Frequently Asked Questions

• What is “workflow-focused” education?
• How do you customize training?
• Why is customized training so important?
• Why are course outlines listed as “mal­leable and customizable”?
• I just need to learn Application X without much customization. Can you teach that?
• Do you offer remote training and online learning?
• Do you offer on-site training and consulting?
• Your competitors say they “write their own books.” Do you?
• So why don’t you sell your instructors’ books here?
• Do you offer Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced courses?
• Do you offer open enrollment classroom training?
• Who owns software purchases?
• What about after sale support?

Q:What is “workflow-focused” education?

A:

The dif­fer­ence between soft­ware edu­ca­tion and workflow-focused train­ing and con­sult­ing is a sim­ple ques­tion: Is the instruc­tion cen­tered on the soft­ware or what you will do with the software?

Workflow Creative is not a soft­ware train­ing com­pany. We will not teach you Photoshop, InDesign, or Adobe Captivate; we will teach you how to use Photoshop, InDesign, or Adobe Captivate to fur­ther your goals, to com­plete your projects, to be cre­ative. That is workflow-focused education.

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Q:How do you customize training?

A:

During our ini­tial con­ver­sa­tions with you we’ll pose the fol­low­ing questions:

• Tell us about your workflow.
• Tell us about the projects you pro­duce or want to produce.
• What areas of your work­flow do you find frus­trat­ing, inef­fi­cient, or tedious?
• In addi­tion to meet­ing the goals you’ve revealed by your other answers, what indi­ca­tors will mark this train­ing as a suc­cess for you?

Your answers define the edu­ca­tion you receive. Along the way we’ll lis­ten for what you don’t say, too, for the ques­tions you may not know to ask, and the pos­si­ble solu­tions and options you may not be aware are avail­able to you. We will present your options and our rec­om­men­da­tions, and together you and the instruc­tor or con­sul­tant will final­ize the goals for the engage­ment. This will become the foun­da­tion for the cur­ricu­lum by which your per­son­nel will be trained.

Once on-site the instruc­tion and con­sul­ta­tion will flow flu­idly, adapt­ing to any revised or newly dis­cov­ered goals or needs. Because of our instruc­tors’ deep exper­tise with the processes, con­cerns, and tools of a wide vari­ety of design and pub­lish­ing work­flows, they can turn the plan on a dime, adapt­ing it on-site with­out delay or confusion.

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Q:Why is customized training so important?

A:

No two work­flows are iden­ti­cal. Each has its own unique details, goals, and needs. As such, no pre-written edu­ca­tional plan can be truly effec­tive in improv­ing or stream­lin­ing the work­flow. The only way to max­i­mize return on invest­ment in train­ing or con­sult­ing is to receive train­ing or con­sult­ing fully cus­tomized to the spe­cific objec­tives of your invest­ment. For that, you need peo­ple with vast expe­ri­ence, deep knowl­edge, and nim­ble adaptability.

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Q:Why are course outlines listed as “mal­leable and customizable”?

A:

A syl­labus or pre-written course forces learn­ers into work­ing toward the instructor’s goals, not the learn­ers’. We don’t offer canned training.

Our instruc­tors build a course fully cus­tomized to you, to your spe­cific goals for the engage­ment, to your work­flow and projects, and to your per­son­nel and their learn­ing style.

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Q:I just need to learn Application X without much customization. Can you teach that?

A:

Of course. Each class’s page includes a course out­line. Our instruc­tors can teach every­thing in that out­line, in that order, if desired. How much the class is cus­tomized is entirely up to you. Use the out­line as a menu–if you want every­thing, you’ll get it; if you want to choose top­ics ala carte, we’ll give you every­thing you order and noth­ing you say you don’t want.

For exam­ple, did you know that Adobe Photoshop includes fea­tures specif­i­cally used in video pro­duc­tion? If you don’t work with videos, your instruc­tor will leave those fea­tures out of your edu­ca­tion, using the time they would have taken to go deeper into the fea­tures you do need in your work.

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Q:Do you offer remote training and online learning?

A:

Thanks to mature remote meet­ing ser­vices and the high-speed Internet, our instruc­tors and con­sul­tants can train and con­sult with you and your team any­time, any­where. Using full-featured online meet­ing and instruc­tion sys­tems with inte­grated instruc­tor and stu­dent screen shar­ing, stream­ing video, and audio con­fer­enc­ing, you and your team can receive train­ing and some types of con­sul­ta­tion at your own desks, with­out the need to bring an instruc­tor on-site.

By their nature, some courses and ser­vices can only be deliv­ered in-person, on-site. Each class and ser­vice page lists its eli­gi­bil­ity for remote training.

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Q:Do you offer on-site training and consulting?

A:

Whether it’s a train­ing class for boxed soft­ware or a com­plete work­flow restruc­tur­ing con­sul­ta­tion, we cus­tomize every engage­ment to your unique work­flow, aim­ing at–and hitting–your stated goals. Training on-site at your offices, using actual doc­u­ments pro­duced by your team as learn­ing aids in hands-on instruc­tion and is the most effec­tive method of edu­ca­tion com­pre­hen­sion and retention.

All of our train­ing classes and pro­fes­sional ser­vices are avail­able for on-site deliv­ery. Some are even avail­able for remote deliv­ery via video con­fer­enc­ing and e-training.

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Q:Your competitors say they “write their own books.” Do you?

A:

Certain noble com­peti­tors make a big deal out of writ­ing their own train­ing books and mate­ri­als, which is a funny thing to make a big deal out of because just about every train­ing com­pany writes its own material.

Now if you want to talk about the qual­ity and author­ity of train­ing mate­ri­als, well, our instruc­tors write books and mate­ri­als that other train­ing companies–and col­leges and universities–use in their classes.

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Q:So why don’t you sell your instructors’ books here?

A:

Because Workflow Creative is in the busi­ness of train­ing and con­sult­ing. If we invested as much space and time as some other com­pa­nies pro­mot­ing the books our own­ers and instruc­tors write you’d have to won­der what busi­ness we’re actu­ally in.

Our owner, Pariah Burke, has writ­ten quite a few books and hun­dreds of arti­cles, authored course­ware, and pro­duced webi­nars and videos, among other projects. Feel free to check those out. Workflow Creative is in the busi­ness of train­ing and con­sult­ing, though, not sell­ing you books.

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Q:Do you offer Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced courses?

A:

Yes, and no. We teach peo­ple with all lev­els of expe­ri­ence, but we rarely use words like “begin­ner,” “inter­me­di­ate,” “101,” or “level 2″ to describe either the instruc­tion or the peo­ple learn­ing. We do use “advanced” just to help peo­ple with a lot of expe­ri­ence in a pro­gram iden­tify the course out­lines built specif­i­cally for them.

In for­mal, lin­ear edu­ca­tion such as a col­lege course, when one starts out with no knowl­edge of a tool and no spe­cific goal other than to learn the tool and then pro­gresses toward mas­tery, draw­ing such dis­tinc­tions in skills and abil­ity lev­els makes sense. On the job, how­ever, with real world projects to com­plete and pay­ing clients to wow, all that mat­ters is being able to get work done cre­atively, effi­ciently, and with min­i­mal con­fu­sion and frustration.

In the mid­dle of a project, rac­ing toward dead­line, no designer has ever uttered the phrase: “Holy cow! I’ve just com­pleted an inter­me­di­ary level InDesign task!”

Our instruc­tors teach your per­son­nel every­thing they need to do their jobs and reach your goals–be those so-called begin­ner, inter­me­di­ate, or advanced skills.

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Q:Do you offer open enrollment classroom training?

A:

We do not offer open enroll­ment train­ing or main­tain our own pub­lic train­ing class­room. Our focus is on improv­ing real world cre­ative and pub­lish­ing workflows.

In an open enroll­ment set­ting, every stu­dent brings dif­fer­ent goals, needs, and skill lev­els into the class­room. When all three of those fac­tors vary–and they always vary in an open enroll­ment class–it becomes dif­fi­cult for an instruc­tor to fully meet the goals and needs of every stu­dent while engag­ing each stu­dent. After a cer­tain num­ber of stu­dents it becomes impos­si­ble. For those with spe­cific needs and goals, those with jobs and projects already, open enroll­ment edu­ca­tion achieves only a min­i­mal return on investment.

If you’re look­ing at an open enroll­ment class of 10 or more peo­ple not from the same work­flow, you should real­ize that no one with a job to do will walk away from that open enroll­ment class fully pre­pared to work more cre­atively and pro­duc­tively in a spe­cific work­flow. The train­ing com­pany will be happy, though, because you will have learned just enough in the class to real­ize that you’d learn more in another class.

At Workflow Creative we like repeat busi­ness as much as any com­pany, but we’d rather spend your time and money by giv­ing you what you ask for the first time. That’s how we’ll earn your repeat business.

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Q:Who owns software purchases?

A:

You do. As a con­ve­nience to our clients we are avail­able to make soft­ware and hard­ware pur­chases on your behalf. If you ask that we pur­chase prod­ucts on your behalf, we do exactly that, on your behalf. The money is yours, so the prod­ucts it pur­chases will be yours. You will own the licenses and be enti­tled to any war­ranties, man­u­fac­turer sup­port, and/or future upgrade incen­tives that accom­pany the prod­ucts. In the future, when it’s time to upgrade, you can go directly through the man­u­fac­turer or other avail­able sales chan­nels with­out the need to involve us–unless you want us to help again.

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Q:What about after sale support?

A:

That’s a very impor­tant ques­tion. We stand behind our work.

You will receive one year of com­pli­men­tary sup­port fol­low­ing an on-site engage­ment, either train­ing or con­sult­ing. If the devel­op­ment of cus­tom plug-ins, scripts, or other mate­ri­als is part of our work for you, you will receive a min­i­mum of two years of com­pli­men­tary sup­port on those cus­tom devel­oped components.

In addi­tion to sup­port from us, you will receive any war­ran­teed sup­port avail­able from the man­u­fac­turer, even if we pur­chase the prod­ucts on your behalf.

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