A well calibrated monitor is a must. You need to do hardware calibration and use the expert mode not the quickie mode which does not do the best job. Even Apple laptops & iMac will look better after calibration. There were a couple of guys offer do calibrate for a fee do a search.
LR is a relatively easy program to use - out of box you can probably get a hang of running it. As for course a lot depends on how, how deep, how much is being shared, and the basic level of the people in the class. From the what little I saw of local course for LR, it is the most basic of basic (note I did not do a really deep search for this). Download the software run it as much as you can during the trial period to get a feel if you need more training. In depth training locally may be difficult to find a course for that. You need to be familiar before you can take on in depth training. How much you get back from training is liken to how big your hand is - big hands (user experience) will mean to can pick up more (bits of info) from what the trainer knows. Only you know how big your hands are if we knew that then Toto top prize would always be share by many people.