An incompetent and disorganised IT training company without own IT staff
I worked on a contract alongside Escalla between September 2023 and February 2024. Escalla’s role on the contract was to run training for a large organisation’s new IT system. I was employed through another company as a subject matter expert to assist Escalla’s trainers and therefore worked very closely with them. I have never worked for Escalla in any way, nor do I work in the training industry; I have no reason to write this review other than to convey my opinion of the company having worked with them.
Over the course of 6 months I found Escalla as a company to be disorganised and unprofessional.
Although their bread and butter is training people, their ability to organise courses was abysmal. Courses regularly started late and delegates had no idea how to find their classrooms. Classes were merged and even cancelled at the last minute almost every day. Training staff were also often paid a daily rate to float around a training venue or sit in reception or a staff room under the guise of assisting with the administration of training.
Given that Escalla seem to be primarily an IT training company, their command and use of IT was woeful. Laptops given to delegates to use the training system on were not fit for purpose, having too low RAM and slow, outdated CPUs. This meant that during training laptops would frequently slow down, freeze and struggle to let delegates operate the system they were meant to be learning to use. This was flagged to Escalla but ignored.
Escalla also did not appear to have any recognisable IT department. The aforementioned laptops were set up at training venues by reception staff who as far as I was aware, had no IT background. The laptops had no security software and were not managed by anyone centrally - all having local admin accounts. If updates or additional software were required, this had to be done manually on each of what would have been hundreds of devices. Staff and delegates were as a result able to install and access whatever they wanted on the devices. On the subject of poor equipment, even the chairs that Escalla purchased for delegates to sit on during training were of such low quality that they frequently broke. Several staff and delegates ended up falling off chairs that broke under pressure from being used normally and one member of staff even fell back and hit their head causing minor injury.
Training staff hired by Escalla and permanent Escalla staff overall seemed to have poor IT proficiency. Trainers would often need help with basic tasks to facilitate their training and would struggle to operate the Windows operating system, let alone the complex bespoke system they were meant to be teaching. While some talented and competent trainers existed, many were a hindrance to the training process due to their technical incompetence. Many trainers only learned how to perform prescribed, rigid steps when operating the IT system they were teaching and had little to no idea how to operate the system outside of these steps. If something malfunctioned or did not work as expected, training sessions would frequently grind to a halt due to this.
The nature of this contract meant that a relatively low level of vetting was required by trainers and other staff working on the project. Multiple people, including trainers, failed their vetting and some of these people worked for or alongside Escalla for significant periods of time before their vetting failures were discovered.
As one of many close working partners on this particular project, I found that Escalla staff often did not reply to emails from partners and even occasionally ignored their own staff. Their organisation is relatively small with a narrow hierarchy and seems to bottleneck at a certain point, where one person is the filter between those who do the everyday work and upper management. This made it very difficult for training colleagues I worked with to get answers to fairly simple questions such as when they would get paid or what their training schedules were.
During the contract, many Escalla contracted trainers were fired without any given reason. This seemed to go hand in hand with an apparent bullying culture by more experienced staff towards newer ones. Complaints about more senior staff also seemed to be dismissed by administrative staff at the communicative bottleneck of the company, who would gate-keep complaints about preferred colleagues.
Favouritism also seemed to be a common trait. Only one out of ten selected lead trainers was a woman while the rest were exclusively caucasian men over the age of 40
Overall I found the experience of working alongside Escalla unnecessarily frustrating. Escalla comes across as a rigid and stubborn company that does not respond well to feedback or any kind of criticism.