Cohort learning · live lab racks
Build networks, recover broken services and defend messy environments. Twelve weeks. Mostly lab time.
Small cohorts of 16. Tutors still working in infrastructure.
01 / THE COURSE
Provision users, schedule changes, read logs and work a queue without losing the plot. You’ll document every intervention because the next shift needs your reasoning, not a heroic mystery fix.
Wire a segmented office environment, inspect traffic and diagnose the ugly failure that only appears after lunch.
No tidy diagrams supplied.
Harden access, spot odd account behaviour and contain a simulated incident. Then write the post-incident note people will actually read.
Technical skill is half the job. The other half? Explaining risk to a finance lead, asking a useful question on a support call and knowing when to stop tinkering.
02 / FIELD NOTE
Every restart depended on one senior technician. Night shifts guessed. Fair question: how do you practise that safely?
Learners mapped dependencies, wrote runbooks and rehearsed a failed database recovery — actually, two recoveries after the first rollback plan proved thin.
Across the following eight weeks, first-line resolution rose by 31% on average. The team still escalated risky changes. Good.
Measured by the client’s internal ticket review over eight weeks; outcomes vary by baseline skill and attendance.
03 / WHY A WORKSHOP?
Back in 2017, infrastructure trainer Mara Ellison got tired of demonstrations where every service behaved and every diagram matched reality. Production estates aren’t like that. They carry old decisions, rushed fixes and labels nobody trusts.
So the first Uptime Workshop cohort inherited a deliberately awkward network. Something broke most mornings. Learners had to ask, test, record, reverse and explain — not follow a laminated recipe.
Here’s the thing. We keep cohorts small because live fault work gets woolly at scale. Sixteen people is our ceiling, even when a waiting list would make a larger room tempting. Really.
Founder and principal tutor. Former infrastructure lead; collector of baffling change notes.
Network lab tutor. Makes routing faults that look accidental. They aren’t.
NEXT COHORT PLANNING
04 / STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Not quite. You should be comfortable moving around a command line, understand what an IP address does and have tried basic user administration. Our short readiness call checks that without turning into an exam.
A modern laptop, stable broadband and a headset. The lab environment runs remotely in your browser.
No. We teach the work, help you present evidence and practise interviews; hiring decisions remain with employers.
Yes, up to 16 people. Team cohorts can use an anonymised version of your environment, though scoping takes around three weeks and we won’t reproduce systems containing live personal data. Look, it’s slower than using a generic lab. It’s usually much more useful.
Live workshops run on Tuesday evenings from 18:00 to 20:30. Four optional office-hour clinics sit on alternate Thursdays, and every exercise remains available until 30 days after the final workshop.
05 / COURSE CALL
Tell us what you already know and where you want to land. The call is useful even if we decide this cohort is too early — or too basic.
42 Great Ancoats Street, Manchester M4 5AB
Monday–Friday, 09:00–17:30