Progent's Experts Team

Virtual Training for Desktop Applications
Progent offers online custom training for a range of desktop apps and operating systems including products from Microsoft's Office and Office 365 suites such as Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint, and Project. Progent also offers expert virtual training for popular applications from other vendors such as Adobe Acrobat Writer and Photoshop as well as Crystal Reports. Online training provides the advantages of traditional in-person classes, including instant interaction between students and teachers, but eliminates the expenses of transportation and the hassle of attempting to accommodate the schedules of multiple workers.

Available to individuals or groups of any size, Progent's live online training allows the teacher to manage the seminar from a remote facility while the students can be dispersed across a campus or throughout the country. All that is required for each student is an Internet connection, a phone, and a computer with a web browser. The webinar technology utilized by Progent requires minimal client setup and supports powerful teaching tools such as broadcast white boards, real-time questions and answers, and shared application control for detailed interactive demonstrations. Sessions can be brief and targeted for specialized topics or longer in duration and wider in scope. Teachers and students can work through problems one-on-one or as a class, and the trainer can be available after class for follow-on questions via email.

Benefits of Virtual Training
Virtual training takes advantage of today's high-speed Internet connections and advanced collaboration technology to bring employees up to speed on critical business applications more rapidly, conveniently, and affordably than is possible with the old paradigm of location-dependent training. Advantages of virtual training include:

• Nationwide Access: Virtual training makes it fast and easy to pool your personnel from desks throughout a department, buildings throughout a campus, or offices across the country. It also takes only a few clicks to include mobile workers and telecommuters. Webinars allow you to leverage a single training session to benefit many employees while introducing less disruption to your company's ordinary workflow.
• Cost Effectiveness: Virtual training enables you to avoid the substantial direct costs of travel for students and instructors. In addition, the lost productivity of workers who attend a virtual class is radically reduced by being limited to the length of the class itself. The elimination of travel time also makes it easier to accommodate more schedules, so you can save money by training a larger number of people with fewer classes.
• Flexibility: Progent can tailor virtual classes to meet your specific needs. For example, you may want a large group to attend a generic class such as Excel 2016 for Beginners, whereas you may also want a smaller group to attend a customized interactive seminar on how to use Excel and Power BI to surface vital information about your business.
• Convenience: By removing the need to struggle with travel logistics, virtual training supports a strategy of selecting short, frequent, task-specific trainings sessions rather than mandating a one-size-fits all marathon class that offers a little information for everyone but not enough for anyone.

Features & Functionality
Progent's virtual education services have incorporated and updated time-tested pedagogic tools from the world of conventional on-site seminars and have also benefited from advanced communication and collaboration technology. Key features of Progent's virtual training include:

• Hand Raising: Students can virtually raise their hand to ask questions in the course of a training session to ensure that they are absorbing what is taught and learning what is relevant.
• Electronic Whiteboard: Training slides are presented on an electronic whiteboard to make it easy for students to annotate content. The whiteboard is also useful for collaboration within the classroom.
• Application Sharing: After discussing concepts presented on slides, Progent's instructors can share part or all of their desktop with students for demonstration purposes.
• After-session Support: Depending on the class and the level of support you require, instructors are available for after-class questions and clarification via email.

• One hour questions and answers about Excel or Word
• Several shorter sessions on Excel to build skills from questions submitted by specific groups
• Help for self-publishing authors who need a quick hand with making a Table of Contents or Index
• New employee training on custom-built software
• Project Building: multi-day training to learn how to build an Access database application. Your employees do the work while the instructor provides any required hand holding. Bite-size pieces and the next steps of the project are presented from the ground up. A project is planned and built with the help of an instructor from whom your employees can get ideas and techniques during their weekly sessions. This structure keeps the project moving and trains students how to maintain and build future projects after the session is over.
• Traditional all-day sessions with specific goals in mind include Beginning Excel, Advanced Word Documents, Advanced Formulas in Excel, Using Outlook as a Time Management Tool and Not Just for Email.

If you are interested in Progent's Virtual Training services, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

Attention IT Experts
If you are a certified consultant with demonstrated ability in any of the technologies serviced by the Experts Group, ask about how to collaborate with Progent by going to Join the Experts Team.