Every two years, APNIC conducts an extensive survey of the Asia Pacific Internet community to find out what it thinks of the services and support APNIC provides.In this year’s survey, more than 1,000 members of the community from 40 different economies provided feedback.
Once again training was high on their list of priorities. When asked what priority APNIC should give to its different services, training was second only to the Whois database. When asked what APNIC should spend surplus funds on, community members said they’d like to see IPv6 promoted more and training costing less. This strong support for training has been a consistent theme in the APNIC surveys for many years and the Secretariat is already moving to respond in a positive way.
Much of the credit for the popularity and demand for APNIC training must go to our former training manager Champika Wijayatunga and the excellent team of trainers he led for more than a decade before leaving earlier this year to join the ICANN training program. Champ and his team travelled millions of miles, visited scores of countries and held thousands of high quality training sessions, clearly establishing APNIC as provider of world class technical training.
At the same time, the APNIC training team established an outstanding reputation for responsiveness – when members and partners asked for training, we were generally able to provide it on time and on target.
Looking ahead, while APNIC is firmly committed to maintaining that very high standard of responsiveness and technical quality, it is also determined to be more pro-active and develop training schedules on an annual basis in advance.
For 2015, APNIC will be publishing a training calendar which it will share with our members and the wider AP Internet community via the training website.
The focus will be on supporting NOG events and providing training where it’s needed most, especially those national communities still developing their Internet capacity.
When the 2015 calendar is published, APNIC will contact NOG communities and invite them to get involved. By being more responsive and pro-active in this way, APNIC is determined to further improve its training services. And there is one other important piece of news from APNIC training. In November, Kevin Meynell from the UK will join the team as its new Training Manager.
As always, we’d be keen to hear your thoughts, so please do leave a comment below!
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.