Career Shift to a Technical Trainer: Pros/Cons and Steps
By: Sathish Vj
Tags: Teacher, Training, Learning, Trainer, Technology

In the last month itself, I have spoken to a handful of people in the tech industry who were considering shifting to conducting technical trainings full time or part time. I thought it valuable enough to put down my experiences, thoughts, and learnings publicly for the benefit of anybody else considering it. Like them or you, I too have done a bunch of talks or trainings at companies that I had worked at previously. It would appear at this juncture that the job of a technical trainer is fairly straightforward - a linear progression. Not so. There are many gotchas and other considerations. Read on.

Let me begin with how I started so that you have some context for my experiences. I came upon formal technical training by chance. I had programmed and led varied teams around the world for many years. I discovered GoLang while it was still in beta and started the Go meetup group in Bangalore sometime after it became generally available. It was quite a tame period in the early couple of years. Somewhere around 2015, we started seeing more people in the meetup group. Over time, we also had a few managers joining the meetups to check on the community and to hire. Then we started receiving requests to help train their teams. I tried to refer other people for it, but it didn’t quite work out. I have always been passionate about technology and, as an extension of that, building and growing the associated communities. Helping organizations is an important step in growing the community. So I volunteered to help out. I really wasn’t even planning to charge at that point — it was purely about helping the community. Eventually though, it was a full time job and it wouldn’t be sustainable without formalizing it and getting paid for it. Since then I have conducted GoLang trainings in multiple countries in SE Asia, India, UK, and USA and also became a Google Cloud Authorized Trainer.

What are the advantages of doing technical trainings?

The biggest, as far as I was concerned, was flexibility and time for yourself on the days that you don’t have training. I got a lot more time to work on projects of my own, follow my own interests, and spend more time with family. I was visiting my mother in my hometown every fortnight, which is a luxury that I couldn’t afford at the time in a regular job.

I have a big, long list of project ideas that I’m usually tinkering with. I am able to work on those. I also am very interested in technology and am always trying to figure out the more interesting ones. I’d worked on blockchain, done some crypto investments, and also helped others with investments. I got to explore a lot on Google Cloud and pick up most of the certifications. I’m trying to figure out more on AI/ML and 5G. I have a few startup investments here and there. So for a person like me with a range of interests, there is time for all of that, and for that I really like training as a career option.

Can I do part time training while also keeping my full time job?

I wouldn’t advise it for most trainings. I have seen some people try to balance training part time while also holding on to their jobs. The stress and risk of attempting this is not reasonable. Most trainings are full day tasks. You will have to take off from work for it. How many times are you going to be able to do that? You also have to commit that time to whoever you are training. Are you going to be able to keep the commitment? If an urgent issue came up at work, who are you going to short change? Eventually, you’ll end up doing a sub-optimal job in both places and that is going to hurt your reputation.

The only case I see for this is very, very niche technologies that receive training requests extremely rarely. These requests might come maybe once or twice a year, and it’s not sustainable to make a career of the training part alone. Continue to be a practitioner and occasionally take time off to conduct trainings.

Is it legal to do part time trainings while being employed somewhere?

It depends on your company and your contract. If you are a practitioner of that technology at that company, teaching that to some other company could be a breach of contract since they are likely to be competitors. Check your company’s policy on it.

A bunch of people I’ve seen doing trainings are those working on their own projects and startup ideas. Training can give you income that keeps you afloat. Again here, balance your responsibilities. If you have a team, remember that they need your direction and attention. Going away for three or five days at a stretch could hurt your goals. Evaluate what you are giving up to gain elsewhere.

I’m sure I’ll be able to manage both!

Do not underestimate the toll training takes on you. It’s physically and mentally demanding. When I used to travel for trainings, I refused to go back to my room early because if I saw a bed, I’d pass out immediately and mess up my sleep cycle.

My advice on this part is hardly going to get through because we’re all bone-headed when it comes to stretching our energy and health. I’ve experienced it myself. A couple of times I was able to get additional tasks done and I thought I’ll be able to carry it through always. I couldn’t. I would recommend that you try to do this a couple of times without making additional external commitments. Just try to do your own work and see if you are able to manage both.

Rest is very important. Do not short change it.

How many days of training will I get per month?

This could vary widely depending on the time of the year, your reputation, and also the need for the skill in the market. There were some months where I could have been busy every single day. There were other months when I had absolutely nothing. To be fair, I rejected a large number of trainings that paid below my pricing. (see notes on how much to charge.)

If I got about 6 to 10 days of training per month, it worked well for me.

Wouldn’t taking training every day be more lucrative?

In the very short term, yes. Anything more than that, the returns are negative. Under some very pressing circumstances (for the clients, mind you, not for me), I have agreed to do trainings almost all days of a month. But it kills you. Training is physically harsh. You are standing most of the time. Your back and legs will hurt. It strains your vocal cords — an unrelenting attack for many hours and many days on end. I’ve had to go to the audiologist a few times. I’ve had repeated throat infections because no part of your body can withstand that amount of aggression. Teachers often get a condition called voice nodules because they are in jobs similar to ours. The doctors who checked my throat said I was fine as of now, but eventually, without rest, that’s where it would go.

You have to give yourself ample rest. Make every effort to keep your health a priority. Usain Bolt won’t be able to keep his lightning speed for kilometres. Don’t assume you are invincible.

There’s also the need for preparation and widening your horizons. You’ve to find out what else is happening, learn new technologies, and new ways in ways which your core tech is changing.

Finally, training can also get repetitive quite quickly. Trainings are almost exactly the same — the same content, the same questions, the same exercises. (The people you meet, the interactions, and the occasional whoa moment you get from participants when something interesting just clicks is the best part.) You might want to focus on areas that you like, but that is usually not what the customer wants. However, don’t discount how you conduct your training; you need to do a great job every single time. Like driving a metro/bus/train route every day, training is a very important job. It helps so many other people get ahead and it is vital for the progress of the world. But you have to feed your own soul too. Do your own projects on the side and be involved in other things. Put time for that. Following the money alone from training every day will burn you out both from the inside and outside.

How much should I charge?

There are many factors when considering pricing. How much does the market usually pay? What reputation does your personal brand hold? What is the relationship with the vendor/company?

My recommended approach is to first establish the factors that affect you and then compute your price based on that. Do NOT be conservative when it comes to this part! Your monthly costs are usually higher than what you think it is. If you already have been receiving a salary, look at your bank account for the past year and see what has been your expenditure to get a ballpark estimate. Typical items you need to consider are rent, food, travel, phone and broadband, entertainment, support for other family members, EMIs, online accounts, water/electricity/TV, clothes, etc. Then add on costs that were borne by others during that period. If you have been working for a company, a lot of things might be deducted at source — like taxes, insurance payments, etc. You will have to do this manually yourself from now on. Be especially careful of taxes which are paid in bulk towards the end of the year. And finally add some % for savings. This is the only component you get to change in a negotiation. Even in a crunch or under pressure from clients, know that anything below that cuts your margin so close that you might be better off waiting it out for another client (which is why I reject a lot of requests that do not pay well). As you become older and experienced, that savings % number should go up. If not you will be living hand to mouth and even a minor crisis can wipe you out.

So, let us say your cost plus your planned savings is X of some currency. Divide that by the number of work days and establish a daily average pricing. If you worked every single day and got that amount, that would get you through.

Now you have to calculate how many days per month you are going to get training requests. For somebody established, about 6 to 10 days would be reasonable (see other notes on days of training per month). Taking the number of days per month, you will have to multiply by that factor — about 3x or 4x — to get at your daily rate to charge.

When you add up numbers like this, it will suddenly look like a lot. If you can find fault with the calculation and the approach, you let me know and we can discuss that. But whatever happens, do not undercut yourself by lowering the number that shows up after the systematic calculation. Your income is going to be intermittent. You might have months when you have no trainings or income. There might be times when payment is delayed so much that it drives you into a corner and you start making dimwitted choices under pressure. When you are independent, you are entirely responsible for yourself and your family under all circumstances, even if you are ill. There is nobody else covering for you. You won’t be able to take any loans because banks are unsure how you will pay back consistently. So make sure you have a sound financial foundation.

One other financial suggestion: get yourself a CA to do your taxes. They know laws applicable to independent professionals better than you.

Where do I start?

Depending on the need for and newness of the technology, there could be different starting points. If it is an established technology like Java or JavaScript for which trainers are many, then vendors and companies could have an an already established list of trainers that they are comfortable with. It could be difficult to break in. Getting good remuneration could also be quite tough here, as the larger supply would push prices down. For this set, you could update your LinkedIn profile to state that you are a trainer. Allow vendors to find you. Maybe write a few blog posts or create a few videos and add a note that you are a trainer and how you can be contacted. If you have friends in the training business, contact them and ask them to put you in touch with vendors. If there is a crack of an opening somewhere when some established trainer has backed out, they might put you through and that could be a foot in the door.

If it is a new technology area, your starting point is to establish yourself as a good practitioner. Is there a valuable certification that you could take? Since I have a bunch of Google Cloud certifications, I got requests to conduct training. Is there an authorized trainer status that you could take? For example, in cloud training, Google, Microsoft, and AWS has an authorized trainer status.

Being part of the community for that tech could probably open doors. I started training because I was, at that time, running the Go community. Since it was a new technology, there were no established trainers. Once I started training, vendors knew me for that and it was one of them who told me that there is an Authorized Trainer role that Google has. One led to another.

Can I start at a low price to gain some experience and start charging higher later?

Once you establish a price, especially when working with companies who regularly need training, they expect that price going forward. Even if you revise the pricing after, say, a year, it is unlikely that you will be able to double or triple it. My advice would be to do sessions in your local tech communities, within your current company, or smaller companies. Cover different topics, update and create material based on the feedback you get there, polish your approach to deliver trainings, and then pick up some of the bigger companies. This is not an absolute requirement but it will provide you a smoother on-ramp.

How do I reach the big companies?

Big companies don’t want to deal with tens or hundreds of individual trainers. Their accounting and vendor management teams streamline the process by onboarding a handful of training vendors who coordinate the training requirements. The company will reach out to the vendors about a training requirement. The vendors will first try and fill the requirement with people they might have on their rolls. If not, they will look for independent trainers they have worked with before. Finally, they will search on LinkedIn or other places. So, almost always when working with big companies, you are going to go through an intermediary.

With small companies, their training requirements are lesser and they might reach out to you directly. Usually though, these companies have limited technology requirements or constrained budgets and they tend to do their training in-house. So there might not be much scope there.

Are there any problems working via intermediaries?

Timely payment is usually the biggest issue. Most trainers’ concern is that the intermediate vendors delay payments. I’ve had vendors delay payment by months and it takes repeated follow ups to get them to release your money. And it is not like they should be having trouble at their end because the end customers are typically big companies who pay on time. This puts significant pressure on your cash flow. I maintain very low tolerance for this (you should too) and I stay away from such vendors because you end up being at their mercy. Recommendation for you would be to establish a timely payment schedule, say about 45 days, which will be based on the payment schedule of the end customer. If they do not pay on time, don’t dig that hole deeper by also conducting the next training on credit.

The middleman is taking too big a cut for no value add!

Some trainers have had complaints that the vendors take too big a cut. Sometimes, that is true. Since you don’t know the deal between the end customer and the vendor, you could be given a smaller fraction of what the vendor is receiving. This is also more irksome for some independent trainers because vendors often provide no value beyond the first contact. Though I agree that is quite true in a long running training engagement, that’s what middlemen are about.

I’ve seen the thought of this inequity eat up a lot of people. My advice is that it is wasteful to dwell on it. What you need to do is to establish your price (see my notes on ensuring you set a good price). And when you get your price, go ahead with the training. How much the intermediate vendor makes on it should be irrelevant to you.

What about content and material?

Most beginner trainers tend to underestimate material. They have typically done a one hour training in their office to a very friendly crowd working on the same technology and they come out overconfident about their capability to do a full fledged training assuming it is a linear extrapolation of effort. Not so. In a formal training, you will come across the occasional attendee who are intentionally confrontational and who are testing you. Forget them. Most people just really want to learn, and they want to learn deep. They will ask questions from the most remote corners of blog posts, they ask questions from their projects which are very specific and not a domain you might know, they draw parallels to languages or technologies that they know but you don’t. In a short session, you have the luxury answering questions later; here, you don’t really have that. In your own office, everybody is working in a domain you are comfortable with and the technologies/languages you use are the same. That doesn’t translate similarly to a full fledged training; your preparation and material should be more comprehensive.

Also, just preparing the material takes so much time. You will probably read this blog post in about 5 minutes. I have been sitting at this writing continuously for almost a day, and it is probably only about half done. (fyi: it is day 4 now editing this post and I’m still not done. Edit: it’s about day 7 or 8 that I’m still making updates, edits, and fixes.) I’m also not having to do any research. I’m just writing out thoughts. In training material that I prepare, I have to go well beyond that, especially topics that I do not know well. I’ve to read multiple articles, understand the pros and cons, create one or more examples, simplify it such that it is not only easily understood, but also provides both depth and clarity on the subject. For example, my Go material took many months and years to even get to a reasonably comprehensive level. Even then, it is still only some key subjects. For my Google Cloud training, it is impossible to keep up with the wide range and speed of the tech that I am entirely dependent on the Google Cloud Authorized Trainer programme to provide me the material.

Don’t forget the exercises and labs you have to create. What environment are you going to provide it in? It has to be smooth without any glitches. You can’t be wasting time helping 20–30 people set up their machines one by one. You might also have to evaluate and incorporate external, paid tools to be used for training.

The great thing is that once you create all this once, it serves you for pretty much ever. Material increases and improves over time.

I’m very good when it comes to the tech. That’s all that matters, right?

Being technically strong alone is not enough. You have to know how to work with the audience. This accommodates all the ideas of good communication. Don’t equate good communication with just being about good English. There is way more than that.

In the end, your job is to help the attendees become better at their job. Do everything necessary to achieve that goal. I read about the science of teaching and learning and have been constantly experimenting with different approaches. Some work for some audiences, some don’t. Some people like visual explanations with diagrams, some want to see code, while others get it with just one cryptic statement. It would be powerful to have all these methods at your disposal. When I still get a quizzical look after explaining it one way, I try another. Explain concepts in ways that makes the most sense, keep them engaged, create an appropriate mix of theory/concepts and exercises, and know when to stop certain discussions.

I have heard horror stories of trainers who have been unable to empathise and connect with attendees. They have been black listed by multiple vendors. Sometimes it is due to the lack of trainer expertise on the subject, but often it is due to how the trainer interacts with the audience. It is super important that the product (your training content) be good and so also the service (your training delivery). You wouldn’t be happy with a restaurant that has good food but dirty surroundings or rude staff, would you?

What conditions should I put prior to the training?

Of course, with the vendor, ensure that you have a written agreement (at least as a mail) that payment will happen within the planned time. 45 to 60 days should be more than enough.

For the attendees, establish what all are required. Some things I have seen:

some companies do not allow downloading any applications or executables (even the language compiler that they are here to learn)

some companies do not allow access to sites like Github

some companies allow only specific tools — e.g. Firefox is ok but not Chrome

some companies do not allow people to install or run applications on their computer. Instead, it is allowed only on a shared volume on a network drive. Now internet connections and running certain applications there becomes an issue.

some companies load 50+ people in one training. At one international site, they loaded so many people that they were standing and sitting all over and we had to open out doors to get some oxygen into that medium size conference room.

some companies load people of all experience levels and backgrounds making it impossible to teach any one group well. Some are asking deep questions about concurrency while others (who’ve maybe come from a purely IT administrator or manual testing background) do not know basic programming concepts (like switch statements, for loops, variable scope, etc.). It’s difficult to straddle the expectations and needs of such a group.

Even before you are being nominated to do the training, lay down the minimum requirements. For example, here are a few of mine:

Everybody should have a laptop for my technical trainings because I want everybody to do hands-on exercises.

They should have the ability to install certain executables. If they cannot have this because of administrator restrictions, you have to plan alternatives.

For my Go trainings, these sites should be accessible: golang.org, pkg.go.dev, github.com. For my Google Cloud trainings, I have requirements like: console.cloud.google.com, cloud.google.com, qwiklabs.com, etc.

Are you intending to use shared Google docs? Check if the attendees are allowed it. If not, keep alternatives ready.

Set the maximum number of attendees — for technical trainings I typically cap it around 15 to 25. I might extend it a little if it is a rare trip I am making to a foreign country where it is much costlier to have me come back. For some sales/pre-sales training recently, I was able to accommodate up to 50 because there was less individual hands-on. For a business case study activity, I was able to split them into sets of 10 or 15, but I couldn’t have done more. For larger conferences, of course, the room has been able to accommodate many thousands. So each kind of session/training could have different numbers.

Strongly recommend homogeneity in attendees. Don’t mix people from completely different technical backgrounds. Explaining a basic idea to a few people will lose you the rest of the audience — you can’t be explaining how to set environment variables to three people while the rest of the group are rolling their eyes and making a mental note of this training being too basic. Similarly if you are talking to a few people about an advanced concept, you’ve lost all the beginners and some of the intermediates. If they insist on cramming a non-homogenous group of people, set expectations clearly about the audience you will be targeting. For example, in a situation like this, my Go training is usually targeted at an intermediate to advanced attendee and they should have programmed considerably in at least one language before. (In some cases, you can’t avoid it. For people coming from a pure C background, I have to explain what is OOPs. For those coming from Java, Python, JavaScript, etc., I have to explain what a pointer is. Ensure you have a quick, clear, compact explanation for those just enough to bring them on board.) Also, give them the option of doing multiple trainings, each with a homogenous group of attendees.

Dear reader, do you have any other questions?

I have noted down a few points that came quickly to my mind, but you could have more. Ask me at my via my contacts listed below and I shall try to answer them and add them to this list of thoughts.