Strengthening your team through Training

Ryan Excel Consulting offers Tailored Training Services (described below) and Mentoring Services (click here).

Our unique approach to customized Excel Training starts with a review of your current models.  We then build a course that focuses on the parts of Excel most relevant to your work, using your own models as examples.  Subsequent individual follow-up sessions complement the course material.  This combined approach significantly increases post-training retention.

When should you consider our Tailored Training services?

• Your staff are not finding the time to explore Excel on their own – Excel has many powerful features that shorten development and provide more robust and effective solutions, but due to time pressures or comfort level, your staff stick with modeling techniques they know
• Your staff retained little of what they learned on more generic Excel courses
• Your staff need to be better at designing more maintainable models on the fly – resulting in models completed sooner (due to less debugging), and less redesign or living with fragile models when the model starts to be used routinely
• You are aware of the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements to improve auditing of critical spreadsheets, but need guidance on how best to accomplish it

Why many Excel training courses fail?

The goal of training is to expand the skill set of your staff and improve their effectiveness in their day-to-day work – many training courses fail to fulfill this goal for several reasons:

• Course content is broad and does not provide sufficient depth
• Many topics are covered that are not relevant to your organization
• Generic and impractical examples are used which are not similar enough to your internal models
• Recall of the course content quickly diminishes with time and participants naturally return to their old habits

Our Tailored Training is unique

This service has three components:

• Review of your financial models to learn about your staff's modeling techniques, where the data comes from, where the reports are used, and the overall workflow
• Teaching of a tailored training course with the content focused on your organization’s specific needs – examples are taken from your own models showing where and how new techniques could and should be used
• Follow-up sessions with each participant individually over an extended period to discuss the new techniques and provide guidance on utilizing them in their day-to-day work

Courses include:

• Advanced Excel
• Macro Development using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
• Spreadsheet Modeling Best Practices
• Auditing Techniques
• **courses can be combined**

Course Details

Initial Review:

• A meeting with several of your staff to get an overview of the models, the dataflow and the workflow
• Subsequent review of a selection of your models which cover the breadth of your staff's use of Excel

Training Course:

• Courses can be provided at your premises or local training facilities. 
• Courses are generally either 2 half-days, or 1 or more full days.
• Courses can be provided in a classroom-style format, or one-on-one.
• The course will be hands-on, so participants will have an opportunity to implement some of these advanced techniques.

Follow-up Sessions:

• Each training course participant will have individual review sessions to discuss their current projects with a focus on how they have integrated the new techniques and concepts into their models. 
• We suggest each session be 1-½ hours in length and take place three times over a six-month period (one month after training, then 3 months and 6 months).
• These sessions can be handled online – using desktop sharing services

Summary

• Focused courses only covering topics that are relevant to your organization's use of Excel
• Examples that resonate with your staff as they are drawn from your own models
• Individual follow-up sessions to ensure the concepts are understood and have become integral to their modeling skills
• Learning your business first so the content is highly applicable
• Using the tool you already have better rather than investing in new tools
• Introducing the concepts of consistency, separation and redundancy avoidance to significantly reduce modeling errors
• Set of Best Practices which make spreadsheets more understandable, less error prone and easier to maintain and evolve
• Exposure to Auditing tools and how their use can improve spreadsheet auditing and design
• Guidance on how best to address the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley as it pertains to spreadsheet development