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Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Tech Citizenship
nSight combines strategy to fill training seats, teach unemployed
By Rodney H. Brown
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The Burlington company nSight Inc. has offered technical training classes for years as one leg of its services, which also include staffing, document publishing and e-learning. But the economic downturn has meant that the number of trainees that companies send to nSight has dwindled, and Tom LeBlanc, president of nSight, was faced with almost empty classrooms.
“We thought, ‘why not open it up to the unemployed?’” he said.
Now, instead of having two or three people in a class designed to handle 15 to 20 learning, say, Adobe InDesign techniques, the classes are filling up with people in between assignments, looking to enhance their skill sets in hopes of making themselves more marketable on the job market, and nSight is swallowing the costs. After all, LeBlanc said, “We are already paying for the trainers and for the space.”
The company didn’t want to waste the talent of the contract trainers it hires for its training seminars on people who weren’t ready to receive the information, so it teamed up with The Career Place in Woburn, which is vetting candidates and sending over people for whom technical training has value. One of those is Vicki Blake, recently laid off from a marketing manager job. She was attending a seminar at the Career Place when she heard about the program nSight is offering, the Training Rewards Program. Career Place identified her as a possible fit for the program.
“They sent me an invitation to come to the seminar to see what they are offering because my background fit the classes,” Blake said.
That background was a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and an MBA from Babson College, and years of creative work for firms including IDG and the Cambridge firm she was recently laid off from, Daratech Inc. In addition, her focus in those companies had been in the tech field.
“Most of the companies I was involved in were in high tech engineering software,” Blake said.
NSight is offering the attendees from the Career Place five one-day training classes, and Blake has already picked out most of hers.
“I have signed up for two Dreamweaver sessions — a basic and advanced — and I am planning on signing up for an XHTML class and a CSS class. They have the writing module but I have an MBA and I feel I’ve got that part covered.”
Filling up the empty seats doesn’t do much for nSight beyond making them feel good about giving back to the community, LeBlanc said. The company, which employs 35 people full time and has a roster of about 4,000 contract trainers, has been profitable every year for the past 10 years, mainly because it has so many different divisions and when one is down, the others come up. Still, the training arm has been the low man on the totem pole for years, and LeBlanc wants to change that.
“Historically we’ve looked at our training business as a little bit of a marketing tool or a side business, but I want to bring that to the forefront and use it for the community,” he said. “Absolutely I think this is a long term engagement.”
To that end, nSight has set aside 25 percent of all of its training spots for the unemployed. That means the company has about 175 seats available across its various seminars through the end of the year. LeBlanc hopes that nSight’s program will inspire other companies in its space to help out while the economy is staggering its way to a slow recovery.
“I just think more companies need to step up,” he said. “It would be nice if others did.”
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