Author: Mark Van Heythuysen

Why Choose Raising the Bar?

  • Expert Instructors: Our courses are led by industry professionals with extensive experience in data analysis and business intelligence. They bring real-world insights and practical knowledge to the classroom, ensuring you gain valuable skills that can be immediately applied in your work.
  • Flexible Learning Options: We understand that everyone has different learning preferences and schedules. That’s why we offer multiple ways to attend our courses:
  • Face-to-Face: Join us at our training venue in Sydney or, have our instructors come to your site for a personalised training experience.
  • Webinars: Attend courses via Microsoft Teams, from the comfort of your home or office. This option provides the same high-quality training with the added convenience of remote access. This is a great option for organisations that have staff spread out across the country or even overseas.
  • Customised Training: For group training, we can tailor our courses to meet the specific needs of your organisation. Whether you’re looking to improve basic Excel skills or dive deep into advanced Power BI functionalities, we can customise the curriculum to align with your goals.
  • Hands-On Learning: Our courses are designed to be highly interactive, with plenty of hands-on exercises and real-world examples. This approach ensures that you not only understand the concepts but also know how to apply them effectively.
  • Ongoing Support: Learning doesn’t stop when the course ends. We provide ongoing email and telephone support for up to 12 months, to help you continue your learning journey. This support applies to the level of the course attended.

A Couple of the Courses Offered

  • Excel Training: From basic functions and formulas to advanced data analysis and visualization techniques, our Excel courses cover it all.
  • Power BI Training: Learn how to create stunning visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and leverage Power BI’s powerful data modeling capabilities.

Investing in your team’s data skills with Raising the Bar will not only boost productivity but also drive better decision-making and business outcomes. Join us and unlock the full potential of your data today!

Power BI

Raising the Bar offer Power BI training courses.

Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool developed by Microsoft. It allows users to connect to various data sources, transform raw data into meaningful insights, and create interactive reports and dashboards.

If you have a group of staff that would benefit from learning how to manipulate and analyse data, one of our Power BI courses will benefit you and your team.

Once a good grasp of Power BI is achieved, you and your team can look forward to creating meaningful, interactive reports and allow you to have visual analytics available at your fingertips.

Take a look at our Power BI Level 1 course outline.

A group can be just a few people or up to 10 or 12 and we can deliver the training on our site, your site or online via Zoom or MS Teams.

Some recent feedback from our clients:

  • Geoff was a friendly and relaxed presenter and always open to questions.
  • All of the course was relevant to me. Well presented and will enable me to edit some existing reports to make them simpler and add more detail. Geoff did a great job and was easy to follow.
  • Great introductory course to Power BI – Will be looking at doing the Day 2 course if approved.

SQL Courses

SQL courses are available as public sessions or group training.

We provide two tiers: SQL Essentials and SQL Data Management.

For over ten years, we have been offering SQL training to a wide range of clients.

A prominent investment management software firm with several Australian offices has enlisted our services for group training in both SQL levels. We have conducted sessions both in-person and virtually via Zoom and MS Teams.

Feedback has consistently been positive; here’s what our clients have to say:

  • All parts of the course are useful as I have seen all the knowledge gained can be applied in the workplace.
  • Perfect session covering all the essentials. Craig has been wonderful.
  • I enjoyed it, I’ve had some experience using SQL but only the basic concepts and this course helped me consolidate my understanding and provided the ‘why’ on syntax arrangements.
  • Course was very well presented at a good pace with plenty of prepared diagrams and examples that made it easy to follow along.

Large Corporate Group Training

Raising the Bar were engaged to deliver Excel training to groups of staff working in the Commercial Retail Management Business Services team within a company that owns and operates a large portfolio of shopping centres.

For this type of training, students are encouraged to bring their own examples along so that they can be incorporated into the sessions, to ensure that the training is as relevant as possible.

These Excel Intermediate courses were delivered virtual classroom-style, via MS Teams which is one of many training delivery options that we offer for group training.

The training sessions were so well received, they have already scheduled an Excel Advanced course.

Here is what some of the participants said:

  • Fantastic! Very helpful. Thanks.
  • EXCELLENT! Craig was a fantastic presenter. Very easy to follow and very helpful.
  • All of the content was relevant and, Craig was a great presenter. Easy to follow. I feel very confident now and am looking forward to trying out my new skills.
  • Excellent trainer who accommodated all of the attendees and kept checking back in to ensure people were on track. Great pace and easy to ask questions.

Microsoft 365 Skills

Improving Efficiency

Raising the Bar are the chosen provider for some of the local councils around Sydney.

For one of the councils, we have recently been engaged to deliver ongoing Computer Fundamentals training to staff who work outdoors.

We cover some of the basics such as:

Apart from the traditional classroom-style delivery, some candidates require a more focussed approach and Raising the Bar offer a variety of ways to accommodate this. We offer one-on-one and roving training to address specific needs of each person.

These sessions have been extremely well received and the feedback has been very pleasing.

Case Study: Combining Webinar and Face to Face Training

WebinarThe Requirement:

An integrator Upgraded their client from Windows XP and Office 2003 to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and engaged ‘Raising the Bar’ to up-skill their client’s staff and help them understand the key differences between the two versions of MS Office and the Windows platforms. The client also uses Project and they were upgraded from Project 2003 to Project 2010. The team, located in three different states of Australia were identified as being quite computer literate and are a Company of Project Managers. Continue reading “Case Study: Combining Webinar and Face to Face Training”

Case Study: Office 2003 to 2010 Upgrade Training

A local government organisation were upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Office 2003 to Office 2010.

Whilst the organisation has approximately 300 + staff in total, initially there were approximately 80 staff members to have the new platform and applications rolled out to them in a specific week. The 80 staff members were made up of three target groups:

To minimise the impact that the changeover might have, it was identified that the initial target groups would require some training designed to give users an overview of what the new desktop would look like, along with some basic knowledge of how to navigate within the applications that they predominately use: Excel, Word and Outlook.

In designing a solution for our client, we needed to consider timeframes and budget and we worked closely with the key stakeholders within the business to ensure that the end result was a true partnership.

The Requirement:

A local government organisation were upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Office 2003 to Office 2010.

Whilst the organisation has approximately 300 + staff in total, initially there were approximately 80 staff members to have the new platform and applications rolled out to them in a specific week.  The 80 staff members were made up of three target groups:

To minimise the impact that the changeover might have, it was identified that the initial target groups would require some training designed to give users an overview of what the new desktop would look like, along with some basic knowledge of how to navigate within the applications that they predominately use: Excel, Word and Outlook.

In designing a solution for our client, we needed to consider time-frames and budget and we worked closely with the key stakeholders within the business to ensure that the end result was a true partnership. Continue reading “Case Study: Office 2003 to 2010 Upgrade Training”