Cortell becomes IBM Training Partner, offers certified SPSS training

Cortell Corporate Performance Management (Cortell) is proud to announce its recent accreditation as an official IBM Training Partner, and following this the addition of certified IBM SPSS training to its portfolio of education services as of September 2012. The courses will be headed up by Dina Venter, Cortell’s newly appointed Senior SPSS Consultant and Training Facilitator.

“Business Analytics has become an important aspect of business management, and many organisations have implemented software solutions such as SPSS for statistical and data mining capabilities. However, often these organisations are reliant on third party skills to harness the power of the tools available as part of these packages,” says Venter.

“Cortell identified a gap in the market for training to empower users of SPSS to independently access and utilise the analytics power of the software without always being subjected to long turnaround times which are typical when relying on third party providers. Our aim is to transfer knowledge so that organisations have the skills and expertise necessary to conduct many routine SPSS tasks internally, and take full advantage of their investment into these tools,” she adds.

While statistics is often a highly theoretical field, Cortell is taking a different approach to training, with practical applications and a hands-on approach that enables participants to go away with the skills to apply their new knowledge in real-world scenarios. The training enables participants to understand what to look for in their data, and then how to interpret the results to deliver real business value and better decision-making ability for their organisations. As an IBM Training Partner, Cortell is perfectly positioned to offer this type of value added training service to new and existing customers.

“SPSS is a highly specialised software package and as such the skills required to train on it, as well as the certifications necessary to become an IBM Training Partner on the SPSS package, are in short supply. With our accreditation as one of only a handful of certified SPSS training providers, customers can be assured of the quality of the training they will receive at Cortell,” says Greg Bogiages, Director of Cortell.

Cortell’s SPSS courses include modules that will prepare users for certification on SPSS, which requires a certain level of software knowledge as well as knowledge of statistics that enable users to utilise the software in situations where analytics are required. These modules are complemented by a range of advanced applied statistics courses. These courses are offered as classroom courses, instructor-assisted self-paced on-line courses and instructor-led on-site courses, depending on the requirements of the customer.

The SPSS training courses augment Cortell’s existing training solutions which cover the full range of software and solutions offered by the provider.