A lot of trainers only give office hours or extended office hours support; not many go late into the evening (after 8-9pm) or cover weekends properly. Avoid those companies who use 'out-of-hours' call-centres - with your call-back scheduled for typical office hours. This is useless when you're stuck and need an answer now.

If you look properly, you'll find professional training packages who recommend and use online direct access support 24x7 - including evenings, nights and weekends. Unless you insist on direct-access round-the-clock support, you'll quickly find yourself regretting it. You may not need it during the night, but you may need weekends, early mornings or late evenings.

Usually, trainers will provide piles of reference manuals and workbooks. This can be very boring and not really conducive to taking things in. Years of research and study has repeatedly verified that connecting physically with our study, is far more likely to produce long-lasting memories.

Interactive full motion video with demonstrations and practice sessions beat books hands-down. And you'll actually enjoy doing them. Every company that you look at must be pushed to demo some simple examples of the type of training materials they provide. You're looking for evidence of tutorial videos and demonstrations and many interactive sections.

Some companies only have access to just online versions of their training packages; while you can get away with this much of the time, think what will happen if your access to the internet is broken or you get intermittent problems and speed issues. It's much safer to rely on actual CD or DVD ROMs that will solve that problem.

You should look for an authorised exam preparation system included in your course. Because a lot of IT examination boards come from the United States, it's essential to understand how exam questions will be phrased and formatted. It's not sufficient just answering any old technical questions - it's essential that you can cope with them in the proper exam format. Clearly, it's very important to make sure you are completely prepared for your final certified exam before taking it. Practicing mock-up tests will help to boost your attitude and will avoid you getting frustrated with failed exams.

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