See also our page about the trainers.

Openness

All our training materials (lectures, technical labs, lab data) are freely available on http://free-electrons.com/training under a Free Documentation license. Except for materials which are still being created, you can check whether our trainings correspond to your needs or not.

You are free to make copies of the training materials for any number of colleagues, actually for anyone!

If people in your organization have sufficient skills but no time to create their own materials, they can use ours and train your teams by themselves!

By ordering Free Electrons trainings, you also contribute to funding their development and improvement. Doing this, you contribute to spreading the knowledge about embedded Linux and Free Software. This attracts more developers and contributors, for everyone's best profit, including yours!

Useful materials

Traditional training companies only give you paper copies of their training materials. Ours are freely available as electronic documents, which makes them very easy to use as references. Doing a keyword search just takes a few seconds.

Free updates and upgrades. By accessing our on-line materials you automatically get our latest updates and improvements, and you can learn about useful new features, tools or references.

Up to date learning and materials

We live in an environment which evolves rapidly. This is particularly true with the Linux kernel and Free Software community websites. Hence our materials and practical labs are constantly kept up to date. You do not learn about obsolete features and you only practise with recent kernel versions.

We have also developed a script to detect broken hyperlinks in our documents. This is another way to guarantee that our materials are really useful.

As they are freely available on the Internet, our training materials are read by many people. We regularly get corrections and comments.

Flexibility

If you find that some of your needs are not addressed (thanks to the public materials), you can ask us to add them. You do not realize this during the class, when it's too late.

Unlike in standard training sessions (“One size fits all”), you can easily adapt the schedule and training contents according to your requirements. Of course, you can ask us not to cover topics you are not interested in.

Practicing with your own boards. If enough boards are available, and if Linux is already supported on them (at least serial and network drivers), we can use them during the practical labs.

Training techniques

Free Electrons practical labs are not like the push button ones found too often, in which you just passively follow instructions.

Instead, our practical labs instructions are very clear about what goals are, but do not tell much about how to achieve them. You really understand some things when you practice them, and our labs try to put you in situations that reveal details you may not have understood well.

When this happens, the audience can go back to lecture materials and ask questions to the instructor. That's much better than when questions arise later on the real job, and the instructor is no longer there.

Cost efficiency

While most traditional training companies charge you on a per trainee basis, we just charge you the same cost whatever the number of participants. This is fair because the amount of work for the trainer doesn't depend much on the number of participants.

Thanks to this, if your organization has more than 5 people to train, you will find our prices very competitive. For 5 people or less, as traditional training companies require a minimum number of participants anyway, you will find that our offer is still competitive.

Evaluation forms and report

Here is our evaluation form: http://free-electrons.com/doc/training/evaluation_form.pdf. Do not hesitate to ask us if you wish more questions to be asked to participants.

Of course, we will not use our evaluation form if you company prefers to use its own.

At the end of the session, whatever evaluation form is used, we will send you a detailed evaluation report consolidating evaluation scores and comments from all participants. In 5 minutes, you can assess the usefulness of the training session. You will receive this report within 1 week.

We also bring an attendance sheet (unless you have your own) and make sure that all participants sign in every day. If we cannot return this sheet on the last day, we send it to you together with the evaluation report.

Transparent participant feedback

See our customers list.

At Free Electrons, we do not only quote enthusiastic training participants! We give you access to all the comments from our audience. It's difficult to find more transparent offers!

It takes a lot of time and work to build a good course. Even though we already achieve a pretty good level of customer satisfaction, we are still working hard on areas that still need improving.

Being fully transparent with customer ratings and feedback also challenges us to achieve best customer satisfaction at each session.

Environmental friendliness

There's more than expressing empathy for penguins!

Free Electrons gives paper copies of training materials, because they are still the easiest way to take personal notes and go back later to what you learned. However, to reduce the impact on our environment, all our materials are printed on recycled paper. Producing our recycled paper requires 20 times less trees, 100 times less water and 3 times less energy than ordinary paper.

Free Electrons trainers use public transportation whenever an efficient and suitable service is available. When car rental is the only efficient solution, we always choose vehicles with the lowest emission rates.

Free Electrons supports the Linux Ecology HOWTO and has made significant contributions to it, in particular by adding experience from embedded Linux system development.