Freelance Trainers: Becoming A GBdirect Training Associate

Summary of relevant skills and aptitudes:

• A grasp of ‘the big picture’
• Strong in software development and computer programming/administration
• A commitment to open standards and an interest in open source technologies
• Experience of writing commercial quality training materials
• The desire and the expertise to teach the ‘warts and all’ truth about your subject/s
• Training experience with one or more of:
  • Embedded C programming
  • XML
  • Java
  • UML / OO Analysis and design
  • AIX
  • Solaris
  • HP-UX
  • Open standards-based web design
  • Python
  • Samba and Unix/Windows integration
  • Apache web server
  • Javascript

Background

GBdirect has established a reputation for delivering courses of outstanding technical and educational quality. This reputation is founded, first and foremost, on talented trainers who are not merely good teachers, but also technical experts practising as professional consultants on a daily basis.

As a small startup company we sustained a rigid, but powerful, method of ensuring that every GBdirect trainer exceeded industry standards for technical excellence: by requiring all trainers to be full-time GBdirect consultants and only employing consultants with personal recommendations from our extensive network of industry contacts (see the recruitment agency notice on this page).

This methodology has, however, been a little too successful for its own good. While we remain entirely committed to the basic premise that every trainer should be a personally recommended and practising consultant of the highest technical quality, growth in demand for our training now far exceeds the capacity of our consulting division to absorb new staff. Which is why we are now seeking applications from independent and freelance trainers who would like to become GBdirect training Associates.

Associates Not Merely The Hired Help

We are looking for genuine long-term associates, and not simply freelance trainers to be hired and fired on a course by course basis. We hope that those who can meet our exacting standards, and who can fit into our no-nonsense working culture, will receive a steady stream of well-paid jobs and high quality clients. We also hope that they will want to take up opportunity to work with us and our clients on many other projects, e.g. developing new and bespoke courses, enhancing old ones, providing mentoring and onsite consultancy as an extension to our standard courses, etc.

We have no intention of mimicking those larger training companies which have gutted their own internal technical expertise to become mere clearing houses for other people (talented or otherwise). Our permanent consultants will continue to contribute the core of our training course development and delivery for the foreseeable future.

What Can You Bring To The Party?

Our most urgent requirement is for trainers with skills in those technologies which are peripheral to our own consulting business, but which are widely used in the open standards based corporate computing environments which we support, e.g. Oracle, Java, UML/OO Analysis and Design, proprietary Unix.

We would particularly interested in talking to freelance trainers who can bring their own training courses and training materials to the association or who have a track record of writing such materials.

We would also be keen on hearing from trainers with experience in the established certification schemes for the skill sets listed above.

Trainers whose only interest/experience is in exclusively Microsoft proprietary solutions are unlikely to fit easily into our corporate culture.

Applying

Please send us your CV. Please include detail specific to the skill sets (teaching and software development/consultancy) outlined above, but also tells us as much as possible about your general intellectual background. We vastly prefer CVs in open standards document formats, such as plain text, HTML, or PDF. Word documents are acceptable.

In judging intellectual capability we give a significant amount of weight to academic achievement, although we will always balance that with evidence of intellectual strengths in other domains, e.g. authorship, research, or participation in learned societies, user groups and standards bodies.

If you have samples of course materials and outlines of courses you have taught, please include them with your CV.

If you can provide referees who we know or are likely to know personally, so much the better.

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.