It sounds to me like you want/need to write some sort of "for dummies" thing, as many salespeople think along the lines of "a good salesman can sell anything" so that they tend not to know/learn about what they're selling.
Maybe 2 books to give an idea what sort of things an absolute newbie might not know:
Leave the books with titles like "for dummies" or "for idiots" at home, because you don't want the students to think that you're talking down to them. You shouldn't be, but if they think you are, then you've got a higher hurdle to deal with than what you want to be dealing with.
A long time ago, I had a job where part of what I had to do was train car mechanics and electronic technicians how to diagnose and repair electriccal problems. Since the division of GM that I worked for made the computers, radio, ac controls and instrument panels (aka dashboard [the speedometer and blinkenlights]) for cars, those were things I had to teach too. Educational levels ranged from high school dropouts to master's degrees.
Teaching is a different skill from knowing, but at least with technical subjects, knowing the subject is necessary for the teaching of it.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach."
Maybe 2 books to give an idea what sort of things an absolute newbie might not know:
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Site-Dummies-David-Crowder/dp...
http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Dummies-John-R-Levine/dp/0764...
Leave the books with titles like "for dummies" or "for idiots" at home, because you don't want the students to think that you're talking down to them. You shouldn't be, but if they think you are, then you've got a higher hurdle to deal with than what you want to be dealing with.
A long time ago, I had a job where part of what I had to do was train car mechanics and electronic technicians how to diagnose and repair electriccal problems. Since the division of GM that I worked for made the computers, radio, ac controls and instrument panels (aka dashboard [the speedometer and blinkenlights]) for cars, those were things I had to teach too. Educational levels ranged from high school dropouts to master's degrees.
Teaching is a different skill from knowing, but at least with technical subjects, knowing the subject is necessary for the teaching of it.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach."
http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html