Host Keith Parsons speaks with Peter MacKenzie, a trainer and course developer in the wireless industry, about the importance of vendor-neutral training. What We Discuss * How courses are developed, comparing vendor-neutral classes and vendor-focused classes. * The importance of not just teaching button clicks, but also the context behind them. * The difference between professional trainers and practitioners who develop courseware. * The pushback from vendors who want their products to be emphasized in training courses. * The importance of crafting stories and analogies in training courses. * Peter’s new company, MQ Training. Link Peter MacKenzie on LinkedIn MQ Training Transcription Transcriptions are provided via an automated service, so they aren’t perfect. You’ve been warned. Keith Parsons (00:00:00) – Welcome. Again, this is Keith Parsons with Heavy Wireless. This is a podcast as part of the Packet pushers podcast system. And today we’ll be talking about vendor neutral training. And with me, I have Peter Mackenzie. Hello, Peter. Hi Peter MacKenzie (00:00:13) – Keith. Good to see you. Nice to be on the podcast. Oh, Keith Parsons (00:00:16) – Glad you’re here. The topic is Vendor neutral training, and I know you’ve been a trainer and a course developer for two decades or so. You’ve been around Yeah, yeah. Doing a while. Yeah. Peter MacKenzie (00:00:26) – J just over a little while. While, yeah. Keith Parsons (00:00:28) – And I, I thought it’d be good and interesting for our audience to hear one. We’ll, we’ll do a little, you know, way back machine, what was it like years ago when we first started, but we can, we can talk about how courses are developed and also give a, you know, let’s talk a little bit about what the current state of affairs are in our wireless IT industry, uh, with respect to vendor neutral classes versus vendor focused classes. So, to get started, Peter, tell us, how did you get started in training and wireless? Peter MacKenzie (00:01:02) – Yeah, it’s a, it is, it’s a good story actually. My, my journey into training and wireless happened at the same time. Um, I, I would’ve never sort of, I, I think, chose to be a trainer. It’s not something I ever dreamt off being. When I was at college doing my computer science degree, I probably thought I’d be a, you know, programma for, for most of my life, if you’d asked me back at university time. But I was working for a UK company called s um, straight out for university. And we were selling telecoms, compliance TAT systems. And I was actually programming a lot of the software order systems. And, um, the telecoms industry ha had a crash around 2001, you, you might remember, um, and a lot the Tats labs stopped, actually ran out of business, which we were selling our equipment to. And around that time, there was a company came to us about whether we had an I S D N tap, I guess. Peter MacKenzie (00:02:00) – So I think that could sniff packets off an I S D N line. And we were asked if we could get that data into a protocol analyzer called, um, peak by a company called Wild Packets at the time. And as as I started looking at their software, I was like, this is a really cool piece of software, this Protocol Analyzer being a compute scientist in me. Um, and so we started a relationship with Wild Packets as a UK reseller, but a product. And that was, um, a reasonably good business decision considering the state of the sort of telecoms industry at the time. So we did that and they had a training program called the Wild PAKEs Academy, but they only had instructors in the US so we couldn’t in Europ...