Today I have launched a one-day on-site enterprise search training course. The course has been in the planning stage for ten years. In 2012 I undertook a research project for the European Commission to determine the barriers to enterprise search adoption and development in the EU. The main finding of the research was that the lack of education and training for enterprise search specialists was a major challenge.
- Organisations could not find experienced search managers
- There was no training for enterprise search team members
- Search software and integration companies could not find development skills
There have never been any commercial training courses from IT training companies focused on enterprise search. The main reasons cited by the companies during the research was that they had never had a demand for enterprise search courses and they could not find people to give the courses.
In 2019 Paul Cleverley and Simon Burnett (at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen) published research that identified the root causes of dissatisfaction with enterprise search. They found that a lack of search literacy, and so a requirement for training, accounted for around 30% of the comments from users about the performance of the organisation’s enterprise search application.
Although Agnes Molar runs very successful on-line training courses, I decided that I prefer to stand in front of a group of participants. Although I had some initial plans for this training course in 2020 I have waited until now to be able to walk the talk on-site. However, I recognise that many European companies have search team members in North America. To widen the geographic reach of the course I am offering to run the course as two afternoon sessions so that North American participants can join remotely over their corporate video platform.
The course is run on a fixed fee (currently £1600/€1900) for an unlimited number of participants. This is to encourage an organisation to bring as many people as it can to the course, and as an outcome reduce the cost-per-participant substantially. To support the training I am providing participants with an e-Workbook of reports and links to resources and in addition there will be a 30 day Q&A offer as my experience with workshops is that it may not be for several days or even weeks after the workshop that queries arise about something said at the workshop.
There is a list of topics on the Intranet Focus web site, but this can be customised (to some extent) to meet the specific requirements of the organisation.
Martin White