A learning experience

Obviously abducted by aliens, Paul Briggs found himself at the British Education Training and Technology show.

I am obviously a great fan of trade shows, but visiting them on a Saturday morning is not exactly my idea of fun. Nevertheless, I somehow ended up at Olympia for the recent British Education Training and Technology show.

Figuring out that I must have been taken by extraterrestrials the night before - this seemed the only reasonable and logical explanation for my being there - I went in expecting to see strange, unheard-of technologies shown on stands by men in suits and glasses that made them look like 1970s Open University professors.

The reality was quite different. The gig was jumping, filled with flashy stands and all the sexy technology you usually see at shows like CeBIT and Comdex.

Radio-miked presenters boomed the benefits of their products to interested educational types who had swapped their patched corduroy jackets for iPAQs a long time ago.

I realised that I hadn't been to school for a while. Next to the Van der Graaf generator and the trusty Bunsen burner, the overhead projector was probably the coolest piece of technology when I was a lad.

As well as the usual suspects such as RM and Viglen, the show featured several resellers, including Teksys, which told me that the education market is still fairly buoyant with revenue; it is flowing like rapids rather than trickling like other areas of IT.

But before you start hanging round at the school gates hoping to doorstep an education purchaser, you have to get it right: put in the groundwork, understand the needs of the establishment, demonstrate return on investment, and avoid jargon.

You may have to do some work for free. But the benefits are like the Cosa Nostra: once you are in, you are in for life.

You may start with one educational establishment and soon find yourself supplying several more. Get it wrong and your pitches will find their way into the circular file.