Age limits for Well House Consultants Open Source courses?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-02-22 07:33:42 - Graham Ellis"How old do I have to be to come on one of your courses?" That's a fair question, but there's no formal age limit. We will train you on a course if the course is going to be right for you. And with courses that are designed to help delegates with their employment jobs / contractors with their contracting businesses, the bulk of our delegates are of working age.
People who are no longer at work often find that they now have time on their hands to learn, and to undertake extra projects that require new skills, and we welcome them too. There are also occasions when a younger person - still of an age where school is compulsory - will want to learn a skill as part of a hobby / extra activity. If our courses are right for such a young person, we welcome them; there's a history in the IT business of the occasional young entrepreneur and I've come across one of two who perhaps haven't made it to the Twitter / Facebook / Google level, but have come up with some quite widely distributed code. And if one of these bright young people asks about courses, it may be a sign of enterprise and practicality beyond their years ... the asking of the question in itself indicates an element of appropriateness for the course.
Now ... there are legal issues / limits. Our training centre / hotel insurance only covers guests aged 14 and above, but it would be really unusual for one of our courses to be appropriate for someone younger. Up to the age of 16, and I would certainly want to ensure that the booking had the backing of the parent / guardian / family. And with any delegate very much younger that our 'norm' - whatever that might be - I would want to check that the course was right for him / her. We are not a crammer that helps pupils pass exams, and I wouldn't want to have anyone waste their money on booking a course if that's their objectives - I would feel very guilty at taking that cash, I would feel that I was interfering with the role of the person's school, and I would fear that the course needed to be run in two different directions to meet the needs of the other delegates learning for their jobs, and the delegate learning for his / her exams.
We have trained a handful of very young delegates, even including special / private courses at weekends. There's a fine line between parental involvement and parental pressure on the young person, and it needs some of the first but very little of the second of those. But it's not the actual age that matters - it's the attitude and aptitude of the delegate, and the reason for learning. Even if someone says "I'm just 13" that's not an immediate "then we can't help" - it's very much more important to help such a person with so many years ahead of them, but that help if very likely (but not inevitable) to end up as being emails of advise to seek something that's better tuned to the person's needs than in-work tuned training from us.