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Graham Ellis | |
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Personal SkillsTrainerGraham has a rare blend of teaching and technical skills that make him uniquely suited to a professional training role, and an enthusiasm for training and the subjects that he teaches that you won't better elsewhere. Graham started to work in support roles many years ago, and very soon was presenting customer training courses - his colleagues always felt they had drawn the "short straw" if they had to give a class, but Graham took the opposite view. Over the years, each job change that Graham Ellis has chosen has moved him more into training roles; currently, he trains some 80% of the time, the other 20% being reserved for technical work to keep him afresh with technology. Technical Author From his earliest courses, Graham has almost always contributed to the writing of his own material - he's written courses on C and Fortran, on the "Designer I" CAD system that he was involved in writing, and contributed to courses on Solaris, Web Development, Irix, and other topics. Today, the "meat" of all the Well House Consultants courses that Graham presents have also been written by him; the longest-established course is "Perl Programming", originally written in 1996. Of course, things have changed a great deal since the course was written, and every module and every example has been updated at least once (usually twice or more!) in the intervening years. You'll usually find that the date on your training notes on one of Graham's courses is less than a month before the course date. Hotelier / Customer Service Graham leads the small team that runs Well House Manor - our training centre, hotel and meeting venue. And with such a small team, he (willingly) turns his hand to a wide range of roles such from reception work (checkins, bookings, advising customers on what to see in the area and onward travel plans) through preparing and serving food for groups of up to 25, to room changeovers and behind the scenes operations. The hotel web site and booking system, and the staff communications site, were put together and are maintained by Graham. In both the computer training and the hotel business, excellent customer service is critical to the business success, with satisfied customers becoming the ambassadors for the business, returning themselves and recommending the products to others. Under Graham's direction, and using this philosophy, Well House Consultants has gone from strength to strength. Analyst / Programmer Graham has specified systems and programs as diverse as manpower planning models, CAD systems and time sheet reporting systems, and has programmed them in languages as diverse as Basic, Fortran, C, C++ and Perl. Applications specified and/or written range from tiny applications that took just a few hours to put together to the CAD system, for which Graham lead the team for seven years. In the last couple of years, Graham has been involved with the specification and implementation of applications that are predominantly intranet or Internet based, including an on line shopping application, and an application to maintain a database of medical experts, and to put those experts in touch with clients who need their particular expertise in a particular geographic area. Salesman Graham's an enthusiast for the right product - and it shows. In the early days of computer graphic terminals, he was a "rep" with a sales territory in the South West of England (that's why, 20 years later, he still lives in Wiltshire) and turned 6 counties of green fields into the hottest patch in the British Isles. If you have any technical questions about the courses that Graham presents, or his contract work, Graham will deal with them personally and professionally; although often teaching during the day, he's able to check and reply to emails every night so that you won't be left waiting. If Graham sells you any training or consultancy, he'll also be the person responsible for delivering the product that he's sold, and providing you with appropriate support thereafter. It should come as no suprise, then, that Graham tends to undersell rather than oversell - after all, if you're not sure if you need the advanced course, you can always book it later, can't you? Technical ExpertiseOpen Source Programming LanguagesGraham Ellis has written and currently presents training courses in Perl, Tcl/Tk, Expect, C, C++, PHP, Lua, Ruby and Python. He has developed training material, and also "real world" applications in each of these langauges. Other Programming Languages Graham has current Java skills, and regularly presents beginner and intermediate Java courses. He's also done a great deal of work in the past in Fortran, Assembler and Basic, and has had some exposure to a number of other languages too. Web Skills Graham is a skilled HTML practitioner, and goes beyond HTML to CGI, JSP, PHP and other server side technologies (and JavaScript on the client side). He's quite happy coding directly in HTML, using Perl's CGI.pm module, or using elements generated by software tools such as Dreamweaver. Designing a web site is both an art and a science, and you'll find that Graham covers both aspects - producing pages that look and feel good and that work well too. Data Management Skills Computing is often referred to as information technology, and the managing of that information is paramount. Graham has designed and implemented data management solutions based on file and directory structures, on relational databases such as MySQL, and on the precursors of XML; current projects include work using XML and XSLT, SOAP and LDAP. Operating Systems These days, most of Graham's work is on Linux; he manages a fast changing network of some 20 systems, many of which are training machines, and the broadband internet connection. Roles undertaken include operating systems builds and configurtation, user account and disc space management, backups and security. The network also include machines running various versions of Windows, and MacOS versions 7 through 10. Historically, Graham Ellis has used a wide variety of operating systems ranging from Sintran to Irix, from Primos to Solaris, and from VMS to CP/M and MSDos.
Title: Graham Ellis - Areas of Expertise and skills Contact: enquiries@grahamellis.co.uk Date: March 2021 This page: http://www.grahamellis.co.uk/skills.html Copyright © 2021, Well House Consultants Ltd |