AIIM becomes IAPP Training Provider

I am pleased to announce that AIIM and IAPP have entered into a partnership agreement. As part of this agreement, AIIM will teach IAPP certification prep courses including the CIPP/US, CIPM, and CIPT. The inaugural AIIM-taught CIPP/US course is scheduled for October 3-4, 2017 at AIIM HQ in Silver Spring, MD and I will be teaching that course. More details on that course are available at http://www.aiim.org/Home/Education-Section/Public-Classes/2017-October-IAPP-SS.

AIIM ECM Master and ERM Master Classes Now Available Online

AIIM has offered ECM and ERM training since 1996. We've always offered students two ways to attend our Practitioner and Specialist courses: our instructor-led courses, and self-paced online courses. But the Master Class, with its in-class case study exercise and home case study assignment, has only been available as an instructor-led format.

Until now. I am very pleased to announce that we have put the ECM Master Class and ERM Master Class online. The Master Classes include 100% of the instructor-led content: The ECM/ERM Specialist, the Implementation, and the ECM/ERM Master Case Study. The Master Case Study portion consists of 5 new modules:

• The case study assignment background - GreenPowerOps for ECM, AIIMBank for ERM.
• 3 individual (optional) modules that provide students a chance to practice. Each module includes some exercises and a sample answer for each exercise. 
• The home case study module. This includes the assignments the student will choose from, as well as detailed information on how the home case study assignments are graded. As noted in the online materials, students should select ONE assignment and complete all the tasks on that assignment. 

Students who sign up for either Master Class will have access to the materials, the online exam, the in-class Case Study, and the at-home Case Study for six months.

The online Master Classes are a great solution for students with no travel budget or who cannot get approval to take the time off (including travel time). It's also great for students who do not live near one of our training locations (U.S., Toronto, London, Amsterdam) or training partners, or for whom our instructor-led course schedule just doesn't work. The price for the self-paced online ECM and ERM Master Classes has been set at USD $1,785.

And if you've already completed one or more of the Practitioner or Specialist components, and want to complete the Master Class, you now have an avenue to do this in a way that works with your schedule and recognizes your prior work. This allows you to upgrade your current designation to the ECM or ERM Master.

More importantly in my opinion, prior students who register for the ECM or ERM Master Class get ALL of the Master Class training materials. So if you took the ERM Practitioner in my first class in February 2006, you get access to all of the most current content as well as the Master Class case study content. If you are interested in this, send a note to training@aiim.org and, once we verify your previous course status, we will give you a discount code that drops the price to $895.

The ECM Master Online and ERM Master Online are available for registration immediately. Feel free to reach out to me at jwilkins@aiim.org if I can provide any additional information.

Ralph Losey: The Doors Are Thrown Open to all 85-Classes of the e-Discovery Team Training Program. Ralph has been one of the deans of e-discovery for more than a decade. I plan to go through this myself and rather sooner than later. From the blog post:

This kind of law school quality e-discovery education, if you could get it, would cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000. Our price is now – zero. It’s Free. (We used to charge $500 to cover overhead, but in 2017 switched to this free model.) Some day we may include vendor ads, but in the meantime, this is just an old lawyer’s legacy and payback to the legal profession. He now absorbs all of the costs of running the program.

I cannot recommend quickly enough that readers of this blog head over and take a look - this is one instance where what you're getting will likely be worth substantially more than what you're paying for it.

Note: I may have met Ralph once or twice in passing but I have no connections, business or otherwise, to him or his organization except an appreciation for what he's done over the years. I've followed his blog and Tweets for many years and, again, encourage readers to do the same.

AIIM Private Courses

In this post I'll explore one of the hidden gems AIIM offers, at least in my mind. Full disclosure: I run all the training at AIIM and, at least for classes in the U.S., I'm generally the instructor as well.

We periodically schedule public classes in the U.S., mostly at AIIM HQ in Silver Spring, MD. Most of these classes are for our ECM, ERM, BPM, and CIP Prep "deep dive" classes: 2-4 days of instructor-led, "butts-in-seats" discussion, lecture, and exercises. We also offer public courses in Canada (Toronto), the UK (London), and Europe (Amsterdam).

What you may not know is that we are also available to teach private courses. Basically the process is that you have a group of people you want to get some training. We work with you to schedule dates/times and location - most frequently in a training or conference room in your organization's building, though sometimes we use a nearby hotel or facility. We work to ensure that schedule, location, and content all meet your particular needs. We teach these courses all over the world and are happy to come to your location, region, or country!

So why would you schedule a private course? There are a number of benefits to this approach over our traditional public courses.

• Better control over the content. If your organization doesn't need X module, or wants to spend additional time on Y module, we can do that. We may also be able to tailor the discussions, etc. to your type of organization and location - I routinely teach at U.S. Federal Government agencies and can tailor the discussions to Federal IM and recordkeeping concerns such as FOIA. 
• Custom content. We can also "mix & match" among our courses to create exactly the learning experience you want. I did a 4-day private class last year that included modules from ERM, Information Governance, ECM, Implementation, Taxonomy, and SharePoint. We can also incorporate your training/trainers or develop custom training - for example, we can build content on email management, social media governance, the Managing Government Records Directive in the U.S.,  or other topics of interest. 
• Flexibility in scheduling. We had a course last year where a major holiday fell in the middle of the week. We made it work such that students were in class 2 days, took the holiday, and were back in class 2 more days.
• Cross-functional team training. Having us in-house makes it much easier for you to include staff that might not ordinarily be able to get away for 4-5 days or who have less personal interest but for whom the class is particularly important, such as IT, legal, or project managers.
• Flexibility in location. We go where the interest is; unfortunately, that means that unless you're in the DC area, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, London, or Amsterdam, your offerings are limited or require travel. With a private class we come to you. 
• Reduce or eliminate the travel cost. This is particularly true today, when travel budgets seem to be the first thing to be frozen or eliminated, and is more compelling the more people you have. If I come out to your site, you don't have to pay air, and hotel, and ground transport, and food, and everything else associated with a public class for each of your attendees.
• Significant cost savings for the actual training cost. We generally charge a per-day fee, either including travel or with travel billed extra, which can be significantly cheaper with higher numbers of attendees. If you have 10-15 people you want trained on a topic, it's definitely cheaper to do as a private course. 

If you're interested in more information on a private training course, please contact AIIM at training@aiim.org and we'll have Michelle (North America) or Angela (EMEA) follow up with you. You can also contact me directly at jwilkins@aiim.org for additional information.