by David Haddock

David joined the training team in February 2008 having worked for GE Smallworld in pre-sales, services and support roles, and during this time undertook a number of training assignments. His Smallworld career started after an undergraduate Geography degree and a Masters in Geographical Information Systems, with the first Smallworld Summer School in July 1997 where he was sponsored by Perot Systems to attend and subsequently worked for them for 18 months developing and supporting the Smallworld application for a UK electricity company. He then spent two years at the head office of Boots the Chemist in Nottingham as their GIS expert, managing and developing their Smallworld application, as well as conducting research into store and services location. David joined GE Smallworld in April 2001 and has mainly worked on electricity and gas projects in the UK and France.

David's first eighteen months training has sent him to India (Delhi and Hyderabad), Norway, France, Slovakia and within the UK, Aberdeen and Bristol. He also taught at the US Smallworld User Conference in Florida along with supporting Office Suite workshops. David enjoys his time abroad which has averaged out at about one week in four. As the most popular course is the Fast Track one, most overseas assignments take him away for a fortnight, which usually gives him some time in the middle weekend to act as a tourist, and he has been to such diverse places as the Red Fort in Delhi, the Holmenkollen Ski Museum and Jump near Oslo and Ramoji Film City outside Hyderabad.

When not abroad David teaches the scheduled courses at Elizabeth House in Cambridge, as well as developing training materials, looking after the training server, and keeping up to date with new products. David is our Office Suite specialist and has been overseeing the revision of the Global Transmission Office course for the new 412 version of the product. He enjoys the new challenge of training, especially having to think on his feet when asked questions and says, "After over ten years working with Smallworld products an innocent query from a student may make me stop and think about an aspect of the software in a new way. You always come away having learnt something new yourself however many times you have taught a course".

Training Schedule Rationale

Our training schedule aims to provide a suitable learning path for customers or partners whose personnel carry out daily tasks that include working with Smallworld applications.

Partners should send their personnel to attend all Smallworld basic courses, including Using Smallworld Core Spatial Technology (CST), Magik Programming, Data Modelling, Application Development, Configuration and Administration.

Attendance on all basic courses provides a comprehensive understanding of all the various components of Smallworld CST necessary for implementing and supporting customer projects. For fast learning needs, the Fast Track sessions offer great opportunities to learn our products through intense and fast paced sessions. Fast Track trainings are not for the fainthearted!

Customers should have personnel in their workforce at all times with user-level and expert-level knowledge of the Smallworld CST product suite, to fully appreciate, use and properly deploy a Smallworld-based project implementation.

Training schedule

Cambridge (UK), 2010 schedule

Training catalogue

Select here to register for a training course in Cambridge (UK), request an on demand session, or just to let us know which trainings you are interested in or to get a quotation.