South Africa`s largest banking group, ABSA, has awarded CS Holdings the contract to train up its technical support staff in preparation for its migration to Windows NT.
The IT training division of JSE-listed CS Holdings is undertaking the training of technical support staff from ABSA`s Distributed Computer Services (DCS). The courses have been tailored to meet ABSA`s specific needs.
ABSA DCS is responsible for all IT distributed services in the ABSA group, including planning, architecture, building and testing.
"With our conversion to NT, we needed to train our technical staff up to be able to support this environment," says ABSA DCS manager, Pierre Venter. "Although the conventional approach is to send staff on the standard MCSE course, experience has taught us that this course tends to be too theoretical for the hands-on know-how required in an NT environment from day one.
"It`s a general problem that many such courses try to cram everything there is to know on the subject into a certain number of days, when the trainee will only need to apply 20% of that knowledge in real life. The key for us was to eliminate those aspects of the course that would not be relevant in the ABSA environment," says Venter.
Based on ABSA DCS`s guidelines, the CS Holdings training division was able to customise the course to cover the practical and theoretical aspects of NT including server, workstation, peripheral device and third party software installation and management. The course included a special section on security in the NT environment. In addition, trainees are able to further tailor the course to their individual needs during their training sessions. "Our whole experience to date has been very positive," says Venter. "CS was prepared to go out of their way to customise their course to suit our needs and at the same time maintain a very competitive price"
"We were also impressed by the special attention they paid to motivating the trainees. The top eight trainees were treated to a special breakfast where the top trainee was awarded a prize in the form of a choice of any one of the training division`s 5-day courses."
To date more than 60 ABSA DCS employees have attended this customised course.
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