After a nice relaxing and sunny weekend with not much IT related activity, this week starts for me with a two day training on ISS SiteProtector. I didn’t receive training yet from ISS in the past so I was curious what the quality of their training would be. It turns out that it is just another boring product training. Time to rant.

I received official product trainings so far, if I remember correctly, for Check Point, BlueCoat, RSA, InfoBlox, Radware and TrendMicro . The only ones who were any good were Check Point and BlueCoat. I would bet that if I follow them now, they wouldn’t be any good either but I was younger, less experienced and easier to please in those days.
The main reason why I am not a fan of product oriented trainings is that every vendor seems to think that a training is no good unless it provides all of the following:

• A trainer who cannot answer all your (sometimes simple) questions (although I must say that the ISS dude does a pretty good job at answering questions)
• Powerpoint slides who contain at least 4 full length (15 words minimal) sentences making them impossible to focus on, let alone summarize the topic.
• Lab exercises which challenge exactly two of my brain cells. Anything which expands on the product’s advanced features and could possibly challenge the trainee is feared by the trainer.
• A certification which you can only take after you took the training.
• A course handout who counts at least 50+ pages per training day and explains everything in a matter my 9 months old nephew could understand.
• At least one co-student who has absolutely no clue about the topic at hand. (Seriously: Thinking that an IPv4 address can end in 256 when you are in an IPS course? Time to think about a career change dude.)

I would much rather prefer to lock myself in a room with a demo (license or appliance) of the product, the manual and play with it myself to prepare for the certification that our vendors demand from engineers. Of course, in most cases you cannot take the certification from the vendor unless you take the training…

The best training I attended so far, apart from my college education, was the SANS GCIH. No surprise that SANS is a vendor neutral training which is not product but technology and business oriented.

Just My 2 cents.