Jobs at GBdirect

From time to time jobs become available at GBdirect. Any current openings are listed on this page. At the present time we have a vacancy for a high-quality training administrator.

When we do have vacancies we are interested in direct enquiries from outstanding open source software developers themselves (Agencies: see notice right).

Why work here?

We think we offer a unique opportunity for the right kind of people. GBdirect is building an excellent reputation for its vision and ability to mix technical skills with the commercial understanding that's needed to build the systems that people want, they way that they want them and when they want them. To do this means having talented and forthright teams that understand not only the capabilities of the technology but also the ways that they can be employed to achieve results.

Two of our flagships are the Training Pages Directory and the (as far as we know) first and leading UK Geographic Search Engine, Somewherenear. Somewherenear was one of the first WAP-enabled sites of its kind and we think it clearly marks how our vision was developed by the technical and business arms alike to fuse what can be delivered with what should be. Training Pages is the leading UK directory of training products and has now received venture funding to continue its growth.

As a further example of forward thinking, we were one of the first companies in the UK to switch to using Linux exclusively in our development and delivery areas — though to our chagrin one PC running Windows is still used for accounting. We are now amongst the leading Linux trainers in the UK.

We also believe strongly that those who know how to do something well should help others learn. For that reason, our training products play an important role in the overall mix of what we do. Anyone joining our technical teams will also be strongly encouraged to help develop and deliver the training curriculum. For those who have not done training before, this is a wonderful opportunity to develop new skills — and as anyone will tell you, the best way of learning a subject is to have to teach it!

Members of our staff are encouraged to think for themselves, to write items for our website and other publications as well as to speak at industry conferences.

The kind of people most comfortable in our environment will be intellectually bright — fascinated by problems and ideas — and no strangers to rolling up the sleeves and getting on with solving those problems. We don't want just talkers (though plenty of that goes on) — you will love being a doer too. We know that people like that are rare but we are picky! It's nice to be amongst them though.

We don't just want people who like to do one thing, be it writing software or anything else. We want people who are able to see the wood for the trees, get the big picture, then figure out what it takes to deliver that well. That probably means as well as having the vision, getting out the hammer and chisel and doing the work too — our experience has been that really talented people are able to do both and find it rewarding to stand back at the end of it all and admire a job well done.

We encourage an atmosphere of skilled professionalism, but we try to have fun too. We aren't stuffy or hidebound by office politics — each person can make a real difference and carve out their own job; there is no shortage of opportunity to take responsibility and really be in control of your projects as well as contributing to others.

General Points

If you want to find out more, please email us and feel free to send us your CV and we'll be happy to provide feedback. We look forward to hearing from you. We vastly prefer CVs in open standards document formats, such as plain text, HTML, or PDF. Word documents are acceptable.

Please do read through the description of the jobs first — we receive quite a few entirely inappropriate CVs and it's a waste of your time and ours if they are way off-beam. Completely inappropriate applications are not likely to receive a rapid email response if they arrive whilst we are busy (and these days we are busy a lot of the time).

We would prefer not to receive vague or general enquiries by phone: we don't like to be rude, but our experience is that people who haven't bothered to look around our web site and find out about us that way have rather missed the point. If you have a specific question, starting off with email is probably the best approach.

Please Note: We are only interested in candidates who already have the legal right to work in the UK, or can acquire it under their own steam.