Alfred Tharwat, RCDD, Head of Presales, Training and Consultancy at R&M, explains how they have trained their partners during the pandemic.
At R&M, we encourage all our customers to engage only with authorised and certified partners who we have listed on our official website. Our unique Freenet warrant programme ensures that our customers’ structured cabling investments are future-proofed and enjoy the benefit from extended warranty periods. This is subject to our solutions being implemented by qualified and certified partners. For these reasons, we recognise that despite the challenges that have resulted because of the pandemic, we are obligated to ensure our partners and customers continue to receive the highest quality of training.
Of course, this has called for a paradigm shift in the way we deliver training. Traditionally, our Qualified Partner Programme (QPP) training has been classroom style with an emphasis on hands-on practice. Recognising that such sessions would not be possible during lockdown, we conducted in-depth analysis of virtual tools and invited select partners to help us create and fine-tune an effective online live training programme.
Our successful trail, run with two partners, was held in May and based on their feedback, we then further strengthened our offering. As a result, we have now implemented a monthly training schedule and have since hosted three further partner enablement sessions with over 60 implementation experts from across the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia being successfully trained. To ensure this training is accessible to a wide range of our partners, we ensure that they are conducted in the partners’ language of choice, with sessions in Arabic and English being held in the GCC and French for our partner community in North and West Africa.
One of the key aspects of our virtual training programme has been the innovative online assessment system which enables us to deepen partner engagement during the sessions and ensure that they have correctly understood and absorbed the information that we provided. This online examination system serves to enable partners to test their comprehension of the latest standards, best-practices, technologies as well as the latest solutions in R&M’s product portfolio.
Through the coming month of November, we are looking to expand the geographic reach of our virtual training programme, with dedicated sessions for our partners in North and West Africa. Registration for our training sessions is conveniently available via our website.
In addition to training for our partners, we have begun to host dedicated sessions for specific customers. Rather than general webinars, we look to drill deeper into the unique requirements of the specific customer and empower them with technical resources that are made conveniently available via our dedicated portal. All this enables us to assist them in successfully completing their projects and overcome challenges that arise during the implementation process.