Well, we really cannot believe that it is 15 years since Paramount Training was born. And my, how things have changed!
Online training currently takes up 48% of our business, whereas 100% of training was delivered in the traditional classroom when we started out It is perhaps surprising that roughly half of our clients still want to see us in person, yet we really do love doing both methods. Where organisations have staff at different offices, or working from home, the online option is very popular.
Over the past 15 years we’ve all had a few different versions of Microsoft software to get used to, we now take the ribbon for granted. Most of us are very familiar with either/both Teams and Zoom rather than other platforms, whereas lots of us hadn’t even heard of these platforms pre-pandemic!
We’ve delivered courses as far north as Newcastle and Barrow-in-Furness, and far south as London, with Norfolk to the east and Mold in Wales to the west (not including quick trips to Belfast and Newtown in Wales!)
Who have we trained over the past 15 years? All kinds of sectors including many companies that do things we didn’t even know were a thing! We absolutely love seeing the inside of organisations and their 'behind the scenes' and understanding how their staff use computers (mainly Excel to run or enhance their business activity).
Here are some of the notable ones…
A football club, a virtual reality game company, a toy distributor, bank note printing company, a battery distribution company, a number of disability equipment providers, a Swiss bank (sadly their office was in Manchester and not in the Alps!), railway maintenance company, many local councils and NHS hospital trusts. We’ve also been to a muffin tin manufacturer, a bakery where they brought in samples to try at breaktime (we’d like to go back there for obvious reasons), a laboratory creating vaccines, many government departments including one where we were locked in the training room and couldn’t leave unaccompanied for security reasons!
We been to a manufacturer of lightning conductors, an installer of lifts, cranes and staircases, we trained a number of times in a kitchen equipment showroom surrounded by mixers, cookbooks, cutlery etc. (none of the cooking skills rubbed off on us sadly).
There was also a wedding dress shop, a small bookshop, the lovely harbour police sergeants up north, a shower screen company and an airline which had with it an inevitable backdrop of plane noise.
We’ve done training for a company who resurface and do white-lining for airport runways, a sportswear distributor who had the biggest warehouse we’d ever seen, a kitchen manufacturer who had five of the poshest ovens in their very posh staff room.
Phew! And that was not including lots and lots of accountants, builders, construction companies and marketing professionals.
So, you can probably tell that we love our work!
So, what hasn’t changed in the last 15 years? Well, we still have the exact same flexible approach to making sure our clients are happy and the delegates get exactly what they need from their training. We are still getting great feedback to substantiate this!
Here's to the next 15 years - we wonder how things will change in the meantime? Will all training go online? Will there be a software competitor to Microsoft? Will people stop using Excel in particular and start using something else? Watch this space!
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