Quality of training classes.

[AlexRecl]

Hi,

I took some VMware courses starting with ver. 6. It became worse and worse every year.

I am taking VMware vSphere Operate, Scale, & Secure class ver. 8 now and it is totally disaster.

I don't understand how such respected company can create such terrible product.

Thanks

[scott28tt]

Care to provide more details, that might be useful feedback?

[Giodomi]

interested on understand what was not working, was the material, the trainer or both things together?

[AlexRecl]

I am writing about Lecture guide only. It is a base on top of which you can make good or bad training course.

The guide is "vSphere OSS 8 Lecture Manual".

For instance Chapter 5 - Storage Operations

There are a lot of theoretical explanations about modules but less practical information such as when do we need it, how it was done in the past and why this is much better and more important to provide cases and how to use this information in day to day practice.

Another point is providing new information without explaining what does it mean. For instance "NVMe over RDMA". What does it mean NVMe  and what is the difference between it and normal hard drives (at least a short explanation), What is RDMA? Show the diagram (better animation) how this technology is working.

Another example is API. It is obvious term for developers but not administrators.

I am under impression that this guide was written by technical guys which has no idea how to properly explain new information and don't know the principle than new information has to be based on well known information but not on new and unknown one.

I am absolutely sure that taking this course will not help any system administrator.

[AlexRecl]

It is impossible to have a good training based on bad content of the course.

[scott28tt]

I was a VMware instructor for 6 years, working for partners using official curriculum materials.

I would expect it to be me telling those practical and use case stories, I wouldn’t expect it to always be part of the materials.

I don’t feel it is VMware’s job to explain industry hardware and terms that are not their own, such as the examples you give, they should of course explain all of their own acronyms and technologies.

[AlexRecl]

>I wouldn’t expect it to always be part of the materials.

What is the point to provide theoretical information which can't be used by administrator? The course is for admins who has to manage infrastructure and do it practically. Theory is good for developers but not for admins. It can be useful only as add-on.

>I don’t feel it is VMware’s job to explain industry hardware and terms that are not their own, such as the examples you give,

I partially agree with you. This guide is for admins who has to receive information enough to use it in every day tasks. If there is a gap in explanation it has to be given al least overview of technology. In this case user has to interrupt reading the guide, search the meaning of acronym or technology and return back when enough information will be found. But this is not the meaning of good course.

Good course should provide enough information to use it in every day tasks without necessity to dig outside of the guide.

New knowledge has to be provided on known facts which is not the case.

[scott28tt]

The materials are only part of the course. The instructor adds a lot of value.

To give other examples, VMware don’t have to explain the Fibre Channel protocol, how power and cooling work in a datacenter, or an in-depth explanation of the latest Intel CPU architecture.

I believe their responsibility is in educating how their software works, on whatever underlying hardware a customer chooses to use it on, not educating on every possible hardware technology. I also think students have a responsibility to understand the surrounding and underlying technologies.

I say all of this as an ex-instructor.

[AlexRecl]

Sorry but being ex-instructor is not an argument.

I, as a student who took a lot of different courses, prefer to give me an overview of technologies which is related to the course and not to leave a gap in the knowledge. It has to be explained as "Black box" model: what is input and what is output.

For instance. you don't to explain how DNS is working but provide one sentence that system is providing name as a string of characters and output should be IP address of the resource. That's it.

[scott28tt]

I worked with course materials from multiple vendors over 15 years of my career.

I think I'm done with this post.

[AlexRecl]

>I worked with course materials from multiple vendors over 15 years of my career.

What does it mean in terms of arguments?

There are big training companies on the market and they still survive IMHO because of the good marketing team and not the quality of the training.

[jlkaushik]

Hi AlexRecl. I can understand your frustration when the text references a technology or term that you may not be familiar with and doesn't go into enough detail. But, I am going to argue that is the value of taking the class with an instructor.

It's unclear to me whether you are taking the class live or on demand, or if you are just reading through the training materials. If you're only interacting with the written materials, I would consider your criticism of the "training class quality" a bit unfair, as the materials are only half the equation.

When you take the class live, you have the opportunity to ask the instructor these questions, if they don't expand on the topic inherently in their instruction. A good instructor is going to add context to the materials, simplify complex topics, and answer questions/clarify ideas so that when you go back and read the material as reference, it makes sense.

And that's what the materials are meant to be - a supplement to the actual teaching. They are not meant to replace what an instructor can give you. This will always be my argument for live, instructor-led classes - a knowledgeable instructor can connect dots that would be difficult to connect on your own, and can explain adjacent technologies succinctly and in a way that relates them to the product you're learning. 

[bryanoconnor21]

I 100% agree @jlkaushik,  whenever I teach any courses whether they be Microsoft, VMware, or CompTIA I always mention the acronyms and do a brief explanation of the technology, that's why we are there.

For example in the ICM course we say that vSphere is compatible with VLANs, I then explain VLANs

As technology becomes more diverse and the VMware product becomes more feature rich and supports different sets of hardware, I feel it will become more challenging to cover every possible hardware technology.

[AlexRecl]

I agree with you about good instructor. I was referring mostly on printed Lecture guide. If the instructor can give short explanation why the same can't be done in printed guide?

Not all learners are able to take live courses. I am taking now online courses where materials are available 24/7. It will much easier to grasp the knowledge if some new one will be explained in one or two short sentences.

[AlexRecl]

My argument is about this "brief explanation". It can be written in the Lecture guide.

Nothing is done in the current guide.

[sulaimanl]

Where does "brief explanation" stop though?

What stops one from searching for the explanation themselves. Adding explanation for every term whether it is 1 or 5 sentences will add so much content to it and make it unmanageable.

A term may also refer to something today and then tomorrow the vendor of that product decides to change the reference does that mean all the other material that had a "brief explanation" needs to be updated?

[AlexRecl]

>Where does "brief explanation" stop though?

As it was explained before "brief explanation" is few sentences. It was given an example for VPN.

>What stops one from searching for the explanation themselves.

Nothing but it mean that this guide is not good enough and it has gaps which lead to search information outside the guide.

>Adding explanation for every term whether it is 1 or 5 sentences will add so much content to it and make it unmanageable.

It is not true. Authors has to take care of leaners but not about how time they have to spend for explanation. The number of new terms are manageable. You can count in every VMware course.

>A term may also refer to something today and then tomorrow the vendor of that product decides to change the reference does that mean all the other material that had a "brief explanation" needs to be updated?

It is also not true. Just count how many versions we have for the last 10 years. We have new version every 2-3 years so no need to update old version if you already have new one with new explanation.