Ratio IT Trainers to staff

[gemmms]

Hello

I work as an IT Trainer for a medium sized law firm. I'm really interested to know what your ratios are trainer:staff.

I'm hoping to put forward a proposal to request additional team members and I need some good ammunition / information to back me up.

Thanks

Gems

 

[Welshbird]

Um. Our ration is zero trainers to 370 staff.

(Although I guess you might not want those figures in your argument!)

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[lespaul]

ours is 1 trainer to 330 staff (she started almost 2 years ago) before that it was 0 to 300+.

Our IT staff usually ends up being the trainer!



Leslie

Anything worth doing is a lot more difficult than it's worth - Unknown Induhvidual

Essential reading for database developers:
The Fundamentals of Relational Database Design
Understanding SQL Joins

 

[straybullet]

Around 250 staff, no dedicated trainers (team of 6 in IS). Our hardware tech and I are the ones who find the time to do training.

Let them hate - so long as they fear... Lucius Accius

 

[philhege]

Zero full-time trainers; 500+ staff. Like straybullet, we find the time to put on the training toque (especially for the Dynamics AX rollout!). Recently, we've been grooming subject-matter specialists in the various departments, so, for instance, an HR specialist has taken on the responsibility of point person for electronic timecard issues and questions. This lessens pressure on the help desk and puts some expertise closer to the actual user.

Given our budget, IT staffing levels, and the current state of our industry, it's a safe bet we won't be seeing full-time trainers hired here anytime soon.

Good luck building your case!

Phil Hegedusich
Senior Programmer/Analyst
IIMAK

http://www.iimak.com

-----------
Pity the insomniac dyslexic agnostic. He stays up all night, wondering if there really is a dog.

 

[Welshbird]

Indeed.

I've just been writing some (very basic) training manuals for things like VLOOKUP, or IF statements. We just simply don't have time to run training (although I personally think that is really short-sighted - if we made time, then after the training we would have much more time!), so 'cheat-sheets' is the way to go for us at the moment.

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[Opieo]

I am not part of IT, but a programmer on the Sales team. I make a customer database system for our team, as well as handle the company wide database staff that is my team's part.

We have just hit 110 people and are growing at a decent clip (was about 75 when I started little over a year ago). We have always had and still only have 1 IT person. She is great and stays on top of what must be done, but almost everybody has minor annoyances they must put up with because she no longer has time to fix them.
As time goes on it seems more and more people are coming to ask me about minor fixes simply because they know I am a computer guy.
I know it might not always be a good idea to help, and I have refused when people ask me to do things such as get them around our company firewall. However, it is a nice distraction and as long as my large projects are still done ahead of schedule, it doesn't bother me.
For our company wide system we technically have trainers.
They are called our Key Users (I am the one for our Sales team, although its not like they deal with the system anyways). These key users, for the company wide database system, are the first level of support to all end users.
If you count them as trainers (it is our responsibility to train new members of our team for their system knowledge), we have 5 here at this location for the 110 of us.
We are mostly just end users, it is just that we are supposed to stay up to date on all of the training documents and train the new people.
Probably more comprehensive than you needed, but thats how it all plays out here.

~
Give a man some fire, he will be warm for a day, Set a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life.

 

[rphips]

Trainers what are trainers -

No, actually I was one once - and of course any trainer knows when the going gets tough and the company needs to cut back guess who is on the for-front of layoffs.

Anyway since my trainer days I have worked for several companies and the ratio of trainers to personnel have been 0 trainiers to a multitude of eand users.

But I can honestly say because of my trainer background they have all exepected me to do the company training along with doing my regular job (for no compensation) - go figure more work less pay.

 

[audiopro]

Hey - from what I read here - I am glad I can just get up in a morning - have breakfast etc. and go to my home office and work for myself. Sounds like the IT industry is being run by short sighted individuals.
Tell me - Do they still make backups on floppy disk and then stick them to a metal board with fridge magnets?

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[lhuegele]

No dedicated trainers here and we have 5000+ users. The only exception is the IT project management office. They have PM's that also double as trainers to train IT people to run IT projects.

All other training is done off-site or by external trainers, and the costs are covered by the individual departmental cost centers as they are all in charge of the training needs for their own departments.