Tag: training

Sparta Global picks up training gong

Posted on July 6, 2018 by - News

85.58Graduate IT training and services provider Sparta Global has been recognised by Women in Tech as the leading Female Grad Tech Employer of the Year in its 2018 awards honours.

Women in Tech is an organisation dedicated to helping women experience a fulfilled and successful career in tech. As part of its annual Employer Awards, Sparta Global was recognised for helping to close the industry gender gap by encouraging more women to start and sustain a career in the technology sector. Sparta global has helped train and place women consultants in positions at organisations including Canada Life, the Ministry of Justice and Discovery, Inc..

David Rai, CEO of Sparta Global comments: “After graduating from university, it can be a daunting experience to enter the world of employment – particularly when you are faced with entering the competitive technology industry. This step can be even more difficult for women, with just 17 percent of the people working in technology in the UK being female.

“Sparta Global is committed to increasing diversity in tech through supporting the development of graduate women. Our talent team regularly visits universities across the UK to discuss the career opportunities and prospects available to women seeking a career in technology. This award recognises the great work of our passionate teams who are dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion by increasing the number of women working in tech today”.

Cyber security channel needs to rethink training

Posted on October 23, 2017 by - News

old schoolTraditional classroom based training is not going to solve the skills shortage, according to a former director of GCHQ.

Talking to the assembled throngs at the launch of the Digital Cyber Academy, Robert Hannigan said that the industry needs to rethink the way it trains people with traditional approaches failing to deliver the right results as well as turning off the next generation entering the workplace.

Classroom based sessions were  not helping to fill the thousands of empty cyber security posts.

“The best guesstimate is that by 2020 there are going to be one and a half million unfilled cyber skills jobs. That is going to get worse as the other half of the planet comes on line and the Internet of Things connects more and more devices spewing out more data”, he said.

“The enabling security that needs to underpin it is going to be even more challenged”, he added.

While the industry and the government knew that they had to “fix the pipeline” and get more people into training and more of those could come from a non-technical background, GCHQ had problems about the way training was offered, Hannigan said.

“A lot of the cyber security training is fairly old fashioned”, he added. “It is classroom based, it is quite static, and it can fairly often be out of date by the time it’s learnt. We must think differently, particularly for a new generation that learn differently,” he said. Gamification was one of the good ways of engaging with them.” Whatever gamifications means.

 

 

Kiwis build angry customer services robot

Posted on May 14, 2015 by - Fun Stuff, News

t2fA New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group is building a robot which it says will get really angry.

The big idea is that companies really have not got a clue how to deal with angry customers and even actors have a job being accurately angry all day for training purposes.

Touchpoint is investing $500,000 to develop, is being built with input from one of Australia’s big four banks, which is supplying reams of real-life customer interactions that have been collated over the past two years. Telecommunications companies and insurance firms are also contributing data.

The project carries the name Radiant which in the novels of Isaac Asimov predicted how humans might behave in the future.

Once complete, the project will simulate hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions that will help companies better understand the behaviours and processes that trigger customer outbursts. Such as not mentioning the war when talking to Japanese or German customers, or referring to the French as cheese eating surrender monkeys/

Touchpoint CEO Frank van der Velden said that companies don’t have the numbers of staff to go through this manually. A bank receive data every day. But it gets to a point where that dataset grows so large that it becomes meaningless unless you can interpret it. That’s where Radiant will fit in.
“We’re not in the business of managing complaints; we are in the business of managing issues that might turn into complaints. We’re at the top of the cliff, not at the bottom. This will allow companies to better predict and identify those issues,” he told the Australian Business Review.

 

Rackspace intros on-demand e-learning

Posted on September 20, 2013 by - Events, News

rackspaceOpen cloud provider Rackspace has introduced an on demand, e-learning training course with a view to bringing about wider adoption of OpenStack technologies.

Customers will be able to register for courses that promise to teach ways to use and deploy OpenStack powered cloud. The on demand e-learning version of Rackspace’s OpenStack Fundamentals will be available to the public in October, though pre-registration is available now.

Additionally, Rackspace is introducing four further in-person courses.

These are Networking-Neutron, where students can learn how to use Neutron to provide Networking-as-a-Service, as well as encouraging students to use an API to build and configure networking infrastructure. Building Cloudy Apps sees students using Python to learn about horizontal scaling and APIs, security in the cloud is self explanatory, and so’s Hadoop on OpenStack.

Certified training partners for the Fundamentals courses include, worldwide, New Horizons, Skyline Advanced Technology Services, and Intelligent Cloud Technologies.

Course overviews and schedules are available at Rackspace’s training website.

Rackspace boasts it’s expanding the program because of rapid growth in OpenStack, including over 10,000 contributors at its three year anniversary in July this year. Citing the BSA global cloud scorecard for 2013, 14 million cloud jobs should emerge by 2015, so there’s plenty of room for Rackspace to work.

“Rackspace recognises the need for comprehensive educational courses and delivery models and is fundamentally revolutionising OpenStack training to include a Certified Training Partner Programme and on demand e-learning course,” said Tony Campbell, director of training and certification for OpenStack.

Avnet picks up huge IBM training contract

Posted on July 12, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeMonstrous distie Avnet has been picked by IBM as a Global Training Provider, opening up training to its partners around the world.

Avnet’s starting its training operations worldwide as of today, beginning with Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, and the USA, before planning to open its centres in the Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and Latin America regions.

The company will be offering over 2,500 IBM training courses, which will be available directly to IBM employees, resellers, and other customers around the world, through its network of IBM Training Partners.

Global prez at Avnet Technology Solutions, Phil Gallagher, boasted the enormous contract will really boost the recent launch of Avnet Services. ”

Veep for IBM Training Bob McDonald said in a statement that Avnet is the company for the job, noting its worldwide reach.