No freelancers!
The best freelance trainers are very good - they know their subject, know the venue and have taken time to tailor their course to their current company's requirements. They are also, unfortunately, quite rare.
More commonly, a freelance trainer will be trying to serve the needs of many different masters, without owing loyalty to any. Here are the main 3 problems we've encountered:
| Problem | Notes |
|---|---|
| Course knowledge | A freelance trainer gives many different courses for many different employers, and can not hope to keep them all in his or her head. So s/he will always tend to fall back on exercises s/he knows, or worse still use the current company's exercises without really knowing them inside out. |
| Reliability | Ultimately a freelancer is just a mercenary, selling his or her services to the highest bidder. No company employing freelance trainers can be certain that they will turn up to give any given course. |
| Product knowledge | If you were a freelance trainer with a space in your diary and a company asked you if you could teach Lemmings 2.0 (or whatever), wouldn't you say yes? After all, how much different can it be from Lemmings version 1? |
Call us control freaks, but we can't cope with this level of uncertainty. We've only missed one course in 15 years, and that was in November 2006 for unavoidable reasons. We sent flowers to the two people affected, and still bear the emotional scars. Our trainers never give a course until they know it inside out (so, for example, a Wise Owl would never train on Excel Introduction without knowing all of the Excel Advanced topics thoroughly). And it goes without saying that our trainers know our courses, courseware and exercises ...
Freelance trainers do have one huge advantage though - you can get rid of them when times get hard. Which is why we are (so far as we know) the only large provider of computer training in the UK never to use them.
