Last week I did something a bit weird – I had an almost full training class. What? You probably thought I did a ton of training. It’s hit or miss mainly. Lately I’ve been busy with clients (which is my main focus – data problems).
In May I announced a new class which pretty much went against everything I said I was going to do moving forward. My goal of “three classes” on qgis wasn’t working like I wanted (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced) and I decided to write up a bunch of blogs and client conversations into QGIS Tips and Tricks. It was mostly sold out. I ran through 16 “things” qgis did you may not know about. In general I’d say 80% of the things people didn’t know about. In total I had about 20 off the top of my head I could do. So I did the 16 “more common” things – or at least what I think is the common based off 10 years of work. Maybe I’ll change it up or have a few different versions of the class.
What does that mean going forward on training?
What I have noticed this year is everything seems to boil down to 4 hours. For that amount of time I have your attention OR I’m really boring from hour 4.5 to 8. I blame online fatigue and the pandemic.
With Intermediate and Advanced QGIS I was getting bogged down in talking. People want answers. So maybe I do the classes as more of a “answer” vs something traditional.
Everyone tells me “I don’t want an intro to QGIS I’m way beyond intro” so when I go “can you tell me about Geopackages” everyone blanks. Maybe I do a shorter Intro Class. Maybe you get “Field Calculator”, or “Editing”, or “Model Designer”. This one I struggle with because I like the 8 hour Intro to QGIS class. I’ve been teaching it since 2014 in various shapes and forms.
If I break training down into 4 hour blocks it does open the door to do some other things like Geoserver, PostGIS, and GRASS. Yeah I know – How Popular would a GRASS Class be? How much can I cover with a 4 hour Geoserver Class? Enough to get you familiar with it. PostGIS? That one I don’t know as of yet. I started laying it out last week and it might run 5 hours. Maybe the full 8.
Anyway – Expect to see some classes get retired and some get announced moving forward. I need to be more flexible as opposed to the rigid way I’ve been handling training.
