How to Solve the Computer Puzzle : Training Facilities Hustle to Keep Pace With a Gadget Hard to Bring to Heel
Despite the computer’s penetration of our society, only a small percentage of us have become friendly with the creatures.
Computers have a way of discouraging even the motivated user. “I don’t think there’s any other consumable item that people buy that requires so much training,” says Bill Hoffman, co-owner of Hoffman Computer Systems in Anaheim. “People perceive a computer as a commodity; it’s not.”
Says Michael Brinda, president of New Horizons Computer Learning Center in Santa Ana, “You’re sold the machine and have an elevated sense of how easy it will be.”
For people at all levels of familiarity with computers, Orange County schools and businesses offer classes ranging from a few hours to six months that can be combined in a variety of ways to take you from total ignorance to expertise without excessive agony.
Hands-on instruction has at least one overwhelming benefit: Procedures that may take hours to deduce from a manual can be often taught in a few minutes.
An inexpensive route to learning the computer lies in Orange County’s community college system. Semester-long classes walk students through the basics, giving the student plenty of time to become comfortable with the computer.
At Orange Coast College, which has more than 250 computers for training, classes fill to capacity every semester.
“We have two missions,” says Bob Wilson, dean of the Business Education Division. “First, to provide education for students going on to a four-year school. Second, providing technical skills for people to get a job or to increase knowledge for the job market.”
Classes are equally divided between beginners and people coming in for upgrading and retraining, Wilson says. Courses in such applications as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 are extremely popular. He calls “C” programming “monstrous” right now in its appeal to engineers and aspiring programmers. And in addition to its IBM PC-compatible computers, Orange Coast College has an Apple Macintosh lab.
Computers have even infiltrated the typing courses at Orange Coast. “Our typing classes are taught on IBM PC’s. We have no typewriters,” Wilson says. “For the first three minutes, students are panicked, and then they love it. They see they’re learning practical, real-world situations.”
The retention rate in the community college’s computer classes is almost 70%, which Wilson notes is extremely good. “We keep a pretty good pulse on what the business community wants. As business quits using programs, we start phasing them out.”
Similar computer courses are offered at Coastline, Saddleback and the other county community colleges. Most of the schools also offer short courses ranging from one day to nine weeks through their community service programs.
A number of private learning centers have sprung up throughout the county to meet the rising demand for computer training.
* The New Horizons Computer Learning Center, which Michael Brinda started in 1982, offers 640 classes covering roughly 100 different subjects, delivered in one- and two-day bites. Prices range from $49 to $348. The center also offers a club program where, for $598, students can take all the classes they want for six months.
The ages of New Horizons students range across the board, Brinda says. The common denominator is that they’re employed. “Most clients are beginners to an application, although most are somewhat computer literate,” Brinda says. “The majority of New Horizon clients are from small- and medium-sized companies. Companies will hire us to do training for them.”
New Horizons is an authorized education center for such manufacturers as Apple Computers and Novell, which distributes a popular local area network. “Novell classes are growing, growing, growing,” Brinda says.
Instructors use not only computers and textbooks, but projectors that show monitor screens on the wall. The average class size is about 12, though some have more than 20 students.
New Horizons’ classes center largely on applications and operating systems. “We don’t teach programming. You can’t teach that in substance in a day or two,” Brinda says.
New Horizons also provides day-long training courses at such schools as the UC Irvine, Rio Hondo, Cerritos and Pasadena City College, usually through the community services division, for $89 a day.
* At the Computer Learning Center in Anaheim, the program is oriented toward students looking to develop a solid grounding in one of three areas of specialization. Most students are full time, attending either day or evening classes for six months, says Al Nederhood, director of the CLC.
Students can choose to focus on programming, computer operations or microcomputer systems. The most popular concentration is mainframe operations and management, Nederhood says. Students learn to work on an IBM mainframe computer similar to what they’ll find at many mid-sized and large firms.
The typical student at CLC is looking for salable skills and, often, a new career. Sixty to 70% of the 200-plus students are working, but they’re not employer sponsored, Nederhood says. “We’re looking for the full-time student who wants more than an introduction. We’re more intensive and in-depth. We’re not interested in leading edge. We offer what’s going to help our students get jobs.”
CLC maintains a separate department of graduate services, and such employers as Rockwell, TRW, Hughes and Home Club regularly interview CLC’s graduates.
The programming and operations tracks cost $6,150 each, while the microcomputer systems specialist track is $5,775.
* Someone who has just bought a personal computer may be able to find training through the store where he or she bought the equipment. This wasn’t always true in the earlier days of the personal computer, when buyers were often left to fend for themselves, and which is why so many personal computers are gathering dust.
These days, the personal computer marketplace has grown increasingly competitive, and training has become a more important factor in selling a system, says Ralph Cooper, the educational manager at Hoffman Computer Systems in Anaheim.
The store runs regular classes to train its clients in computers and software, having found that users often had great difficulty setting up the systems on their own. “That’s where the Macintosh shines; there’s not so much jargon, and the interface is similar from one program to the next,” Cooper says.
Hoffman’s class sizes range from one-on-one to groups of 20 or 30. Some students are looking to learn to use what they have just purchased. Others are seeking to familiarize themselves with applications programs that are widely used in their fields. “People come in to make themselves more marketable,” Cooper says.
Mike Soto, Hoffman Computer’s sales manager for IBM-compatible systems, teaches AutoCad, a program for civil engineering. Many of the engineers Soto encounters have a basic drafting and design background but are not yet computer literate.
Hoffman’s instructors have found that if they make training goal-oriented, that is, orient training sessions to actual projects in which the students are involved, understanding comes more quickly. “We show them what they want to see, with their own work,” Soto says.
Cooper often finds that people new to computing have trouble distinguishing between the computer’s operation and the job they want done.
In one common scenario, for example, the owner of a new business may be trying to learn both how to operate the computer and how to handle the accounting for his business. He doesn’t have enough background in either to know where the computing part ends and the accounting begins.
As Cooper puts it, “The computer will not make an accountant out of you.”
To the minimally trained customer, this doesn’t seem to make sense. “We were getting continual calls not on the hardware, not on the software, but about how to run their businesses.”
When any dealer sells a software package, the new user may find himself with a pile of manuals and absolutely no idea of how to set up the software for his business. When Hoffman Computers sells a specialized program such as an accounting package, it recommends consultants who can set up the program, in essence tuning it to the user’s hardware.
While computers will occasionally frustrate their users, the concepts that the average person needs to use a personal computer for, say, word processing or spreadsheets, are not especially difficult to grasp. Classes offer shortcuts through the learning process, reducing the trial-and-error floundering that makes learning from the manual so tedious.
