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We all want something for free

I like things that are free and I have to be honest, when you offer me something for free I’ll take it. Why should I pay for something if the same exists free of charge. Following up on this thought, is there really anything free in life? When discussing this with my son, I’m always telling him that “free” doesn’t exist. Please do reflect on this yourself: what is really free of charge?

There is a lot of valuable information on the Internet. ..and the Internet is free of charge so this should be a good example. Why are people providing internet with free information? Because they want to help a community. Looking back, it is the same thing that people did for centuries: sitting together, sharing information. Now we share it on the Internet.

In the past, I had friends advising me which shares “I had to buy!” while we had a beer together. Today, I can read a blog that tells me which shares I have to buy. I would even state that all secrets that tell me how to be a good investor are somewhere on the Internet. There is great information available, free of charge. My question now is: who would give their money to an investor who does nothing other than reading the internet?

Free Training in IBM

IBM has been around for a while and existed before even the idea of the Internet came up. We adopted to new technologies before many other companies did and we also embraced digital training during the last years. We converted our classroom training into digital formats and we also published lots of free digital offerings on the Internet which we believe serves the interests of our clients.

Our Strategy

As a next step for our company we have been reviewing what we think is the right amount for free and fee training. We researched this and also discussed this internally and externally with our Global Training Providers. Based on this investigation, we decided to proceed with our Training Providers to focus on a 70:30 split on fee versus free.

This means there will be lots of free materials available but we will also focus on fee charging items too to get a good balance. 30% free content seems to be a right amount. There is a great article about the same subject on the TSIA Blog, and TSIA’s data and conclusions are similar to our investigations.

So looking to the TSIA article, it seems we’re on track. This means a good route to support free and fee based approaches around training!