Hey guys.
My office wants to send me for Apple courses that I can support the employees who is working for us with their Apple Laptops and Ipads.
Does anyone know of any places offering courses in Pretoria and Johannesburg for me to call?
Thanks
Local quality I agree is generally bad -- if you still prefer this, you can contact the Core head office at 1 Sandton Drive (also happens to be an iStore) -- official distributor for Apple, however not the only training centre.
Caution: CORE training
The quality I've personally experienced at 1 Sandton drive (development training for some of our consultants) i.e. supposed to be an advanced development course; end result was expensive, and crap:
- 1 of our then junior objective-c developers, didn't even have a basic understanding of the debugging tools in Xcode, which was meant to be tackled on the 4th day.
- Intermediate developers were bored for 1 week, waiting for some non developers to figure out objective-c and Xcode.
- Even worse some of the attendees hadn't used a Mac before, and didn't know how to switch it on (this I experienced, I attended to assess the quality, and although they brought in a qualified trainer from the UK, he was completely overwhelmed by the varying levels of skill in the classroom i.e. not his fault).
So be careful most of these companies are only concerned about income, and less about ensuring that everyone attending the class is at the same level...
In the end we had to internally retrain everyone -- there was no chance to productively apply any who attended this so-called "advanced" course (consult to our customers).
CORE contact details -- good luck, be very critical if you go down this path.
Sales, Marketing and Administration
1 Sandton Drive,
Sandton, Gauteng
South Africa, 2196
Postal Address
Private Bag X2009
Houghton, 2041
Tel: +27 11 535 9000
You could also consider self learning:
http://training.apple.com/learn
http://www.lynda.com/Apple-training-tutorials/106-0.html
Another caution re certification:
Just remember
you do not need to attend a course locally to gain certification, some might try to convince of this --
this is you can do direct with Apple internationally and potentially avoid paying for useless training.
For the further / advanced certifications that typically requires an in classroom exam;
you again do not need to attend their training,
but you can simply use their facilities to take the exam.
All material to prepare for this exam can be found online, and is generally of a better quality than they give you (Core did not even provide documentation until 4 weeks later -- talk about bad service), or they might even try to charge for material you can get download from Apple for free.
I'd suggest get your material from Apple for free, or buy a good rated e-book -- PDF ideally, as you can't easily share an Amazon kindle book, or an Apple iBook (its also more difficult to arrange for multiple licenses with Amazon and Apple,
PDF is easy, just ask the publisher for a volume discount and buy more).
Ask yourself a question about how important it is to understand OSX and be certified.
If that's your objective then make sure they provide guarantees for many of the problem I hinted to, more so do they provide a guarantee that you can take the certification exam immediately after the course, within an hour or two (quick cram) and you'll be guaranteed to pass or they'll refund your money or provide free additional training days (not self study), until you pass.
If they not willing to provide these types of guarantees then I would honestly advise you to avoid them (
we've been burnt before, hence we now train internally). Also be careful about the sometimes more attractive on-site offer (lower price) i.e. they'll send a trainer to your site, voila everyone who attends can use a Mac (Not So) -- again double check what guarantee are they willing to provide in this case,
best to not leave the dispute until invoice payment time.
Existing Knowledge
If you already know the Mac, and only need a refresher or have some key questions; you can target these at this forum (Apple forum only, to avoid trolls) -- try the search as many questions have already been answered .
Alternatively PM me and I'll see how I can help, y
ou'll also find great non discriminating help from a user called Bwana (moderator of this forum) and of course all the other Apple experts -- you'll get to know them over time.
just be very careful of the trolls - x vs Apple disputes are frequent
![[)roi(]](/forum/data/avatars/m/8/8711.jpg?1563828683){kind=avatar}