Managing and Leading

Team Managers are responsible for coordinating the resources and skills of their team, to deliver excellent results. To succeed, they must focus on framing customer service and performance improvement as the central activity of the group they lead.

Each organisation must define and each manager convey to their team what "brand" of service and skill they want to be known for - what it should look like and how it should work. Failing this, front line staff define in their own minds what the service level should be and that can lead to mediocre or patchy service.

Our courses are specifically focused on assisting new and experienced managers to monitor team and individual performance and decide which if any interventions are required to improve effectiveness. The programmes are very practical and developed from the extensive real-life experience of our trainers.

Click here for further details: Course details or contact us for in-house courses.

Credit control – vital for survival

Average payment terms have stretched to over 60 days for many businesses. Almost a third of SMEs report payment delays of over 90 days. This is unsustainable, financially crippling and must be addressed by all enterprises.

Businesses must manage their debtors or risk a gradual (or accelerating) loss of control, due to reduced cashflow and increased incidence of bad debt.

Our training helps to establish effective credit practices and demonstrate a systematic approach to debt collection, suitable for all enterprises. We show participants how to deal effectively with slow payers, while maintaining good customer relations. We outline the best ways of using the telephone and other communication tools for business advantage and highlight the benefits of different techniques.

Click Credit Control to view details on our public course or contact Damian O’Neill for a customized course for your business.

Oracle SQL Tuning

For optimum performance, an Oracle database should be regularly tuned. This is a broad and somewhat complex topic area when it comes to Oracle databases.

Two of the biggest questions faced by your average DBA concern where to start and what to do. All you may know is that a user reports a problem about a slow or poor performing application or query. Where do you even begin to start when faced with this situation?

If you are experiencing current performance bottlenecks or designing a new application and want to know how best to structure your schema and index strategy for optimal performance, then Professional Training have the skills and experience to assist. On our courses, you will get expert insight and learn best practices to help you identify those areas of database and application design that will give you the greatest benefits for performance.

We can provide focused consultancy or training. Click here SQL Tuning or contact us for more details on this and our other Oracle courses or Consulting.

MS Excel 2007: Get updated quickly

A lot of the change in Excel 2007 comes in the interface. Previous Office applications presented a system of menus, toolbars and dialog boxes, which everyone is now used to. In an effort to make features easier to find and to minimize on-screen clutter, Microsoft has replaced the traditional menus and toolbars with the "Ribbon," an interface device that presents commands (buttons, icons and options) under a set of tabs.

As an example, Office EXcel 2007 offers tabs for creating worksheets, inserting charts and applying formulas. In theory, only relevant tabs appear when they can support the immediate task at hand. Thus, as an example, Excel's chart commands only appear when you're working with graphs. Ribbons will likely be easier for novices to learn, but may prove frustrating for experienced users who are accustomed to the original MS Office interface. As it stands, it takes time to learn exactly which commands reside on which ribbons.

Even experienced users will benefit from taking the time to do a formal (as opposed to "at-your-desk-in-a-spare-second") course. We offer a range of options to ensure you get the most from Microsoft's latest release.

Click Excel Training or contact us for in-house courses.

Public schedule for Business and IT training courses

In addition to customised courses for our clients, we offer an extensive range of Public Courses.

IT training includes: SQL 2005, Oracle, Unix, Linux, VB.NET, Crystal Reports, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, Photoshop, MS Office, etc.

Business Skills training includes: Sales, Finance, HR, Customer Service, Leadership & Management, etc.

For details on all of our public scheduled courses, click here