Colin Anderson - Learning Content Designer and Developer

Hi! I'm Colin Anderson. I've been working in tech for 25 years, including a decade of managing technical teams and, most recently, a decade of running all aspects of L&D for a hosting/managed services company. No matter my position, I excel at creatively solving business problems quickly and cost-effectively. I enjoy writing and have three (so far!) published short stories. As a game dev hobbyist, I am creating a computer game which I plan on releasing in 2026.

I am looking for a Learning and Development role as I really do like helping people unlock new skills and grow professionally. Finding creative ways to keep training engaging and beneficial outside of simply creating training modules to put in an LMS (although this is important too) is what keeps me engaged in the process. I am comfortable working with most eLearning authoring tools and learning management systems, but I have created an entire training catalog on an LMS using completely free software.

I can handle any or all of the various L&D responsibilities from collaboration with leaders and SMEs, designing, creating, deploying, and delivering training modules. I can build, configure, and administer servers as well as the LMS software running on them. I can build proprietary certification courses to ensure learners' understanding of important concepts and proof they can act on that knowledge. Finally, I can manage a staff if needed.

I believe professionals, technical or not, learn best through hands-on experience. During a period of being the only employee in the training department, I needed to deliver training to multiple employees of varying technical skill for their roles in support. To achieve this, I developed a hands-on lab from scratch to give employees real-world server and network problems (Linux, Windows, and firewalls) to fix in an environment without real-world consequences (if you break something, learn from it!). This allows me to spend my time (as the only employee in the training department) creating the exercises, and that’s it. The setup, assessment of the employees’ attempts, and destruction of servers afterward is all automated as well as automatic reporting of employee success/failure. To build this I used:

• ESXi nodes on Dell rackmount servers (I have successfully tested on AWS, Azure, and Proxmox)
• Bash scripting, PowerCLI, and Powershell
• Apache
• PHP
• MySQL
• Cron jobs

Some example images from a beginner-level Wordpress exercise (some quick edits were made to hide proprietary info):

User reads the request, attempts to fix via SSH to the server described, and clicks "I am done"

User sees the results

Every exercise provides a newly deployed virtual machine with a randomized problem or simulated customer request (based on the type of exercise- Apache, IIS, Wordpress, MySQL, etc). The VM has its own IP address from a DHCP pool and can be accessed via SSH or RDP for investigation and attempts to "fix". When the user clicks "done", the amount of time taken (starting when they start the exercise, not including time to spin up the VM) to complete the exercise as well as pass/fail status is recorded. The VM is then destroyed (there is also an automated job to destroy any lingering VMs every night if the user never clicked "done").

One important, foundational aspect of L&D is understanding business or employee needs so a solution can be developed and delivered. Spend enough time gathering these needs, and you’ll probably start identifying needs that require solutions that fall outside of traditional L&D responsibilities. However, when I see a need that I know I can help with, I’ll go ahead and provide a quick solution.

These are website-based apps I developed myself to address the problems outlined. There are certainly 3rd party or enterprise software solutions which would solve most of the problems. However, as the company had no solutions at the time, I provided very specific solutions which didn’t require investment, installation/configuration time, or any significant learning curve for the users. These are all created with PHP/MySQL on an Ubuntu server unless otherwise specified.

Feel free to click on any of the apps to get an idea of how they work. They are database driven, however, the databases are read-only for security purposes in these examples. Additionally, these apps use SimpleSAMLphp for authentication in the corporate environment, but require no authentication for viewing here: