Fabian Associates - Our Company Philosophy

A Strategic Approach - Flexibility - Low Cost Training

Mark Robbins, the founder of Fabian Associates, has worked for many years in the fields of IT and Computer Science, both in industry and academia. For over 10 years, he was a freelance project manager directing nationwide strategic projects for the BBC, the NHS, the MoD and the Home Office. After this he became a freelance lecturer in Computer Science and Management, teaching at a number of London universities.

Fabian Associates was set up after extensive market research showed that there was a need for a new type of Training business:

• Organisations these days are rightly making far greater demands from their IT and management training, looking for a far more strategic, holistic approach. Courses have to be integrated, because of the more technically integrated nature of modern IT solutions and because organisations are now looking for training providers to devise entire training strategies for their staff. Technical training has become far more than just a question of providing one-off courses as required.



• Organisations are also looking for a far more customised approach. Courses must be designed around their needs and they want to be able to join in the design process.



• At the same time, as a result of the tightened IT budgets of the early part of the decade, businesses are also looking for far greater value for money. No longer are they prepared to spend thousands on courses of uncertain relevance. Many small businesses, under the pressure of more integrated customer-supplier relationships, are now for the first time also looking for IT and Management training, and many of these are certainly not in a position to pay the excessive rates normally charged by the traditional providers.

So, here we have a complex set of demands to reconcile. Greater customisation and design flexibility, the ability to readily link courses into an overall strategy - yet all this at a cheaper price. How are we to square this circle?

The way forward came by adopting two innovative approaches. Firstly through the application of a new scientific approach to course design and secondly through the adoption by Fabian Associates of a sophisticated business model.

First, our scientific approach. Fabian Associates is using its knowledge of teaching research and its academic contacts to apply the principles of advanced Learning Design (LD) and Educational Modelling Languages (EML) to business and technical training. In essence, this modularises courses, allowing individual learning components to be grouped into many different packages, be they individual courses or entire staff development suites. It does so in a way that allows the design process to be sufficiently simple for the customer to be able to share in the process - yet remains flexible enough to meet the most specific, detailed needs. This gives us the ability to customise and to devise over-arching strategies that we were after, but at the same time makes the whole process straightforward - and therefore much less expensive.

Secondly, we went for the leanest form of business organisation we could devise. Fabian Associates does not want to generate the overheads associated with most Systems Training organisations - the large premises, the large number of back-up staff and all the costly paraphernalia of the traditional company - but at the same time wants to have the resources to deliver a wide and expanding portfolio of courses. Hence it makes use of a virtual organisation structure:

• We are developing strategic partnerships with other cutting-edge training businesses able to provide courses that complement our own suite. We already work with Intelligenesis, a leading Learning Design consultancy and other partnerships are in the pipeline.



• We don't employ full-time teachers, but use Associates, a group of highly experienced and high-quality teachers. They act as freelance partners who contribute to both teaching and design as necessary but do not constitute a permanent overhead.

This approach complements the first - it enables us to maximize our range and flexibility, yet also allows us to keep our costs down.

So, if you want customised, strategic and inexpensive training, come to Fabian Associates.

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