Customer Education Benefits

Benefits for the Engineer

Wind River offers training solutions that provide engineers with a fast, cost-effective way to acquire the knowledge necessary to develop real-time applications.

Whether classes are used to sharpen up on specific skills, or training courses are a building block for developing a career, Wind River offers the right course for meeting the objective.

Highlights

• Gain practical experience using the latest Wind River products
• Learn to use products to achieve application objectives
• Avoid haphazard, hit-and-miss self-learning and common mistakes
• Learn Wind River's recommended solutions to common issues in real-time multitasking
• Learn the advantages and disadvantages of different solutions to the same problem
• Ask questions of experienced, knowledgeable instructors

Wind River training is available for all areas of development.

Return on Investment Proof Points

No matter how complex your products, no matter how many engineers you have or how experienced they are, you still need to get your product to market faster.

Why is training mission-critical?

• Untrained users often ignore, misuse, or under-utilize new technology.
• Untrained users require three to six times more support than trained users.
• User error is the No. #1 cause of system downtime

Convert Productivity into Time-to-Market
Independent research shows that one hour of truly effective training can gain you nearly one day of productivity in your project. A team of five engineers in a four day course could result in project completion a full month earlier. Our courses not only pay for themselves: they help you stay ahead of your competition.

Being earlier to market can do the following:

• Improve market share
• Improve margin
• Build economies of scale

World-Class Training Program

A recent survey conducted by an independent organization polled more than 250 Wind River customers worldwide to determine customer satisfaction. Overall, the survey found an 86% satisfaction level with Wind River's Customer Education — a world-class result. This demonstrates that Wind River's effective training has a direct impact on customer success because the survey was conducted long after customers attended training and worked with products.

Testimonials

Wind River has successfully trained thousands of customers. These are comments from some of them:

• "Excellent job demystifying real-time systems"
• "This will definitely save me a significant amount of development time."
• "In my 13 years in this business, this class was one of the best."
• "Excellent class. I wish all training classes were this good!"
• "One of the few times that I've taken a class and the instructor really knew the material."
• "I am extremely pleased with the dedication and support that your instructor has provided during and after the training I am much further along now."

Training FAQ

Why do we need training? Can't we learn on our own? We can't afford the time to come to training.

• It is unlikely that you will learn on your own as thoroughly, quickly, and cost-effectively as you can by taking our classes.
• If you don't get training, you will likely learn in a haphazard way. Self-learning is often a hit-and-miss proposition. Often important concepts or features of the product are overlooked, creating problems for the development effort, including code redesigns, rewrites, reduced execution speed, or new features learned in the midst of development. Training reduces your risks by ensuring that you have a good grasp of the product before you design/develop your application.
• When you learn on your own, you build your own training program (consciously or not). On the other hand, we have invested years of work building the quickest, most thorough, and most effective approach to learning.
• Training reduces the cost of maintaining your application because you learn how to write more portable, easier-to-maintain code.
• You will develop a more reliable application because you will have more information on which to base the choices you make in solving problems.

I've sent my development staff to other companies' training before and they always said it wasn't very useful. How is Wind River training different?

• Unlike courses offered by some other companies, Wind River has a dedicated training staff. Our instructors are dedicated training professionals, not someone pulled from some other project to fill in a training slot for a week.
• We have spent considerable effort writing, rewriting, and improving each class.
• Unlike many other training departments, all of our instructors are programmers who write programs and spend considerable time reading and understanding source code. They know the products and can answer questions beyond the pages of the student materials.

How many students do I need to have a class conducted at my facility (onsite)?
The break-even point is usually eight to 10 people. If airfare is costly, eight students are usually sufficient. If a workshop is offered at a location near you, you would probably need at least 10 students to make it economically advantageous. A cost-comparison chart is available from our education department as an aid to deciding which would be better for you. Contact our education department for a copy of this chart.
How can I justify the cost?

• One of the common mistakes made when considering training costs is to think that self-learning has zero cost. In fact we all know self-learning has a cost. Each student will develop and attempt to follow through with his or her own learning program (typically with considerably less effort and experience than we have put into it). Often the self- learning student will suffer from everyday distractions of the workplace. The program will often be insufficient, with significant omissions. When designers/developers have gaps in their knowledge (or worse, misconceptions) the self-learning costs show up in missed deadlines and the time it takes to fix, correct, or redesign code that is incorrectly or poorly organized. At worst, the real price paid for self-learning can be a final application that is inferior due to lack of insight at the start.
• Our prices are average for professional high-technology training. Our quality, we believe, is much better than average.
• Wind River has invested substantial resources in a dedicated staff that develops professional training courses. When you take a Wind River class, you gain the full benefit of this investment while the cost is amortized across many students and many companies.

What is your cancellation policy?
You may cancel or reschedule 14 days prior to the class start date. After this time frame, tuition is nonrefundable. Substitutions are accepted at any time. On our part, we will let you know as soon as we can if and when a class has to be canceled. In such circumstances, your tuition will be fully refunded or applied to another class.