Five Steps to Convince Your Boss To Get You iBwave Certified

These days, there are resources and training materials on practically every subject you can imagine. It can be a daunting task finding training that’s both effective and relevant to your job. But without training, how can you be expected to stay up to date on the latest wireless trends and innovations? And once you do find the right course to enhance your skills, there’s the tall order of convincing your boss to pay for it.

So how exactly are you supposed to do that?

It’s not as intimidating a task as it might seem. We’ve compiled five tips to prepare yourself for pitching to your boss to approve your training. Follow these steps and you just might find yourself attending an award winning training program like iCP.

Step 1: Gather Information About Training Programs

It might seem like a no brainer, but many employees skip this step when pitching to their boss to ante up for training. Since there are so many courses online and in class, finding the right one is crucial to getting approval.

First, compare training programs you want to attend. Is one more expensive than the other? Does one offer more relevant topics to your industry? Is the training online, in person, or are both options available? Do they have a quiz you can take to see if the training offered is right for you? These are the first types of questions you should be asking when finding the right training program for your job.

Did you know iBwave has a world class, award winning training program? It’s true! The iBwave certification program (iCP) provides expert learning through three levels of courses on in-building wireless design with the software suite. With training packages offered in-person, online, or virtually, and a suite of different subjects to learn about, iCP is a proven program that caters to your specific needs. Best of all, iCP is BICSI certified, so you can be sure you’re getting quality training.

iBwave offers comprehensive details on their training program, including testimonials, pricing, and course information. This is where you should begin your journey.

Step 2: Compare Training Costs To ‘Lack of Knowledge’ Costs

Ok, you’ve found the training program you want to take. You have an idea of how much it’s going to cost and what level of training it will offer you. The next step is to compare this cost to the alternative – either in-house learning or nothing at all.

Does your lack of training on the subject cost your company money? Quite possibly. Lackluster teaching leads to drops in productivity and quality of work. And if you have a technical question outside of your realm of understanding, who are you supposed to turn to for support if no one is trained on the subject?

The bottom line: undertrained and undereducated employees cost a company money and reduce efficiency. Highlighting this point to your boss is crucial if you want to convince them to pay for your training program.

Step 3: Highlight Return on Investment for Your Company

Managers often tend to be big picture thinkers. Simply telling them that attending a training program will enhance your skills is probably not enough for them to sign off on it.

With that in mind, we suggest showcasing the high return on investment that paying for a training program offers.

It isn’t enough to tell them the training will benefit you. They need to see how it will benefit the company.

No sweat! We’ve gathered some of the most common benefits a company gets if its employees complete effective training:

Designs and projects are finished faster.
Training empowers employees to take ownership of their role in the office.
Knowledge is contagious – trained employees can share their learning with others in the company
Higher education leads to innovations and advancements in your workplace

The key here is to move the focus away from yourself and on to the company itself. The more you highlight the benefits of the big picture and less on your personal development, the more likely your boss will see why attending training is so crucial.

Step 4: Showcase the Trickle Down Effect

We touched on this on our last point, but the trickle-down effect really is a meaningful benefit to an employee getting training.

Employees who are trained on a subject can pass this knowledge on to others in their office that have not attended the training. This can take many forms, from informal conversations to structured presentations.

The net benefit is that the overall knowledge level of workers is increased, all while fostering a workplace culture centered around learning and development. You can even teach your boss the skills and insights you picked up while training.

Step 5: Demonstrate the Benefits of the Training

You know those before and after pictures of people on workout plans? Believe it or not, this tactic can also apply to convince your boss to pay for your training – both before and after you’ve completed it.

You won’t be showing your boss your new physique, but you will be able to compare the quality of work done before and after a training.

If you’ve yet to attend the training, show your boss some testimonials from the training program you want to take so they can understand the tangible benefits that it would provide.

Once you’ve completed a training, your pitch isn’t over! It’s important to show your boss how the training benefited your organization even after you’ve completed it. The best way to do this is to compare a project you worked on before the training to one after. Many training programs also offer official certification, which provides a global standard mandated by many tier 1 carriers. and professionalism that will reflect well on both yourself and your manager’s team.

There you have it! We hope we’ve demystified the process of convincing your boss to pay for your training. We’d also love to hear your tips on how to get your manager to approve a training program, so please share below!

What better way to begin your research on training programs than starting with one of the best?

Feature Spotlight: iBwave Reports

It’s time for another iBwave Feature Spotlight!

In this piece, we’ll be looking at four key reports within iBwave’s network design software. No, these aren’t the type of reports you submit to a professor. These are automatically generated reports which can provide you with essential information when designing in-building networks.

Equipment List

You’ve designed your in-building wireless network and now it’s time to compile a list of all the vendor equipment you’ve used within the design itself. The list might be long: radios, cabling, cable trays, switches, routers, controllers, and so on – in other words, the bill of materials.

You can do it the hard way: manually input each cable, antenna, router and transceiver in a spreadsheet until your eyes glaze over and you’ve aged a decade. Or, you can do it the iBwave way: with the Equipment List Report!

In just one click, the Equipment List Report will generate an overview of all network components required to complete your design. The data can then be exported and shared with project stakeholders in the file format of your choice (PDF, Word Doc, PowerPoint, etc.). Not only does it make it easier for you, your clients will appreciate knowing exactly what equipment is needed to complete their network design.

The bottom line? Manually creating an equipment list is not only time consuming, but also prone to human error. The Equipment List report will help save time on tedious tasks so you can focus on more demanding duties.

Cost Details

Now let’s talk about everyone’s favorite subject: budget allocation!

You’ve used the Equipment List Report to compile the network equipment needed to complete your design, now it’s time to calculate an accurate cost breakdown with the Cost Details Report. Not only can you use this tool to customize your equipment list to include pricing for each piece of equipment, you can also add additional project costs to the report such as labor and construction costs, mark-ups, and more.

The Cost Details Report also gives you control over what information you share with your customers and project partners. Keep things on a need-to-know basis by choosing whether mark-up percentage or construction costs are visible to your client or not on the final report. And just like the Equipment List Report, you can extract your Cost Details Report in the file format most convenient to your company and customers.

Leave the numbers to us. iBwave’s Cost Details Report will make short work of complex calculations.

Access Points

Your building wants wireless access and wants it NOW! But before you go placing access points in every nook and cranny of your network, try iBwave’s Access Points (AP) report.

The AP report will give your customers an all-in-one document that outlines everything they need to know about their building’s AP placement. In addition to displaying the location of APs on your building’s floor plan, it will also tell you which channel and band your access points are operating on. You can share the report with the design and installation teams in multiple file formats so they can be easily reviewed.

Many of our customers have seen first hand how the Access Points report saved them both time and money. If the goal is to have complete wireless connectivity in your in-building network design, give the Access Points report a whirl and see how easy it can be to accomplish.

Output Maps

Some people just want to look at pretty pictures.

iBwave’s Output Maps Report generates heat map visualizations that convey everything you need to know about your in-building wireless design, all in one convenient document.

But these pictures aren’t just pretty, they’re essential! The Output Maps Report will display heat maps of your network design’s predicted performance, providing useful information such as the network’s average data throughput rate per user, signal strength, SNR, co-channel interference and capacity pass/fail rates. It even allows separate heatmaps based on frequencies used, so you can compare the output of 2.4 GHz vs. 5 GHz and add KPI requirements for each as needed.

Just like the Equipment List, Cost Details, and Access Points report, the Output Maps Report exports in the file format of your choice. Notice the trend? No matter the report, you’ll be able to share it easily with those that need it.

These are just a few of the reports iBwave software can generate. In a future piece, we’ll cover another batch of useful reports.

And there you have it! Thanks for reading another installment of the iBwave Feature Spotlight series.

New Feature! Quick Connection Tool

In the newest release of iBwave Wi-Fi a new feature was introduced called the ‘Quick Connection Tool’. And if you often do the cabling in your designs, this is a feature you’re going to appreciate.

What does it do?

It completely automates the cabling of your sources to your APs, enabling you to cable your designs in just seconds whereas before it could take up to an hour or more, depending on the size and complexity of the venue you are working with. For many of our customers, this is a new feature that offers big time savings.

Here’s how it works.

Using the example floor plan of an office space, we can see the placement of the source (switch), the access points, and cable trays (purple lines) on the floor plan.

Note: quick connection tool can be used with or without the cable route defined already, in this case I have placed cable trays which the tool will use to automatically route the cables.

From here, it’s quite simple – simply click on the ‘Quick Connect Tool’ icon from the menu, which presents you with this screen:

Next, you need to do a few things to tell the tool how to connect.

Select your source (in this case the switch)
Select the APs to connect to
Select the cable trays through which the cables should connect (optional)
Select the cable from the smart list of acceptable cables (i.e the software will suggest cables based on your source/APs)

Here is what it looks like…

And voila, you now have your sources/destinations connected – from here you can simply run a Bill of Materials or Cost Details to get a report/estimate of your network design parts.