hi everyone welcome to glide chat this one's about glide fast consulting university or as we call it gcu i'm alex darby the director of training for glide fast kind of handle all things training including this program that uh we are running the first run of it actually is going on right now so we've cut out of work left the students hanging in order to be able to talk to you guys about this i've been in servicenow space for eight years about and been at live fast for going on a thousand days thousand terrific days just basically running all things kind of training and helping out where i can with anything related to our clients in training and now our new associate technical consultants and their training uh and i'll pass this off to diana to introduce herself thank you alex hi everyone my name is i'm the training program manager here at glidefest consulting i work with custom training projects i manage our internal and external trainings and as well as the back end of this glidefast consulting university program that would launch it's been very exciting i'm involved in the back end again of the activities i've been in the servicenow space i would say for about eight years i think alex i think we've been about the space for about the same amount of time and at glide fest for two and a half years so it's been a little bit um working with everyone and now we'll pass the intro to derrick thank you diana uh hello my name is derek b heunen i am a instructor here for glide fast consulting university and a senior technical consultant i've only been in the servicenow space for about two years so thankfully i have a wealth of experience behind me to help me and yeah i'll pass it off to matt hey everyone i am matt taylor i'm one of the service delivery managers here at uh glidefast and i am also one of the instructors for the glidefast consulting university technical consultant program i've been working in servicenow space for about two years i've been in i.t for almost 10 now and uh perfect that is our team that uh we've sort of taken uh what we call glide fast uh university and uh made it really big uh so the way that the whole thing started was back in april two great companies came together uh glidefast and cloud fires and the cloud fires company their junior development program was generally how they hired new people coming in so they would give people opportunities that didn't have servicenow experience you know maybe had a little computer program programming background or we're just proficient or eager people to learn bring them on and the truly unique thing about the program is bring them on as employees and then train them for the the baseline is 90 days but really it's the training process you know i kind of think of it as like a training hospital if you've ever experienced those where you're literally on the job trained with other people you have a senior and a junior so we really took their idea which was one of the fundamentals of that company and then put it on steroids right so they would have two to three different juniors or associate tcs at a time we decided that why not do 15 to 17. so we uh started with uh 17 or 16 17 depending on when their start dates were right after the fourth of july we thought that was a good sort of independence day thing to do and it's a 90-day program that really came about based on a couple things right you know you get to a level within servicenow you get to a certain size of a company where you can actually start doing good for you know in our case ohio is where we're starting out but we're planning on expanding where we take people that you know we're not too stringent on requirements you don't have to have a college degree you don't have to have been in you know there's really no requirements other than you know we do prefer a little bit of a computer programming background which could just be they play a lot of video games or it could be that they've built their own kind of computer at home or they understand how the internet works or they've maybe done a little web design in college their sophomore year or whatever they generally have some type of background that's definitely beneficial but it doesn't have to be you know could just be motivated extremely motivated person so we we sort of focused on that you know that we we don't have to have somebody who's got a computer programming degree they don't have to have five years of servicenow experience before they get hired glide fast they can come into this program learn from our experts in our teaching methodology in order to be able to become you know producing members within our organization but also introduce them into an ecosystem which i'm sure as most of you watching this podcast agree is endless at this point right there's stuff that i read on linkedin where there's going to be a 2 million developer deficit within the next two years so we really want to make sure the ecosystem has what its needs and then also use that ecosystem to provide people with lives that they would have never expected based on you know the current demands that you'd see like on a linkedin or by other companies but let me pass this off to diana for your take on kind of what this is all about what the whole program is about well it was a great introduction as to what we're doing and how it all started with cloud buyers um so the great thing about this program is that we are giving those who are interested in starting their career maybe it's a career change maybe it's an early career the opportunity to come on during glide fast one of the best elite partners or servicenow and just learn from the best we have every person that works at gladfest it's just an expert at what they do and so coming on learning from the best on the call we have derek who and matt of course who are one of the full-time trainers working directly with their associate tc's it just provides an overall a great opportunity to get that career going in tech specifically in servicenow become that good technical consultant um not just on lecture of okay this is servicenow we're going to take this class we're going to go through that curriculum but you're also getting hands-on practical experience just learning from the best and that's one of the best things about this we're giving those with zero background or experience the opportunity to learn and become a tc in the servicenow space so i personally love that i think it's a great thing we're doing and now with our associate tc's i mean there are a great group of folks that are so excited to learn and just become a great employee of glasfest and then eventually a tc2 for the ecosystem so that's my take on it i've been involved in the back end of course i'm not working directly with the associate tc's but it's been a great opportunity i would like to hear more now from derek who is on the line working every day with these associate tc's what is your take on this program derrick yeah i think this program is something truly incredible having gone through the cloud pyres version of it so seeing it in its infancy it allowed me to jump start my career in tech i've always been kind of a nerdy programmer guy and i've been looking for my way into the field and the economy and the ecosystem so to be able to have this low barrier of entry if you're passionate if you're dedicated if you're a problem solver and you care about you know providing something meaningful to people then you will thrive here and you'll be able to jump into this i.t space and truly build amazing things and work on incredible projects so if you can't tell i'm madly in love with it and yeah i'll pass it off to matt what's your take yeah now this has been a pretty wild ride you know derek and i started on the same day learning all this stuff together we've been kind of in the trenches of figuring out how to use this platform together for quite a while and to to be here trying to pass on the lessons we've learned along the way to the next you know group of developers getting started in this career path is is pretty amazing you know i have i've had a lot of crazy awesome experiences in the it space over the last couple of years working with servicenow and just seeing what what it can do you know it can facilitate a lot of really interesting and cool business processes and kind of feed that creative outlet to take a bunch of you know tools and build something that you know you had never imagined before and getting the opportunity to to teach that to people with an interest and uh sort of a creative bent in not only i.t but um you know the creative space of building and creating things has has been pretty wonderful yeah and just to point out to everybody you know we made it clear derek and matt are products of the program at cloud fires you know when it was on its smaller level and you know one of the so we had a merger right you guys absorbed that i'm sure one of the things with the mergers there's always a lot of stress and anxiety over what is this new company like what's the old company like what's going to change about my job and things like that and this was a significant change for glidefast right coming in and then being able to take this cloud pyres program and then multiply it was something that all of us were you know we're not sure how this is going to work out to this level of scale and uh the things that have been you know pretty consistent which is consistently a reason why we're being successful so far now coach for just a month in is it's on site right so we've we have trainers that are dedicated to teaching pods for lack of a better word of five to six students on site together in the same building all of the time so you can really and i've tried similar programs where we've been remote we haven't really cracked that code yet on how for that to be successful but this being on site what we're seeing is everybody's bonding you know all the students are but becoming friends with each other just after a month they're really into the program we've had a lot of feedback you know we've been able to adjust the program on the fly which is another amazing thing we kind of attack the learning in three different stages uh you know the classic classroom-led sort of teaching which we rely on servicenow for so servicenow trusts glide fast to be an authorized training partner so we deliver classes for them like publicly you know like you would go attend to class and pay for it we do that a lot but then we take those classes and we put them into this program so we have this one learning style which is a classroom approach and you are on a familiar that's like you have training instances that are servicenow instances you go through a book you do labs you learn the basics of servicenow but then a second thing we do is we have real requirements that we well not exactly real but real to a to a degree uh that they came from actual clients either of cloud tires or of glide fast that they complete right so that's the next level they take that knowledge they've learned through a textbook through basically being told and then they apply that to requirements that they're going to have to actually do in the real world in addition to taking advantage of other great free training that's out there from servicenow chuck tomasi's video series on javascript if you haven't watched that that's required reading for anybody in servicenow we use that we use the developer site basically whatever we get our hands on it's been now learning about 600 free courses on there we use all that material and we bundle that together with a dedicated trainer who helps them walk through all of that and then our final piece will be like literally putting them through a project with a client where we'll sort of simulate being clients they have to take down requirements and complete them go through the process of development demonstrate what they've done and that will sort of be their final not tests say the final learning experience before they're released into the client world where of course you know they'll be with senior level trainers as they go throughout but literally after three months they'll have gone from somebody who's never logged into servicenow to being able to move things with an update set into from a dev to a test environment for a client project it's just really exciting and you know the experience of the folks that are with me on this podcast have allowed it to happen to where we can literally pivot on the fly okay this isn't working for learning let's go this way so there's a lot of feedback that's been coming through that we've changed on the fly but overall i would say you know if you're interested in joining this you just have to have a desire to learn you have to be focused right it's not easy this is not an easy program you're coming in to learn a whole new piece of software in 90 days and then expected you know you're an employee of ours so it's a job that you you have to do so it's not for the faint of heart but if you have dedication you have to know a little bit about computers then come and talk to us because we will definitely be doing this again yeah and if you are listening to this podcast watching us on youtube you can apply by going to our company website glidefest.com within the resources section is the tab there will be a link to glidefast consulting university and within that website then you can go on and submit your application excellent we hope to hear from you guys [Music] you