Myles Brown: Welcome everybody. My name is Myles Brown. I'm the Senior Cloud and DevOps Adviser at ExitCertified. ExitCertified has been a leading IT training company for over 20 years in North America, and I have with me one of my colleagues today, Micah. Maybe you can introduce yourself.
Micah Holloway: Sure, thanks, Myles. My name is Micah Holloway. I am a Senior Education Consultant here at ExitCertified. I've been in the IT training space for going on a decade, and been with ExitCertified for about 5 years now.
Myles Brown: Excellent. Well, at ExitCertified we have plenty of individual customers who just go to exitcertified.com and find some classes that they're interested in. You know we have a very robust public schedule, especially, for you know, very popular vendors like AWS. But we also have larger customers that have very complex training needs. And so I was hoping that Micah, maybe you could tell us about one of your customers for for whom you've created kind of a larger training plan.
Micah Holloway: Sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So I have the unique opportunity to work with organizations as they go through some sort of transition, whether that be adopting a new technology or a you know a migration, or whether that's addressing skill gaps within their current group, or even sometimes it's certification driven. You know, thinking of a specific example. I know recently we worked with the an organization, a global data analytics organization.
And they were moving to the cloud - specifically AWS. And they came to us. They really didn't know what they needed to know they had a group of seasoned IT professionals, but they were new to AWS, so we kinda had a meeting of the minds internally. And since they were new to us, we were new to them, they wanted to send a couple of students through our public track, the architect and and developer track specifically just in the public space. And then, after they attended that they, the students, came back. We had another call, and we we went over that feedback, and they they were ecstatic. They felt that our instructors, you know, brought great value to the class, the lab environment, the access after class, all went into it. So their next question was, how do we scale this out? And how do we make it, you know, kind of a more impactful session for a large group of of only our employees? And Myles, I believe that might have been when we brought you into the conversation.
Myles Brown: Yeah, I remember working on this one because they wanted content from several different of the sort of canned AWS classes. But you know, like most organizations these days. They they wanted it in the least number of days possible, right? So that people not working on projects, you know, is a problem. So we had to kind of customize and pull some topics, and and we created, I think, what they exactly what they wanted. But I remember that. You know, even after going through a bunch of AWS training, they had some other topics that they wanted to talk about as well.
Micah Holloway: That's right. That's right. So we we created the custom AWS training, which they had a kind of a separate audience. They were some that were architects developers. So we took some pieces from the courses, and we ran the first course. It was for about 25 individuals, and and that went great, and they said, hey, let's do it again and again. So I think over time. They probably put roughly 80 students through that program, and then they put some students through the more advanced AWS training track, the EKS track, which you're familiar with, and and some of the other advanced courses. And then you're right, even outside of AWS, they said, "Hey, you did such a (good job), you know we enjoyed this training. We thought it was impactful. We have a group of front end developers who are are looking for React training and Redux and JavaScript. So we create a similar path for that group as well.
Myles Brown: Yeah. And did they end up - you mentioned EKS, I think we did some other sort of vanilla Kubernetes training as well, like, outside of the AWS track?
Micah Holloway: That's right. That's right. We did some introduction to Kubernetes, Docker. There were some certification-driven requirements within that - the CKA, that that a few of them were looking to achieve. And then we also did some security courses. I believe Security+ was one, and
Micah Holloway: and maybe some other certification-driven courses as well. So they ended up after going through it, they they started using a Flex training program with us. That kind of provides the value across our catalogue.
Myles Brown: Yeah. So Flex Plan is, you know, something we do with a lot of our our larger customers. Maybe you can kind of explain how it works.
Micah Holloway: Yes, so it it's kind of in the title: Flex. It kind of gives maximum flexibility to an organization to use their training program or training funds with ExitCertified. So with this specific organization, they have a yearly training budget for their engineering group.
Micah Holloway: and they said, "Hey, you know we've enjoyed these courses. So for this year we're going to put our training budget on file with ExitCertified." And in return they get a lot of value. They get to maximize their training budget because we get them a set, discounted rate really on across our full catalog, of course, is they get access to not only the public, but the private and custom courses. They get
Micah Holloway: unlimited access to our Subject Matter Experts to, you know, develop and tailor courses for larger groups. And then, when it comes to accounting, they get monthly updates. They get the student feedback reports after each class which help them understand, you know, what the students learned in class, whether they enjoyed it. They also get the instructor feedback, and things like that as well. So the Flex training program is is something a lot of organizations are utilizing now, and I highly recommend it.
Myles Brown: Yeah. And and we're seeing this from a a larger and larger proportion of our our customer base, where their requests are coming from not just one vendor, right? And and we're seeing, especially people moving to the cloud: they come, and they take a couple of classes from their cloud vendor, but they realize that's not the whole story, right? A real cloud journey usually means maybe you're embracing DevOps more. Maybe you're gonna start doing Cloud Native. So, containers and Kubernetes. And once you've got your stuff in the cloud, you've got all kinds of analytics options there. So this is really why we created our CloudCentrix portfolio of classes. Maybe you could talk about, you know, a little bit about how CloudCentrix has changed how you talk to our customers?
Micah Holloway: Yeah, you hit the the nail on the head. So with this organization, specifically, as I mentioned, they came to us, and it was really the conversation with all about one specific vendor, right? They were moving to the cloud - specifically, AWS. And that was really, you know, at the beginning of our relationship all we spoke about. But then, you know, as it grew, we have a CloudCentrix diagram which I believe I showed on the call which is really eye opening for organizations to see kind of the breadth of our portfolio. The different vendors that we partner with, the opportunity for customizations in the different areas that are trending within the IT space. And that's really when the relationship took another step and we started talking more about not just AWS, but Kubernetes, the developer training tracks, and things of that nature.
Myles Brown: Excellent. Well, thanks a lot for taking time today to discuss the type of projects you work on, and I know you really help your customers prepare for their cloud journey, or whatever kind of IT transformation they're doing.
Micah Holloway: Yeah, thanks, Myles.
Myles Brown: Allright.
