Company training - In house or outsourced

[nharper]

company info
CE firm
1000+ employees

We used to have a dedicated autocad "trainer" until he moved on in the last year. We are currently undergoing our 6 month planning for C3D implementation. The decision has been made to only go with outsourced training at this point and not replace the person who left. Does this make any sense or does it seem like a company of this size should have its own training person especially when moving to basically a brand new software package?
Basically all users will be switching to new software and 3 days outsourced training is the plan at this point. Personally, I think it wont fly when you have people that have been using basically the same software for the past 15 years (LDT/DCA).
thanks

[Railrose]

First question... Do you have anyone capable of keeping up with the training needs?
Second question... What is a comparrison of costs?
Third question... Can one person maintain the workload of training that many employees & what would their job be between training?

[pdavis]

I think it depends on the number of people that need to be trained.

I am dealing with training 250+ people of a new platform, and we are going to employee both outsourced and in-house training. The short-term requires us to use outsourcing. This allows me to get large groups of people trained.

This first group of people trained are users that are excited about the new product and enjoy the challenges of learning new software and processes. These are my beachhead people.

Once the beachhead has been established, we will then phase out outsourced training and moving to in-house.

Our trainer not only trains, but also provides support and will work on projects as necessary.

[reed.stephens]

OUTSOURCE !
You have to start out with someone who really knows how to deploy and use Civil 3D and all of the Land Desktop experience you can imagine does not qualify an in-house guru to implement Civil 3D. In fact a compelling case can be made that the more ingrained one is in LDT procedures the more difficult it is to successfully move to Civil 3D.
There is a current thread at www dot TheSwamp dot org in the Land Lubber forum named "Lessons Learned" that is detailing the process a smaller firm than you have described went through to just get its pilot Civil 3D project through first submittal. This entire board is open viewing for any guest and I invite you to go there and check out this thread along with several other Civil 3D specific topics you will find there.