by: Chris Knotts, ASPE Creative Director
We’ve had a lot of interest lately from our customers and prospects regarding some of the most important people here at ASPE: our professional training advisors. I want to take a moment to explain exactly who these people are, what they do, and why it’s worth it to our business to provide such a valuable service free of charge to any professional who needs it.
The mission of an ASPE training advisor is simple: to help you precisely identify your skills gaps, and develop a plan to get the training you need to solve them. That’s the reason we have a dedicated staff who does nothing but consult with you on your role and exactly how you might benefit from training. The more we understand your specific situation, the more we can use our knowledge of the current industry landscape, trends and tools available to help you navigate skills-based solutions.
That doesn’t always mean it’s most appropriate for you to take one of our courses. In fact, when ASPE entered the training sector years ago, we decided one of the most important reasons we needed to work hard to foster an extensive network of other players in the training industry was to make sure we could offer customers a training plan even when we didn’t offer the solution ourselves. The first priority for a training advisor isn’t always to sell an ASPE course: it’s to help find a concrete strategy to make sure that your training investment is going to result in truly applicable practical skills. These days, it’s very rare that ASPE either doesn’t have a course from across our five training companies, or a partner referral who can offer you the exact training you need.
Remember your college advisor? If you were fortunate to have a good one, you may remember the attitude he or she took when preparing you for the next semester. Young students often need coaching when making career decisions at such an early stage, so although the advisor was an agent of your college, the real job was to first understand your specific personal goals. I remember how helpful my advisor was from year to year as she watched me grow in my learning, but more importantly, as she helped me develop the exact career strategy I needed to adopt as I completed school and entered the workforce. It was not specific courses or credits that she was really concerned with; rather, it was what I wanted to achieve.
The mission of the training advisor at ASPE is just the same. What matters most are the specifics of your organization and the specifics of your own needs and goals. This is the first and most fundamental conversation that a training advisor will want to have with you before discussing any type of specific training options.
Another key role of our training advisors is helping you distinguish certification needs from simple skills gaps. Your professional certification goals can sometimes be just as complex as the overall landscape. There have never been as many certifications available as there are today. Is an accrediting body certification appropriate? Is a university affiliated certificate better? Or, do you need vendor specific certification on a specific technology? The answers vary by field and by position. One thing is clear: the right industry certification is highly valuable. (In fact, we’ve developed multiple industry salary surveys which track data across the worlds of project management, business analysis, etc. and have found it striking just how much more salary is commanded on average by individuals certified in these fields).
However, it can be difficult to know whether these certifications will be worth it. At ASPE we’ve chosen to focus on a few key options: PMI credentials, Certifications from the IIBA, Executive-level business certificates, and software testing certification from ISTQB. Whether you need one of these or another credential, ASPE’s advisory staff can provide helpful answers.
We’re often asked what the catch is when it comes to providing this sort of service without any kind of guaranteed ROI. Well, the reality is that we’ve found it to have incredible ROI for our company. In the world of professional training, it’s amazing how often companies promote educational products as if they’re a sales-driven retail company. We feel that this isn’t the most effective approach to bringing high-level professional training to market. A philosophy of talking with people, and treating their need for training as an educational opportunity revolving around THEM instead of our own product line…this attitude is something people appreciate. When people appreciate you, they’re more apt to become customers. What’s more, they’re more apt to become loyal customers. That’s what we’re really interested in at ASPE. And for those who ultimately don’t turn to us for training – we’re happy that our business model allows us to provide them with something of value regardless of the future relationship. At the end of the day, it’s well worth it to us and our industry to see professionals make informed decisions before deciding to engage in training – be it with us, with a partner, or with another resource altogether.
We operate in a very complex landscape. The enterprise project world functions in a way that’s heavily influenced by technology, global trends, and ever-faster absorption of new lessons and data in real time. These, combined with a high level of specialization and sophistication, are all factors that contribute to a world of training possibilities that can be very intimidating. Sometimes there are specialties within specialties, and it can be hard to feel confident about choosing just the right training. Course content can be confusingly different (or confusingly similar) from vendor to vendor and course to course. It’s easily possible to begin a training search seeking to resolve knowledge challenges, but coming away even more confused than when you started. This is a shame, and should never be the case. The good news is that having so many courses available and having every specialty covered is ultimately a great thing. It allows for the gaps in your skills to be addressed in a highly tailored, relevant way. It also means that somewhere in the world there is training available that matches to your job description with a high level of specificity. The challenge then becomes how to navigate all the options, and that’s why our training advisors make up one of the largest and most important departments in our firm.
