Training session: a walkthrough

Updated on 12 November 2024

First off…

The point person for administrative, educational or handicap questions is Christophe Porteneuve.

If you have any question relative to how we adapt our trainings to your disabilities or special needs, please check out our disabilities page.

Ahead of your session

Summons

No later than D−7 before your session, you’ll receive a detailed summons e-mail at the address provided during registration.

This e-mail contains tons of useful information, such as access details for your session (full address or a link to join online), dates and timetables, a reminder of preparation best practices, our installation guide (FR) should your session require prior prep of your computer, a link to the pre-fit questionnaire if you haven’t already sent that in, details about your trainer, and so on.

Read this e-mail carefully and keep it at hand!

Pre-fit questionnaires

As early as possible during our collaboration (in the quotation or contracting phases), we’ll send you a questionnaire that will help us both confirm that the training you’re planning to get is a good fit for you. It includes questions about your background (if any) related to the training’s field (e.g. React) and lateral fields (e.g. source control, continuous integration).

It is critical that you quickly fill this questionnaire in, using an e-mail address we can reach you at. (You may elect to use another e-mail address than the one used for registration, but keeping things consistent is best.)

As sono as we get your answers, our team determines whether further evaluation by the trainer might be needed, in which case we forward your answers to them. They may decide to get in touch with you to chat in more depth about your particular situation, and make sure you can get the best out of the session with no obstacles. They might advise you do a bit of prep work using specific online resources, so you can resolve any potential issues to that end.

It is theoretically possible that your profile is too far away from the course’s stated pre-requisites, and that lack of time or means before the session’s scheduled dates prevent you from bridging that gap. In such a scneario, the trainer has full authority to deny your attendance, sending us a written argument for it. This cancellation is also notified to the person in charge of your registration, unless that’s you already. If the contract included other trainees, it gets amended and re-sent for signing.

Do note that such denials are in practice extremely rare, as our intended audiences and pre-requisites are highlighted across all our web pages and documentation.

No downpayment, but paperwork must be out of the way!

Except for client-specific policies, Delicious Insights does not require a downpayment to finalize registration: the entirety of the fee is invoiced once the session ends. Clients may require invoicing of all or part of the fee ahead of time, usually for fiscal-year budget assignment reasons.

However, if you work at a French client that goes for payment delegation to an OPCO or the French Unemployment Office (Pôle Emploi), it is imperative that your employer has completed all necessary paperwork and obtained positive proofs by the financing entities, ahead of the session.

During the session

It’s the big day already! OK, so what is it like? Well, that depends on the session’s attendance type.

Full-day(s) sessions, be they remote or in-room, usually go with the following timetable:

• 09:45a: Startup
  • Day 1 features a round of intros
  • Following days feature our “debrief” (see below)
• 12:45p: lunch break
• 02:00p: training resumes
• 04:00p: snack break
• 04:20p: final stretch
• 06:00p: day ends

For half-day sessions, that are usually slated on afternoons, these usually start at 2:30p or 1:48p, depending on the specific course. Get more info here.

Remote sessions

Multi-client sessions (at least until March 31st, 2022) and single-client sessions (unless the client mandates otherwise) are held remotely using live videoconferencing (sometimes referred to as “virtual classes”).

You can find a wealth of information on the dedicated remote training page: prepping, logging in, rundown, best practices, etc.

Here are a few more useful bits:

• You get a single link to join throughout the session (no per-day links, in particular).
• Logging in does not require any existing account (Zoom, Teams, etc.) and can be done through pure-web clients (no prior software installation, which helps in stricter IT scenarios). In that latter situation, the authentication info built into the link might be discarded and you may need to type in the password provided along the link in your summons e-mail.
• Being on time is important. You can get in earlier: you’ll be put in a waiting room and let in the moment the trainer joins.
• For various reasons (e.g. a trainee is compelled to get away for a short while, a trainee has difficulties taking it all in on-the-fly, etc.) it might be useful to record the session (audio/video); only the trainer can do that, and only with the express agreement of all trainees on-hand. Such recordings are made available to trainees who are forbidden to spread them. Delicious Insights does not spread these either, but may retain the files for up to 3 years for service quality auditing purposes.
• At various times during the session, trainees may get split in breakout rooms of 2 to 3 people in order to collaboratively work on a specific exercise. Within such a room, people take turns leading the work, from one exercise to the next. Room rosters are shuffled anew every day. The trainer can be called for help at any time, from any room.
• Quizzes can sometimes pop up, right into the videoconferencing solution, to provide a gamified way to assessing the current state of understanding and internalizing the know-hows being taught, and reduce cognitive load by switching gears for a moment.

In-room sessions

Should the client require it, we can indeed perform an in-room, single-client session in a venue of theirs, anywhere in the world, in English or French (provided the trainer agrees).

The client must then commit to providing a venue that satisfies all applicable health requirements and our minimum standard for equipment, as per our Terms of Sale.

In such a scenario, we work with the client to refine dates (that may be non-adjacent) and timetables, which usually align to your regular business hours. This is quite comfortable for you. 😁

If the session takes place in a dedicated training room, or more generally using computers that are not your daily ones, the usual biggest hurdle to clear is that your IT services must follow our installation guide on the training computers ahead of the session, and all computers (including the trainer’s) must enjoy reasonably open and fast Internet connectivity.

Delicious Insights does not cover catering for trainees during in-room, single-client sessions. However, the trainer is usually able to get lunch with the trainees. If the client features a corporate self-service, restaurant or food service, they most often provide the trainer with the necessary items to gain access to that service in order to facilitate this friendly time with trainees.

Regular attendance and attendance sheets

Every trainee attends the full session hours. At the beginning of every half-day slot, all trainees sign the attendance sheet, that may be provided on paper, as an annotated PDF, or using a special-purpose online tool (that may compile a consolidated attendance sheet). The trainer co-signs every half-day, and eventually Delicious Insights applies it seal to the document.

In case of a major cause of absence (sickness, unavoidable family requirement, etc.), the trainer can allow the trainee to leave the session, possibly requiring relevant proof. That leave may extend to just part or all the remainder of the session.

A temporary leave may be alleviated by the trainer’s recording of the missed hours for the benefit of the leaving trainee, which requires approval by all remaining trainees. The resulting video is made available in the evening for the trainee to “catch up,” as best they can, before the next training slot.

Longer leaves (starting at 50% of the session hours) result in Delicious Insights and the client working together to try and schedule a do-over attendance in the closest next available session.

As the full cost remains due (but third-party financing might not cover it anymore and work more on a prorata temporis basis), Delicious Insights may, at their sole discretion, offer a discount on the do-over registration, as it would entail full-session hours anyway. Under exceptional circumstances, Delicious Insights might provide said registration for free.

Teaching resources and methods

• The first day starts with a round of intros from trainees, followed by a presentation of the trainer and info on the run-through for the session, various rules, best practices, useful bits, etc.
• The following days start with our “debrief”: as an open, spoken quiz of sorts, the trainer leads the group in making knowledge from the day prior re-surface, by re-explaining it together in a collaborative way. This is a great way to get back in the zone, make sure you did grok it when you thought you hadn’t… or the other way around. It’s a relaxed, laid-back, fun format that our trainees always enjoy, and lasts around 30 minutes, never more than an hour.
• Course material is made available online for the entire session, including evenings and nights, so trainees who’d like to work back on it at their leisure can.
• Our trainings are careful to alternate short segments (10 to 60 minutes) of theoretical presentations, demos and hands-on exercises that can take many forms, including but not limited to:
  • Writing code in an online interactive lab
  • Writing code in a starter codebase for a common-theme app
  • Using appropriate commands on a specific Git repo that puts you in a given situation
  • Manipulating specific tools in a situational context (e.g. front-end performance auditing tools on a specific webapp)

Technical resources and methods

• Videoconferences currently use Zoom but do not require an account or subscription with them for trainees. The pure-web client can be used if you’d prefer that, avoiding any installation on the trainee’s computer.
• Course material relies on open formats (mostly web pages, sometimes PDF).
• Trainers ensure their hardware allows excellent training running performance, including hosting the videoconference. For remote sessions, they make sure they use high-quality A/V setups (headsets, mics, webcams, lighting, etc.)
• Many courses rely on starter or demo codebases, that are made available either as public GitHub repos that evolve over time, or downloadable Zip files.
• The debrief “package” (see further below) provided when the session ends is a downloadable Zip file specific to the session, made available for at least 7 calendar days.
• All questionnaires are fillable online and do not require a service account (e.g. Google). Delicious Insights may retain your answers up to 3 years for reasons of statistical compiling, KPI tabulation, and later quality audits by certified third parties.
• For in-room sessions, we ensure the trainer has a number of hardware items available, including a sufficiently-high resolution videoprojector or flat screen (no less than 1,600 × 1,200, usually 1,920 × 1,080) with HDMI connectivity and a whiteboard or paperboard with working markers. Every trainee has a comfortable workstation (desk and chair) with sufficient social distancing from other trainees where applicable, a 230V power outlet and, if necessary, an RJ45 network socket. Individual water bottles and glasses are also provided.

Income

If you’re attending one of our trainings on your working time, your employer usually maintains your income (there might be various local incentives available to alleviate that cost, by the way).

If you are unemployed, your benefits keep running during training in most countries.

Locale-specific programs may exist that help financing your training costs and income during sessions (City, Regional / State, Federal, EU / OECD / UN, etc.). We can’t track all of these, but do some research!

After the session

You’re done! Your head is buzzing, your brain starts dripping from your ears (just slightly), and now starts the “digestive” part, when you process it, internalize it, make it your own and — we certainly hope so! — put these new skills to good use in great projects! But you and us are not quite done yet…

Resources you leave with

When the session ends, you’ll get a debrief e-mail at most 3 days later (as our sessions usually end on Friday, so the week-end may delay the processing). It contains a ton of good stuff:

• The training session’s “package”: a Zip that contains full course material, sometimes extra slides, and depending on the training, complete detailed solutions for all exercises, starter codebases or finalized, documented and tested codebases, and more. This file remains available online about 7 calendar days, so snatch it fast!
• A rich listing of complementary online resources
• A link to our ”hot” feedback survey, that you must fill in without wait!
• One or more links to online rating systems (notably Google Ratings for Delicious Insights)
• A reminder of our contact info (e-mail, Twitter, etc.) so you can reach us if you hit any snag.
• Sometimes, special offers and discounts related to your session: coupons for a free video course of ours, discounts on upcoming sessions, that kind of thing.

“Hot” feedback survey

As a French training company operating with the highest levels of quality requirements in our fields of expertise, we are required to collect “hot” feedbacks (that is, either in the last hours of the session, or very soon after the session ends), then “cold” feedbacks (1 to 3 months later). All these questionnaires can be filled online, do not require an existing service account and only take minutes to fill in.

You’ll get a link to the hot survey in your debrief e-mail; we insist that you fill it in within 7 days, after what time a reminder e-mails campaign would trigger, and if necessary phone calls or appeals to our administrative contact at your employer would have to follow.

These questionnaires feature quantitive, qualitative and open-text questions that cover quality of teaching, technical expertise, quality of training organizing and resources applied to it, how well we met your specific needs, etc.

It is critical that you quickly fill in that questionnaire for several reasons:

• Your employer usually wants us to provide them with your feedback quite quickly.
• We are required to collect that information, for instance in order to retain our Qualiopi certification as a training company.
• Most importantly, your answers help us get better. Some of the best ideas for raising the bar on our training experiences come from your feedback!

“Cold" feedback surveys

About a month later, we’ll send you an e-mail with a link to a similar questionnaire, that is more focused on hindsight, though. We specifically would like to know to what extend your training has helped you in your actual projects so far.

Again, replying to this is important, both to help us get better and to keep us in compliance of various laws and requirements.

Finally, roughly 3 months down the line, unless you’re both the trainee and the decision-maker on the training, we’ll send a decision-maker “return on investment” questionnaire to the person who requested your training (that could be a tech lead, a product owner, a CTO, etc.), in order to gauge how satisfied they are with more strategic outcomes of your time with us.

Formal complaints

It is theoretically possible that, after having fully attended a session, a trainee be so unsatisfied (first time for everything) that hot feedback surveys just don’t cut it, and they wish to file a formal complaint. To address this contingency, we put together a process for complaint handling, that starts with a specific online form.

The possibility of this recourse, with the relevant link, are notably made clear in the following locations:

• Invoicing e-mails
• Debrif e-mails to trainees
• “Hot feedback” survey forms

We strive to provide a response, or at the very least a first level of response, within 2 business days. Complaint cases are handled by Christophe Porteneuve, unless he’s targeted by the complaint as a trainer, in which case they are handled by Maxime Bréhin.

Certificates

When the session is over, we produce a certificate of attendance and, should the financing entity require it for remote sessions, a certificate of completion. These documents are provided as PDFs.

Payment

When the session is done, Delicious Insights invoices the relevant parties.

For direct payments (including later refunds by financing entities), the invoice targets the client, with a copy of the co-signed attendance sheet and, if requested, attendance certificates.

For delegated payments, the invoice targets the financing entity, with a copy of the co-signed attendance sheet and, if applicable, the certificate of completion.

The client then only gets the attendance sheet and attendance certificate, unless the payment is only partially delegated, then they get an invoice for the remaining fee.

All our invoices are due 30 calendar days after their emission date, by wire transfer.