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Hugh Norris, a technology expert, successfully runs his training business on TrainerCentral

"I like TrainerCentral’s simplicity of adding lessons to courses. Other course platforms make it a convoluted, winding process to create a course and add lessons."

— Hugh Norris, Founder and Senior Trainer, The IT Training Team

Hugh Norris hails from the UK. He is the co-founder of The IT Training Team that specializes in training software job aspirants. He is an expert in various software technologies, such as Linux, Devops, and Kubernetes. He has been in the training business for 15 years and carries a vast experience mentoring young technology professionals across the world. Hugh prepares his own coursework, which has historically been hosted online.

Hugh and his strategic partner and co-founder of The IT Training Team Intelligence Power, a French company based in the Paris region, operate primarily in the French, Belgian, and Swiss markets. Their main expertise is the design of innovative training systems aimed at creating new and tailored IT capabilities based upon the most efficient engineering practices for their customers through hybrid learning.

The approach has proven to be very effective, as the systems have significantly improved the employability of learners, as well as the skills and practices of the client companies.

Over the years, Hugh has created and delivered his online courses by putting together different set of tools. He used a site builder tool to publish the training content, an LMS to offer the courses, and a webinar solution to host the live sessions. Hugh found it cumbersome to bring all of these disparate pieces together to operate his training business.

Once he identified the problem, he evaluated a dozen online training softwares before he finally heard about TrainerCentral.

Moving on to TrainerCentral

Hugh's main challenges was to keep up with the acceleration in the digitization of the economy and the advent of new engineering techniques, technologies, and practices. So, as an architect of training systems, Hugh's team needed a solution that makes it easier for them to update, create and deploy new content quickly and easily.

TrainerCentral's no-code platform with a simple, straightforward user interface was the ideal fit for Hugh's requirements.

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I was able to set up a course in TrainerCentral within an hour or less. It was very easy to create a curriculum. I could add pre-screening tests, chapters, lessons, and build a website too.

Hugh uploaded over twenty courses to TrainerCentral and was ready to kickstart his training programs with very little effort. The multi-language support in TrainerCentral enabled Hugh and his partner, Intelligence Power, to publish the course content not only in English, but also in French to cater to the predominantly French speaking audience.

The need for hybrid training

The IT Training Team's course work is structured in such a way that the trainees have to go through a warm up session in a live virtual classroom. The live session helps these participants to get exposed to the basics of technologies like Kubernetes or Linux before they get invited to the actual course. This also ensures the trainers can simulate a face-to-face environment to build healthier interaction with the participants. In a hybrid model, with a healthy mix of live training and on-demand courses, Hugh's team wanted a solution that offers multi-modal training capability. TrainerCentral is among the very few online course platforms that come with live training functionality built-in.

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TrainerCentral's live session capability is smooth. Unlike other solutions, we didn't face audio or video streaming problems. It was 99.9% of the time crystal clear.

Setting up paid courses

Once these courses are live, an important business requirement for Hugh is to configure payments and charge fees from his trainees.

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The different pricing models available in TrainerCentral helps us come up with flexible payment options for a course. The Coupons feature is excellent, as we can run discounts and offers to a specific customer segment. In a lot of other LMS solutions it is a pain to set this up.

Getting future ready

Hugh has so far set up twenty plus courses on TrainerCentral and is planning to create many more. Thanks to TrainerCentral's scalability, The IT Training Team will expand from 3 to 20 senior trainers who aim to coach up to 1000 trainees in a year.

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From a simplicity point of view, integration point of view and flexibility point of view, TrainerCentral beats all other platforms I've had my hands on.

With those closing statements, we feel even more proud to partner with Hugh Norris and The IT Training Team in the journey to upskill software job aspirants in France, Belgium, and Switzerland.