CS Holdings wins coveted Microsoft CTEC award

CS Holdings has won the Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centre (CTEC) of the Year Award, emphasising its credibility as a certified provider of Microsoft technical training. The Microsoft CTEC program is the premier training partner program and delivery mechanism for Microsoft training. Microsoft CTECs are the only training organisations that can use the Microsoft CTEC logo to market their training services.

According to Mark Reynolds, Partner Development and Marketing Group Manager, Microsoft South Africa, CS Holdings has been continuously involved in delivering quality training to the corporate market, based primarily on Microsoft certifications. "CS Holdings received the Gold Certified Partner for Learning Solutions status through internal skills development and supplying customer references."

Microsoft Gold Certified Partners are the elite Microsoft Business Partners who earn the highest customer endorsement. They have the knowledge, skills and commitment to help implement technology solutions that match the customer`s exact business needs. They have passed Microsoft`s most stringent requirements and demonstrated the most robust, efficient and scalable implementations of Microsoft technologies in enterprise customer deployments or on-site Microsoft assessment.

"The People Solutions division`s strategy is to provide customised training solutions in line with clients` business needs," says director People Solutions division Madelise Grobler. "A critical component of our strategy is the interaction between CS Holdings and the client, and we have positioned ourselves as business partners, working to understand the client`s training challenges, providing regular reports, analysis and assessments to ensure successful knowledge transfer. Microsoft`s Gold Certification status for Learning Solutions really addresses this area of our business, it was a natural progression for us and enhances our partnership with Microsoft."

Specific references that were relevant to receiving this award included a customised training solution for Software Futures. Two groups of developers, from pre-dominantly VB 6 and Java backgrounds, were trained on Microsoft C#. The training solution was focusing on specific skills needed and included the language component being C# and XML Web services.

CS Holdings also signed a deal with Absa to skill 20 developers on Microsoft SQL, XML, XSLT as well as ADO.NET. The SQL component was completed and the delegates are currently busy with the XML component.

Grobler says the courses are all customised to be in line with the business needs of the group. "The focus of CS Education Solutions is to create training solutions to be in line with business requirements and the latest technology offered by Microsoft. Two of our instructors have completed an extensive training session on the new Microsoft CRM product to ensure that we can deliver training on the product to Microsoft partners."

"As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner for Learning Solutions, CS Holdings will assess, design, customise and plan training solutions for medium to large enterprise organisations," says Reynolds. "Additionally, the company has proven success in deploying Microsoft .NET developer, IT infrastructure and customised training solutions at the enterprise level. Microsoft is committed to investing in enhanced resources and support for Gold Certified Partners as part of an ongoing commitment to provide customers with product solutions of the highest quality via Microsoft Gold Certified Partner companies such as CS Holdings."