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John Qi

Senior Trainer/ Consultant
Brief info

John Qi is one of our most experienced Senior Trainer and Consultants. He is based in Shanghai where he was born and lived until the age of 16 when he moved to Australia to study. He started his working life with Symantec, gaining extensive experience as a trainer. He is an expert in Symantec products, especially in security and information governance, and teaches throughout China, Japan, Korea and South East Asia.

After nine years of training with Symantec, John decided he wanted more real-life experience and decided to take a consulting role-based back in Shanghai. The move gave him the opportunity to work on some large projects and encounter real-world situations that enhance the training he provides.

In 2013 John was recommended to Red Education by a former manager and he has been working for us ever since. He combines training with consulting which gives him a balance of online with on-prem work as well as that critical up-to-date real-world experience that he passes on in his training.

He believes that real-world experience is especially important when teaching adults. His students are not just there for the certificate, they are there to be able to deal with real-life situations, and so that’s what he teaches them.

Like all Red Education Trainers, John is part of a global community of certified instructors with access to every level of technical detail at the same level as the vendor to ensure that course attendees have an outstanding learning experience.

A family of teachers

John says that it was almost inevitable that he became a trainer, coming from a family of teachers. His mother and aunt were primary school teachers, and his father was a college maths teacher. John developed the same passion for teaching and enjoys engaging with his students and helping them learn.

“People are more interesting than computers”

In both his training and consulting roles, John enjoys working with people, saying that ‘people are more interesting than computers.’ He gets great job satisfaction from student feedback, especially when they tell him how they’ve used what he has taught in their work.

‘Everyone deserves a good mentor’

John enjoys building relationships and also mentoring his students. He describes how he hired one new recruit who was very proud of his technical skills. However, after a few projects ran into problems, it soon emerged that he did not have the communications skills needed for the job. John took on the job of mentor, role-playing each the failed projects and enabling the younger colleague to see what needed to change.

John recalls his own early days at university when a more experienced mentor took the time to help him get his life on the right path. Without this, John believes that he could be washing dishes in the back of a restaurant today instead of a respected trainer and consultant with Red Education.

‘Soft skills training is more important than anything else”

Having seen at first hand how the lack of good communications skills can impact IT projects, John believes that soft skills, such as leadership and project management, are vital. In his own transition into a management role, he has worked hard to learn the new skills needed. As software becomes simpler, he believes that soft skills are the real growth area in the IT industry and these skills are increasingly in demand from those who understand that their success depends on more than their technical knowledge.

Always the teacher

John is a great lover of travel and describes how he has missed that side of his job since the global transition to online learning. This has been especially challenging for John as his family lives in Sydney, Australia. John talks regularly online with them and, always the teacher helps with homework via Google Docs. He confesses to finding some of the homework quite challenging now that his children are at high school.

A self-confessed ‘computer nerd’ at home as well as work

In his spare time, John enjoys going to see musical theatre shows and has recently started playing basketball again after 20 years in order to keep fit. However, he confesses that he is still a ‘computer nerd’ at home as well as in his career, spending his time learning online and teaching himself computer languages as well as leadership and management at home.

John’s certifications

  • PMP
  • SYMANTEC and VERITAS certified Instructor NBU, EV, SEP STS
  • Data loss Prevention ASP
  • Microsoft Certified Trainer (2001-2012)
  • CTT+
  • MCSE 2003
  • MCSE 2000
  • MCSE NT4
  • MCDBA 2000
  • MCSA: Messaging
  • Cert IV of workplace training and Assessment
  • Completed Solaris 9 admin 1 course
  • Customer Support Professional
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