Hi there – I’m Alycia and I am super excited to be writing my first blog post for GovLoop. I am a program coordinator for Web Manager University (WMU), and will be sharing with you training opportunities, government innovations, and cool websites and tools that I find through research for the WMU programs.
Web Manager University is co-sponsored by GSA and the Federal Web Managers Council to bring cost efficient (sometimes FREE) training to help government agencies manage their web and new media efforts. These classes, webinars, and courses are geared toward meeting the needs of a government audience and our instructors use government examples and encourage discussion within the group so that attendees can find solutions within their peer group.
Our past classes and webinar subject areas include open government, citizen engagement, social media, writing for the web, usability and design, Section 508 compliance, web analytics, and overall governance. Check out our Past New Media Talks and Previous Training.
You don’t work on the web? Have no fear – WMU is expanding our training to include all aspects of delivering customer service (including phone, email, print etc).
Our next class, on June 15th and 16th is Intro to Proven Usability Techniques: Making Your Website More Effective at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Find out more on our events page.
Wondering if you should attend?
If you design websites or web applications then this class will teach you the fundamentals of designing something USABLE. It has happened to us all – you buy something (new phone, tv, dvr) and you can’t figure out how to _________. You think – this doesn’t make sense, why did they choose to do this like that, why didn’t they do better testing? The same is true on the web. This class will teach you how to
- develop a good design process,
- how to run a usability test, and
- basic principles of user-centered design.
I hope you’ll join us for some of our events this year!
It is an honor to be accepted. I think this is a great program. I work for the department of corrections in training. I also relate to not knowing how to use something.
Never been to a class but they look awesome. Do you take video or blog a recap of the events?
We have not yet done video or blog recaps, but we are ALWAYS looking for great ideas like that one to help promote our classes.
The reason we charge different prices (which is fairly standard practice) is that, as a govt agency, GSA’s highest priority is to train other government employees and to do that as low cost as possible, given many agencies’ small training budgets. Our general rule is to charge vendors/businesses 1/3 more of the cost that government employees pay. We still think that is reasonable, and you’ll see that our rates are generally much lower than most other training programs. Our aim is to cover the costs of managing the program, not to make a profit. Costs include payment to speakers, travel, paying for course materials, venues (though we try to find free venues whenever we can), and light refreshments.
Alycia – I think it would be great to do video or blog recaps…would be cool to post on GL and help with promotion of future ones.
Alycia thanks for the post! I will be on the look out for classes available on web analytics.
Our mission is to provide government employees (and government contractors) with excellent, affordable training on web-related topics, providing a superb customer experience from end to end. We strongly feel that this pricing structure which is still below the typical cost of other similar training is appropriate for our goal. Thank you for the input though – we periodically revisit our pricing structure and will continue to do that.
Awesome.