Is there, in fact, a Linux training market out there?

Mon May 31 01:00:32 UTC 2010

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday-L09J2beyid0N/H6P543EQg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  Warning:  This post is going to be somewhat (OK, a lot) self-serving
> in terms of my looking for new Linux training gigs in Toronto, but I'm
> also interested in the opinions of those who have had to deal with
> that sort of thing.  And I'm typing this from the finish line stage of
> the Toronto Criterium this morning so I might ramble a bit.
>
>  Most people who know me know that I've been a professional Linux and
> OSS trainer for many years -- taught both my own material to my own
> clients, other peoples' material to my clients and other peoples'
> material to their clients.  And the training market certainly seems to
> be cyclical.
>
>  Several years ago, training was in demand.  Now, not so much it
> seems, which inspires me to ask the question -- is there a viable
> Linux and Linux-related training market out there?  Or, even if there
> is, has it already been snapped up by the big vendors so that there's
> little point in trying to break in anymore?
>
>  Case in point:  When I lived in the US years ago, I had a national
> bank as a client, and I taught them several classes of intro and admin
> AIX.  Not to sound unhumble, but they were terrifically happy with me;
> that relationship lasted over a year until, one day, the director of
> IT told me that they simply couldn't use me anymore.  The edict had
> come down from head IT that the bank had centralized on exactly two
> national training providers, and everyone else was simply dropped.
> Apparently, it didn't matter that neither of them offered AIX classes,
> or that the local IT manager went to bat for me.  It was just
> simplification and that was that.
>
>  The same thing happened a while back locally, where someone who had
> been spectacularly happy with my instruction told me that, nationally,
> they were switching to Red Hat for all their Linux training.  Can't
> fault them, of course, Red Hat offers good courses -- I used to
> contract teach for them during that stint in the US.  But, again, it
> just takes what little there is left of the training market and makes
> it even tinier.
>
>  To make a long story short, I've always enjoyed writing and
> delivering courseware, especially custom stuff based on *exactly* what
> the client asked for.  And I thought (correctly or not) that there
> might be a market out there for what I called "crash courses" (hence
> my domain name), the idea being that some places just don't have the
> time or budget to send people for 3/4/5 day classes and have a
> *specific* training need that could be dealt with in a single day.  I
> don't see the major vendors offering many single-day courses because
> it's just not profitable for them, but for an independent trainer,
> that represents a perfectly respectable market.
>
>  So, back to the original issue -- I'd dearly love to get back to
> making a living as a corporate Linux instructor, writing custom
> courseware as the need arises and charging a fraction of what the
> major vendors charge, simply because that would still represent a
> perfectly good living.  But ... is there a market anymore?  Or has it
> simply been swallowed by the big fish?  Thoughts?

This is an area of real interest to me as I am interested in doing
Linux education. I don't know what sort of a pay market is out there.
I have been happy to do some volunteer training for Planet Geek
(www.planetgeek.ca), Free Geek Toronto (freegeektoronto.org) as well
as talking at GTALug (http://gtalug.org/wiki/Colin_McGregor) and Unix
Unanimous (gtalug.org/wiki/Unix_Unanimous). For the most part I enjoy
doing volunteer presentations, but ... they don't put food on the
table...

So, there is the local Linux Education group that is interested in
improving the state of local Linux education, but this is a group that
appears to have at least for the moment stalled...

Bottom line in all of this I guess is that while I think there is
interest in Linux education, I don't (yet anyway) know how to make a
living at it...

Colin McGregor

> rday
>
> P.S.  There is, of course, tons of good courseware out there on the
> net for the taking.  Specifically, there's all of this stuff:
>
>  http://free-electrons.com/docs/
>
> and I recently hooked up with those guys to start updating a lot of
> that content and add more as the opportunity arises.  So, certainly,
> if someone was looking for hands-on training on any of those topics, I
> could grab the appropriate slides and labs, and update as necessary.
> But is there a market?
>
> And, yes, I'm available. :-)
>
> --
>
> ========================================================================
> Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
>
>            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.
>
> Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
> Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
> ========================================================================
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists