EOH Gallium broadens training focus to skills, not just products

Gallium, an EOH company and HP Platinum Partner, is launching a range of training courses that provide clients with skill sets rather than training on specific products.

“HP has a presence in South Africa and they themselves offer training on their products, so we are developing courses that are not product-related per se,” explains Sue Martin, technical trainer at Gallium Training, of the development.

Gallium has already developed its Requirements Management 101 and Project Management 101 courses, and will soon to be unveiling its Application Security Testing course.

“We take pride in developing the skills of our clients with our practical approach to training. Not only do we train the book knowledge, but our well-qualified trainers also share best practices that Gallium has garnered over the years,” says Haydn Pinnell, MD of Gallium.

The one-day Requirements Management 101 course, aimed at business analysts and test analysts, is designed to provide a comprehensive understanding about the importance of extracting correct, testable requirements for an application, the policies that drive the requirements and understanding the level of detail that is required. This hands-on course enables students to extract testable requirements themselves to validate their newly acquired knowledge on Requirements Management.

“More and more businesses are looking much closer at Requirements Definition and Requirements Administration - grouped together as Requirements Management - to streamline the entire application life cycle. This course is designed to provide the delegate with the skills required to perform this very important task,” indicates Martin.

The daylong Project Management 101 course is intended for project administrators and people interested in becoming project managers. At the end of the course, students will understand what project management is, and will be able to identify the people involved in projects, identify the project life cycle, the documents used during the project life cycle, project constraints, and identify project control variables and how to manage them.

Gallium delivers its training modules in two ways: either at the Gallium Training Centre, which is situated at EOH's head office in Gillooly's View, Bedfordview, Johannesburg, or on-site at the client's premises in a real-time environment with staff on actual projects, through the medium of lectures, slides, discussions and practical exercises.

“The duration of client training differs depending on the product concerned, but if the training is not product related, we try and keep it to a day or two days maximum as we know how stressful it is to have employees out of the office for longer,” Martin says.

The Gallium course most in demand is its role-based training on Quality Centre - a course that focuses on the role the tester has within the application testing space.

Martin maintains that clients do see the value in training, be it product or skills related, particularly because it's a forum where they not only can learn, but share best practices, tips and tricks with other users.