Opening a training center: How viable is it?

binarysoul

What do you think of the market for an IT training center? Specfiically, teaching people skills such as Windows, MS-Office, Internet security, maybe a troubleshooting course and another program to help people learn IT for employment, e.g. practical PC setup/reapir, network setup, system admin and etc.

dtlokee

Depends on the market and timing (and luck to a degree). I opened my school in 2003 which was a bad time for IT training because many companies had slashed their training budgets. The name of the game needs to be corporate contracts where you will provide training for a company, finding individual students is far more costly and timing is always an issue. Depending on your fixd expenses of maintaing the school it may be possibl to run one with as little as 6 students per month. My fixed monthly expenses (not including any salary or benefits) are over $150,000 per month for rent, utilities, insurance, equipment, software licensing and other miscellanous expenses. The problem with things like Office training is you are competing with lots of CBT type training, some of it is given away for free.

All in all it was the best thing I have ever done. The first few years were difficult when you had no idea where or when the next sale was going to come in. Be conserviative in your estimates of how many sales you will be able to make initially, I don't think I hit my estimates until after 2 years in business. And the best money I have spent was on an advertising company to develop consistent branding and an advertising campaign (although this wasn't until about 18 months after I started the business)

JDMurray

dtlokee wrote:

The problem with things like Office training is you are competing with lots of CBT type training, some of it is given away for free.

And competing with the training programs offered by community colleges as well. To pull in students, many small colleges offer CompTIA, Cisco, and Microsoft training and certification programs. At $26/unit plus books, you can get a lot of hands-on CCNA or MCSE training and a cert for under $1000. It's difficult for any training academy to compete with that.

empc4000xl

you beat me too it. Communtity colleges in my area weren't offering the classes or they wanted you to take 4 semesters for a CCNA class which meant it would take you 2 years to get a CCNA, when they readjusted some of there IT classes down to 8 weeks meaning you could get your CCNA in 6 mo and MCSE in 9 they saw there enrollments soar.