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Mark Jeggo
Ricky Doyle

We're "an IT training service for IT people"


Having worked in the IT department for a number of years in different roles and different organisations there are a lot of similarities. One of these was around training, when we asked our colleagues what courses they had been on these were their responses:

Training? I haven’t been on a course for a long while.

I knew most of it so it was not that enjoyable.

The lunch was good, and so was being out of the office!

IT managers would comment that having their team numbers reduced for a 5 day training course was challenging not to mention the training and sundry costs associated with it. However they also understood that it was necessary to keep their teams skills updates as best they could.


This is why we decided to do something about it and change the approach. Our first idea was to build an online hands on environment for practical skills development, hence the creation of Practice-Labs. We felt that when individuals had completed their traditional courses they still lacked the practical aptitude for what they had learnt. Normally once the course finishes you are sent on way with the training manual and a pat on the back, we feel that learning should not finish once the course does. Our Practice-Labs are now used by some by some e-learning providers to add the practical element to their online training.


Next was determining the actual areas that needed training, that is when SMART came to fruition. IT manager do have training budgets of varying sizes but sometimes do know where to allocate those funds. SMART was a way of saying define what you have, assess how well they know it and deliver the relevant training for the weak areas.


The training platform is the baby of our services. Having been in the training industry a little while now; we saw that the products out there were not IT centric and focused more on business and soft skills needs. We wanted a platform that is essentially a learning management system (LMS) that integrated our Practice-Labs, training content, live chat, knowledge base, collaboration and social learning into one place.


Mark Jeggo (Co-founder of Practice-IT Training Services)


I have almost 15 years experience in the IT field, having worked for a number of corporates and investment banks in the city of London.


I have a wealth of strong networking and firewall skills and I even passed my Checkpoint certifications using our Practice-Labs technology.


"Many companies just don’t have test labs or when they do, you find that half of the equipment is missing or cables not present etc because they have been used to repair issues in the production environment". They are also far from practical having to go in to a dark room somewhere that has the lab seperated from the production LAN.


Practice-Labs gives you the ability to easily get access to a clean working environment without the hassle and time consuming process of cabling up equipment, or sitting in that dark room. Perfect!


"Quite often I use the labs to test out theories and ideas or test that commands and features are available on the different Cisco code versions.".


I always enjoy a challenge and love to get feedback on new features that could be implemented in the service.


"As the main developer at Practice-IT, I want the service to be a tool IT professionals and beginners alike can use as an aide to further their career". I have had some great feedback from indivuduals who use the service, and it's warming to know that the service is helping people make their careers move forward!


Drop me an email if you want to chat, or let me know if you have any ideas that would aide your study.

Ricky Doyle (Co-founder of Practice-IT Training Services)


I fell into IT at the end of the 90's, Y2K seemed a good time to get started.


I Worked my way up through the IT ranks from the support desk to Technical IT Consultant.


Having worked for a range of different companies and roles I have gained a very diverse skill set ranging from firewall technologies to server backups.


I have always been interested in trying keeping my skills up to date but it was not always easy to do so. Gone are the days of throwing a server into the domain and have a "play" to understand it. As IT has become an integral part of most organisations operations the change control and cost saving era has stifled development somewhat. That is why we decided to come up our solutions.


I am now focused on developing the necessary business skills to make Practice-IT Training Services a success. We are always learning new things and trying to implement them in the business which hopefully makes for a better experience for our clients.


If you have any comments, issues or just want to run something by me please feel free to email me, contact me on LinkedIn http://uk.linkedin.com/in/rickydoyle or phone on +44 (0) 207 631 3716.