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In person training is back!

COVID is not over, but life is returning to what is being called “normal”. I’m looking forward to traveling, seeing my family, eating in restaurants, going to the movies, and returning to working with people face-to-face. Professionally, I miss teaching in person.

Teaching for the last 15 months

For the past 15 months I have been teaching “live online”. This essentially means doing webinars for small groups with questions and answers using chat or video/audio. This has worked very well for the student since they get the classes they want, introduced no additional COVID risk, and minimized costs by eliminating travel. It also works well for the instructor for many of the same reasons.

Frankly online teaching reminded me a bit of my days as a radio disc jockey. I have been speaking into a microphone, hoping my anecdotes were working, and getting limited reaction. At one point I (almost) felt myself saying “We have a student from London with a question, nice Euro Cup win for the Three Lions against Germany, go ahead John.”

Prior to COVID I was on the road 75% of my time and, while I really enjoy sleeping in my own bed, I miss live, in person classes.

Live classes are back in Florida and New Hampshire.

Last month we began to offer our Privacy Pro training in our Delray Beach, Florida headquarters and our office in Nashua, New Hampshire. Using the International Association of Privacy Professional‘s content for these classes and limiting the in person participants to five people, the seats began filling up pretty quickly. The attendees were expected to vaccinated or wearing masks. The Privacy Ref team members present were also vaccinated.

It was great to be able to get immediate feedback as we were working through the lessons. There was also a higher level of participation and questions in from the class when compared to just being online.

There were online participants too

When deciding to open up live, in person training, we recognized that some people are just not ready to travel. So we allowed people to also participate remotely. We are continuing to limit total class attendance to 10 people to assure a great learning experience, so the classes sold out.

We will be continuing to provide a hybrid in person / remote classroom experience for the foreseeable future.

On-site corporate training is happening as well

I am happy to say that I have gotten back on the road too. We provided an on-site Privacy Pro training in June as well. The company we taught for is still having their staff work from home, but they opened a portion of their building to hold the class.

I must admit it was a bit eerie driving to the location on a virtually empty road, stopping at rest area whose restaurants were closed, staying at a very empty hotel, and teaching in a multi-story building were the only occupants were the students and me. I can’t wait to do it again.

Are you looking for privacy training. We are having multiple in person / remote classes every month. If you have multiple team members looking for training, we continue to offer discounts for corporate training arrangements either at your location, remotely, or in our scheduled classes.