Have you ever run a training course?

An article by Glen    1 Comment

I’ve often been interested in getting more involved in running training courses. I’ve run a couple in my time, and really enjoyed the experience. I’ve never done anything “professionally” though.

I live in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, and the training options are numerous in stock standard areas (Intro to Java, Java Web Programming, Intro to J2EE, etc), but it’s all very mainstream. I’m wondering where there might be business opportunities to offer training Australia-wide in more niche (but growing/exciting) fields of Java technology (eg Spring, Hibernate, Eclipse RCP) that developers are likely to really benefit from.

I guess the real killers would be:

1. Developing/sourcing the course notes (though I reckon I could build a killer Spring course based around the Pro Spring book, ditto for Eclipse RCP);
2. Buildling the cred/contacts to be able to sell myself as a trainer in this stuff (but let’s be honest, most of the trainers here have never written much production code, so I reckon I could add a lot of “real world” value here); and
3. Putting together the venue/lab to be able to host it.

Training in Australia seems pretty expensive (circa $3-4k/week/student), so the maths seems to add up pretty quickly if you can put together a class of 6-8 students. Even if you were only “working” one week a month and prepping the rest the numbers could probably work.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has run any commercial developer training. Did you develop your own materials? How did you go about marketing yourself? And based on the amount of work you could generate, did the maths add up for you?