F5 Ensures Timely Training and Course Consistency

F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV), a global leader in multi-cloud application services and security, enables organizations to provide exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers and continuously stay ahead of threats. Founded in 1996, the Seattle, WA-based company operates in 43 countries and has $2.8 billion in annual revenues.

F5 helps customers—and the global teams that support them—get the most from its solutions with self-paced and instructor-led courses, plus professional certifications to validate

Using the MadCap Create and Syndicate, F5 has moved from static PowerPoint presentations to dynamic online course content. This has enabled the company to maintain training consistency across different instructors and rapidly adapt training to new product capabilities and security demands. Let’s review F5’s journey.

Evolving Cybersecurity Landscape

It seems like every week, there’s another story about a cyberattack either grinding business operations to a halt or compromising thousands to millions of sensitive corporate and consumer data. McKinsey & Company predicts that the continuing rise in cybercrime will have an annual impact of $10.5 trillion by 2025. 

The problem isn’t just that there are more cybersecurity breaches; cybersecurity attacks are also continually evolving as hackers develop new technologies and techniques for infiltrating systems. As a result, enterprises need to regularly update and certify their employee training to ensure they are prepared to handle new challenges and threats. And they often turn to their solution providers, such as F5, to assist with these learning journeys.

Wanted: Greater Consistency and Agility

F5 provides a range of courses that help customers, partners and employees gain the knowledge and hands-on experience to deploy, configure and manage F5 products. This training is complemented by F5 professional certification, which validates students’ expertise in manipulating the entire application stack—from traditional network knowledge all the way to advanced application-layer understanding, with the ability to integrate those two worlds.

For years, development teams at F5 used Microsoft PowerPoint to create and deliver course content, which led to multiple problems. Rather than using the developers’ course slide decks without modification, instructors personalized their own versions, and the changes were not shared collectively with the rest of the team. Moreover, each course was taught differently and sometimes included different content. This resulted in crucial information being omitted or valuable content being exclusively presented by select instructors, posing a particular challenge for certification courses that demanded precise knowledge for the tests.

The ad hoc nature of instructors’ changes also made it difficult for development teams to control, track and provide updates to their course content. These challenges were compounded by the company’s use of a 70-page publishing document with multiple required steps. Consequently, when developers needed to update and republish a course’s PowerPoint slide deck, the process was exceptionally long, even when changes were as simple as a title change.

The F5 team realized it was time for a new approach to training that would drive course consistency, ensure all learners received the right information, and provide the agility to keep pace with new product introductions and industry developments. After evaluating different industry solutions, F5 chose MadCap MadCap Create and Syndicate.

Taking Control with Online Training

Utilizing the MadCap platform, F5 has moved away from using PowerPoint slides to now deliver courses via online slides. The team relies on MadCap Create to author, reuse, review and publish the online slides. By taking advantage of the software’s instant feedback and preview capabilities, developers can easily create or update online course slides, quickly correct errors, and then publish the slides with the click of a button. 

The content from MadCap Create is published to MadCap Syndicate, which ensures content is delivered from a single source of truth. As a result, developers now maintain full control over their course content—instructors can no longer make changes themselves. 

Instead, F5’s instructors receive fully noted slide decks. Since the slide decks don’t display the content’s various levels of intricacy, they include the ability to add uneditable notes to each slide that give a deeper understanding of what should be taught consistently. And instructors are forced to write their own notes. 

Instructors still have a mechanism for influencing course content, since F5 has introduced a request form that instructors and others can use to suggest changes. Additionally, the company has established an instructor community site where instructors can stay updated on course changes.

More recently, F5 has been working with MadCap on creating digital student guides for instructor-led training (ILT) courses, so these can also be updated with the push of a button. 

Gaining Efficiency, Agility and Consistency

Since implementing the MadCap platform, F5 has realized several benefits:

• The introduction of online slides has expedited the process of creating, updating and publishing course content—providing the agility to keep pace with new product and industry developments. 
• Giving development teams control over course content ensures that learners receive consistent information and the knowledge needed to pass certification tests.
• Implementing a request form for content changes, combined with the ease of producing online course content, has allowed F5 to reduce the number of employees directly changing content and significantly improve efficiency.

Since implementing the MadCap platform, F5 has also seen the organization shift to a shared understanding of the importance of consistency and more positive team dynamics. This, in turn, is translating into a more robust suite of courses than ever for empowering customers to create, secure and operate adaptive applications that reduce costs, improve operations, and better protect users.