Delivering Oracle Education through the Workforce Development Program

I teach the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) courses at Austin Community College (ACC). ACC offers the exact same course material as Oracle Education through an Oracle program called the Workforce Development Program (WDP). I also offer Oracle technology training through RFD & Associates, Inc. on a customized basis for your organization. RFD & Associates is also a WDP partner.

There are two main differences between the Oracle Education program and the Workforce Development Program.

The most important difference is that courses offered by a Workforce Development Program partner can only be delivered at a maximum rate of 12 hours per week. The Oracle Education program typically offers courses in a 1 week full time format (around 40 or so hours). It’s great for folks who can spend that much time away from work, but it does have some drawbacks with regards to time commitment and also with regards to cost. Also many folks find that 40 straight hours of Oracle training can be a bit like drinking from a fire hose. With the Workforce Development Program at ACC we take a much more relaxed pace with 20 classes of 3 hours each (2 per week) for a total of 60 hours per class. At RFD we can build a timeline that works for you. Would you like three 4 hour days per week? Would you like two 12 hour days? Do you want to do 12 hours on Friday and Saturday and then another 12 hours on Sunday and Monday? Basically we can put together something that works for you as long as we don’t go over 12 hours per week per class.

The other difference is that when you take a class through Oracle Education (or one of it’s partners), you are connecting directly into servers that Oracle runs internally. This is nice as they tend to be very nice servers with lots of resources. Of course set up time for the organization offering the training is very low. You ask Oracle to provision the servers for your students and they do so. Very easy! However, there are some downsides. Once the class is over, your server is gone. This means that if you want to do some extra work or practice for the certification exams, you are on your own. At ACC and RFD we use Oracle VirtualBox to create a virtual environment for the training. While the default at ACC is to use the ACC classroom computers to run the VirtualBox training environment, you are free to use your own laptop if you wish. At RFD we can either use our computers or your computers. If you use your own computer you have the flexibility to work on the exercises and practice for the exams outside of class time. The downside, of course, is that your laptop or desktop is sometimes a bit slower than the Oracle internal servers. Sometimes this means that a lab exercise will take a bit longer to run.

If you have any questions about getting Oracle Education through the Workforce Development Program either from ACC or RFD, please feel free to reach out to me.