So Netware was completely Novell to him...

... I was walking my pet dinosaur.

lay eggs for my breakfast.

I've been on many courses where the trainer has no answers.

some train multiple products, from Firewalls to SQL to Load balancers in the same month.

They know the course but don't know the products. Deploying checkpoint is vastly different to implementing PIX/ASA/FirePower, deploying Citrix LB is different to AVI.

Scratch under the surface and all their comprehension is exposed.

They teach the course and not necessarily the product. Also they often lack experience of running the product in anger so won't understand the nuances when you ask about situations that can arise when the product is deployed.

The old saying still applies:-

Those who can, do

Those who can't, teach

Those who can't teach, teach gym

I believe that once upon a time there was a motto in surgery: see one, do one, teach one. I suppose it was advisable that the patient at stage 2 survived before the surgeon moved onto stage 3.

Still prevalent in UK Medical Schools.

The best Surgeons are fairly bored and their underlings do most of the routine work under their monitoring (often from a distance, while the Surgeon is musing over his latest round of Golf).

Source: I am the outlier in a Medical family.

Ah. In education, there's a slightly different version: those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who can't teach become Ofsted inspectors.

You beat me to that one, Both my Mum and Dad were teachers and well, yes.

"Those who can't teach, teach gym"

I thought it was "Those that can't teach, teach teachers"

I thought it was "Those that cant, manage"...

Maybe in some professions. Maybe even in some schools. Where I'm from we teach our colleagues, our students and our customers, all at the same time, while doing our jobs .

Every day is a school day.

OTOH it's a problem when the teacher knows the subject but doesn't know how to teach.

My high school chemistry teacher certainly knew his stuff as he had a PhD in the subject.

Unfortunately, his style of teaching involved walking slowly back and forth in front of the blackboard while talking on a slow monotone. His students didn't so much have trouble learning chemistry, we had trouble staying awake as it was so soporific!

I had a Physics teacher like that. I'm not sure I learnt a thing from his lessons, other than to appear to be attentive whilst closer to asleep.

Good name for the subject though: Dr. Kelvin Power!!!

When I was doing my ONC the lecturer for one subject was far too clever and would spend the whole lesson filling out various blackboards with notes we had to copy down and then the last 10 minutes writing down the homework we had to complete before the next 'lesson'. Nobody passed his class and we had a different lecturer for the repeat year

At school, we started the new academic year with a new head of Maths. By the New Year, we had a new new head of Maths as all the pupils kept going to other Maths teachers to be re-taught what we were being told in class as no-one could understand the teacher.

I think this is a variation on George Bernard Shaw's "Those that can do, those that can't teach". The reality is that those with the expertise to deliver these courses can likely earn way more from doing the job itself (or being consultants)–even given the eye-watering prices that they charge for those courses. The training companies are left with people who'll give it a go and deliver something.

Those who don't teach don't realise what a skill teaching/coaching is.

One aspect of that is knowing your subject (and not just knowing what someone else's slides say)

Far too many corporate instructors fail on both counts.

On the rare occasions I'm in a course with a teacher who both knows their subject and can teach I really go out of my way to recognise them as they are too few of them.

Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue.

Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions - one friend has gone from a highly stressful Senior Management role in a school, to basically delivering lessons that are already planned, and got doesn't have to deal with angsty teenagers, parents or Ofsted, has for a significant salary bump and still regards a 40 hour week as part time!

This is very true, but simply being good at something doesn't mean you can teach it. Some of the worst people I've seen at explaining things are those who know a product inside and out - simply because they don't understand how little other people know about the product!

A friend who used to lecture part-time once told me he was often asked to lecture courses outside his area of technical expertise. He was a fast learner and reckoned that, as long as he was one chapter ahead in the course book, he would get by.

He was obviously capable as he only stopped taking on such work when his main line of business didn't give him any spare time. And, in his late 80's, he's still running seminars and training sessions worldwide...

I've been on a "speed awareness course" where we were told...

- all speed cameras are yellow to make sure they're visible. Nope, we're near an AONB where they weren't allowed to do that, but still put in cameras - green to not ruin the view, but with a splash of yellow to comply with regulations.

- all speed cameras that flash are rear facing. Nope, the city ~50 miles away has front-facing flashers, including the one that caught me.

There were various other smaller issues but completing the course was required otherwise I'm sure many would have walked out.

Many years ago my then employer selected BAAN (I said it was a while ago) as their designated global ERP system. Having spent a few months commuting to the US as part of the implementation team I went on a course at the BAAN UK headquarters for a few days to learn about their application customiser; it quickly became apparent that the person leading the course neither knew the subject or could teach! As he was the only person in the UK who knew anything at all about that part of the software this was somewhat worrying. I spent half my time on the course helping the other students.

A few months later I went after an implementation consultant gig with BAAN, offering the fact that I knew and could actually use, the customiser as a USP but it quicky became clear they didn't actually care about helping the customer, all their consultants were employed to do was upsell more product - I wasn't offered the role but would have turned it down anyway. Probably a good thing as BAAN didn't last all that much longer due to some iffy accounting practices.

Had a lecturer who was only one page ahead of the class. Z80 assembler programming was his subject and I had magazine articles/solutions published on the subject before I went to University.

I was asked to leave his first lecture as I was "disrupting the class and obviously didn't need to attend" - I only pointed out his incorrect bo11ocks 3 times within 10 minutes.

I made a tidy sum from tutoring the students on that class. It paid for a lot of caving gear.

The Barstool only gave me 99% for that course. The Dean (who I was invited to meet due to my mark) said that the lecturer had knocked off a mark for non-attendance at his lectures!

(Just looked up his name and he co-authored a number of papers before he retired - quoting Laminitus as the reason - (just so that if you are reading this, you know that I know you went on to better things.))

because I mentioned I knew about a particular technology.

Just as much as I knew of Quantum Mechanics. Or Elephant Husbandry. Or the fiscal policy of Ecuador.

Fake it until you make it is what makes us focus, as mentioned :-)

I generally give programming courses to beginner programmers. They need to learn everything : variables, variable types, functions and procedures, passing variables to said functions and procedures, etc.

One time, however, I got a group of expet JAVA dwevelopers. So, to break into their mindset was rather challenging and, for them, I pretty sure the absence of any method controlling garbage colletion was anatheama to them.So I coded a seconde node where I created a smal collection of docuements and a script that would loop through the collection.

Once the code had loaded the next document, I used the keyword DELETE to remove the previous document from RAM.

The thing is, I had never used that keyword before. I didn't even know if it would work.

Thankfully, it did, and I avoided making a total fool of myself, but it could have easily gone the other way . . .

I remember on one course I kept asking so many deep technical questions that, at the end of the course, I was asked if I wanted a job as an instructor. Also managed to score some freebies because I kept having to correct an instructor on another course.

I miss those days.

...kept having to correct an instructor...

They asked me to leave when correcting the instructor again and again.

I went on a course "Advanced troubleshooting for NT 4", or something along those lines. Throughout the course I kept thinking "I know this already ready. When is the Advanced bit going to start." Near the end of the week long course, the instructor got onto the blue screen of death, and said that the crash dump file provided information on what was happening when it crashed, and could be used to diagnose the problem. "Ah ha! This is what I've been waiting for" was my thought. "That is beyond the scope of this course," he continued.

When I did my CSE in Computer Science, my teacher proudly announced he would be taking the exam with us! There were 2 of us in the class that had Commodore computers at home and were already fairly familiar with how to program them, even if I only had a VIC20, not a PET. I grabbed the system manual, which included a lot on machine code and sys calls.

Within a couple of weeks, the teacher was doing the history of computing part of the course and Alan and I were coaching the other pupils on the practical side of writing programs. Although I was only doing CSE, I got several As (anonymously) for O-level projects as well. One of the pupils needed a lot of help and just to make sure he read my code and understood, I put in a copyright notice at the end, I managed to give him a hint about that just before he handed the project in for marking and he removed the lines, with a very red face!

I think I've been on more courses when I've though I might know more than the trainer than the opposite.

Teaching is also an art form and most people who lead courses cannot teach.

But then most of the courses we complete to tick that box in HR are BS anyway

About half a century ago a friend of mine got her English degree and found a job teaching at a small school in Cornwall. When she got there she discovered she had to teach Latin as well, a language she was completely unfamiliar with. So she started on the textbooks and tried to be one week ahead of the class. Needless to say, some annoying kid was two weeks ahead of the rest of his class and kept asking annoying questions.

Reminds me somewhat of this old story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/3503891.stm

I'm generally sympathetic to trainers; they know they might be up against some trainees with more knowledge/experience than them but what can they do? Even as a self-diagnosed expert myself, I've never failed to learn something from a trainer.

Real experts know that they don't know everything. There are, of course, some who know this is not true.

On the other hand, I've had experts who come in to tell us how we should be doing things, find out they know nothing, learn how it should be done, and then go away. Never fast enough.

That seemed to be the understanding amongst the lecturers and grad students when I was a grad student in Cambridge.

I seem to recall my Ancient Greek teacher at school admitting that he was only one step ahead of the class.

So three cheers for Alfred the Great!

Yes! That's what the pay as a teaching assistant is offset by. The years I helped teaching the maths courses were really useful. It also helps having taught basic stats to geography students when in a later job you have to educate management beyond such difficult terms like "mean" :D

Grandpa once told me that he didn't mind teaching me things because whenever he did, he learned something new for himself.

That stuck with me. Smart man, Grandpa.

I think it was Feynman who said something like "If you can't explain a subject/concept you don't truly understand it."

I spent New Year at a friend's place in North Germany, I was living in the South at the time. He started a new job on the 2nd January and I had just met a girl where he lived and as I was between contracts and waiting for confirmation on the new one, I was spending a couple more days at his place...

He rang up in the late morning and asked if I could do PHP and whether I wanted a couple of weeks work, his new employer was looking for someone? YES, of course I wanted a couple of weeks work in the area!

I had an interview the next day... I quickly researched and found LAMP, installed it on my PC and went to w3schools... By the end of the day I had a basic website up and running in PHP and had taught myself a few basic bits of JavaScript (I had developed in C, COBOL, VB, C++, 4D, FORTRAN, Pascal, Jaca and a bunch of other languages over the year. so there wasn't anything terribly new with PHP or JavaScript, except they weren't very structured).

Aced the interview the next day and started 2 days later. Luckily I was working on an existing project, so I could look through the existing code. It started well, I was holding my head above water... Then there was a big problem with one of their eShops (they built shops for big customers, mostly in the clothing industry). Every time the customer's site appeared in the PayPal newsletter, the site collapsed and the dbadmin spent his time restarting MySQL ever 2-3 minutes. They saw I knew SQL Server and called me in to analyse the problem.

I'd never used MySQL before, but I quickly dived into the documentation and started looking at the code. They were busy adding more and more fields to the indexes, in the hope it would speed up - the code to call up the menu took around 60 seconds, when the server was under load (250 users across 3 front end servers and 1 SQL server on the backend). I quickly came to the conclusion that the coders had never learnt how to write SQL queries and were just writing them as if they were being interpreted by a human, starting with the biggest dataset and whittling it down through additional clauses in the WHERE statement, until they got what they needed.

I just turned the query on its head, started with the most restrictive table and built out from there. The query time dropped from 60 seconds to 0.01 seconds and the 3 front end servers could cope with 750 parallel transactions without breaking a sweat... The company was so impressed, they offered me a permanent position - the first person to not be on a rolling 1 year employment contract.

I went on to write a tracking system for their photo studios, which were getting hundreds of products a day to photograph for the shops, brochures and adverts. It was fast, simple and worked flawlessly... I documented it as I went and the PHPDoc generated around 1,500 pages of documentation on using the various classes APIs I'd written. I left the company soon after. About 5 years later, a new dev added me as a contact on LinkedIn and thanked me for the documentation, he had taken over the project and it was still going strong.

Back in '97 when I was on my year out working for Leeds City Council, we had a contractor come in as a database expert. He'd never used Unix before and didn't know how to login!

The amount he was paid compared to me was astronomical, but I knew more than him!

I had a "lecturer" in first year university.

He was teaching the C Programming for Engineers course.

He was basically a chapter ahead of the class in whichever dodgy textbook he'd learned from, including its dodgy library that he was teaching as if it was standard.

I failed every assignment because the lecturer didn't understand my compliant C.

Then there was the networking course that the company sent a lot of us on early in my career. Run by a guy who made a point of mentioning his physics degree every 30 seconds or so. He eventually kicked me out for correcting him every time he opened his mouth.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, provide "training".