom.
Students receive a lot of post-course material. This includes thousands of pages of digital references, how to videos, and step-by-step activities. These materials are for post-course support only. They can be version-independent.
In many cases, the feature sets in software don’t change much between versions. We are able to teach different versions of the software simultaneously. We would not mix versions in a classroom if there was a significant difference between versions, such as PowerPoint 2010 and 2016. But for Introduct