Unitek - an unhappy customer

Thinking of getting training from 'Unitek It Training' of Fremont, California?

I excised a long screen that was, perhaps, a bit unfair. In it's place, then, this.

Hardware Provider X has outsourced it's training - formerly in-house - to a vendor, Unitek. Expectations were set regarding a very high standard of instruction. The vendor did not live up to those standards due to entirely avoidable problems.

These problems included a nice but new to instructing instructor - he knew the subject from an operational point-of-view but was new to teaching which can make a difference. The lab servers failed when we tried to use them resulting in down time while IT was hunted down to restart the box. And so on.

Oh and the infamous missing trash-can. We had .. a cardboard box for waste. What's the big deal with that? It's the little things that count; for $3750.00 per student you'd think they could send someone down to Office Depot for a trash-can. It's an attention to detail item - if they can't pay attention to the small easy-to-fix stuff what does that say about the big picture?

Please note this is not passive aggressive mawpging - a more detailed gripe was sent to my boss, which he shared with the vendor who shared with Unitek who - in the person of a very nice project manager - drew me aside to ask me what was the problem.

One result was that Friday morning the trashcan box was gone - in it's place not one but three trashcans.


The key is - would I go back? Yes and no. Yes, I will be going back to them for training - they are the vendor's preferred or sole source for education. I need schooling on the vendor's hardware, I see them.

But, no. If it was a choice between the competition and Unitek .. I'd go with the other guy. It's a once burned forever shy kinda deal.