Trainers: MARK WALAS
EDUCATION: - Mark was born and educated to GCE A level in Northampton, England before commencing his working career. Vocational education has been a regular feature in Mark’s working life.
CAREER HISTORY: - Mark has worked for both large and small organisations, in the UK and for limited spells overseas. His work roles range from hands on to director level assignments. He has been running businesses since moving out of “regular” employment in 1982.
CORE SKILLS: - Since starting his IT career in 1976, Mark has been involved with the IBM medium range of servers, latterly the AS/400 and iSeries systems. His 25 years of IT experience started with two years in operations, followed by two and a half years in programming, system design and system implementation. Mark has installed systems around the world. This was followed by a spell in IT management before starting a systems development and support business. He learned about many different industries and processes before starting to develop an interest in training in 1986. Mark describes this interest as a passion and eventually started a business dedicated to the provision of IT training in the IBM server market. Over a ten year period, he was able to build the business to be second in the market (to IBM). During this period, competitors who were ahead in the market gradually withdrew as they could not keep pace.
IT TRAINING EXPERIENCE: - Mark has run and developed training courses for both technical and user audiences. Technical training involved computer operations, programming, databases, management and strategies. User training involved word processing and office applications. Application training was focused on accounting software and payroll applications.
IT PACKAGES: - MS WORD, MS POWERPOINT, MS EXCEL, LOTUS NOTES, LOTUS FREELANCE, MS FRONTPAGE, INTERNET, ADOBE FRAMEMAKER, etc
OTHER INFORMATION: - Mark trained many technical staff at HSBC during a period when his company was appointed sole supplier to the bank and its operating companies. He trained all staff at SUN ALLIANCE properties for a roll out of electronic mail and office applications based on the AS/400 system.
Mark was invited to participate in an internal project inside IBM in 2000 to develop training course materials, presentation materials and documentation for IBM. These materials were subsequently published and Mark is listed as the co-author of the IBM publication (reference SG24-4249-03).
