Twenty Years of Training
It's been something of a nostalgia-driven month at Wise Owl. After celebrating the 60th birthday of the BASIC programming language earlier in the month, arguably the more important event is my 20th anniversary at Wise Owl! This blog is a self-indulgent look-back at some stats, highlights and lowlights of my two decades teaching people how to navigate the vagaries of Microsoft software.
How did I get here?
Completely by accident as it happens! I trained as a secondary school science teacher before realising that there isn't enough money in the world to have me deal with teenagers on a daily basis. Returning to science, I spent three years working on a PhD studying East African cichlid fish. The field work was fantastic fun but I found the day-to-day lab work as dull as dishwater. Abandoning the PhD before the dreaded writing-up stage I found myself looking for any job to tide me over while I decided what I really wanted to do.
The role at Wise Owl seemed to offer the aspects of teaching that I actually enjoyed while simultaneously appealing to my inner computer nerd. I figured that I'd give it a try for a while and then, just like that, it's twenty years later!
I can prove anything by statistics
Actually, I'm not sure what the following statistics prove, other than that I've been doing this for a long time! I've kept fairly meticulous records of the courses I've delivered and have collated some of the information to produce a Microsoft Power BI report (see a list of our Power BI courses if you'd like to learn how to create similar reports!).
You can see and interact with the embedded Power BI report below (use the tools at the bottom to navigation through the pages and to view it in full screen mode):
If you don't have time to poke around in the report itself, here are some of the headline stats:
It's not quite that number of individual people as some have had the misfortune to attend more than one of my courses. Were you one of the unlucky ones? Sound off in the comments below!
Dave reliably informs me that this is nearly enough to get to the moon (but not back again).
It may sound glamorous but the vast majority of these were Travelodges and Premier Inns!
What software do I teach?
The Software Timeline page shows how the products I teach have changed over time.
I used Microsoft's colours so blame them for the appearance of this chart!
It's a bit sad to see the decline of Access, but equally great to see the demise of the hated Project! Excel has been a consistent performer over the years. It's exciting to see the growing popularity of Power BI.
What are the most popular courses I teach?
The most popular by far is Introduction to Excel VBA with almost twice as many courses as the next most popular.
It's a reasonably even split between scheduled and tailored training.
Interestingly, I delivered my last MS Project course in 2012, yet it remains the 4th most popular course that I've taught (please nobody request that we start delivering Project training again)!
Where's the best place to teach?
I think we do a good job of choosing nice venues for our public courses, but it's always more fun to visit our clients at their sites. Here are some of my favourites:
Courses for Jaguar Landrover were great because the training venue was attached to the British Motor Museum! Sadly, no test drives were allowed.
PwC's More London venue always offers spectacular views of Tower Bridge. On this occasion, Warner Brothers selfishly ruined the view with a photoshoot to promote the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The library at Holborn Bars lent a suitably studious air to proceedings.
PwC's links with Formula 1 meant they got to display one of the Team Lotus cars in their Embankment Place lobby. Again, no test drive was allowed.
Honourable mentions must also go to the US Air Force for hosting me at RAF Croughton, and BAE Systems for inviting me to their tank factory in Telford. There are no photos of these for obvious reasons!
What's the biggest challenge I faced?
The COVID lockdown, unsurprisingly. For a company making a living from delivering face-to-face, classroom-based training courses we were a bit stuck! Fortunately, we're a resilient bunch here at Wise Owl and within five weeks of the first lockdown we delivered our first online training course!
It was a very sudden introduction but it seems that online training is here to stay.
What's the dumbest thing I've done?
Without a doubt it was publishing 91 YouTube videos on the same day not realising that it would send 91 separate notifications to each subscriber. Needless to say, we had slightly fewer subscribers by the end of the day!
January 3rd, 2020: a day of infamy. Sorry subscribers!
What's my biggest achievement?
Fortunately, the YouTube hiccup didn't do too much damage and receiving our Silver Play Button to celebrate reaching 100,000 subscribers was quite a proud moment.
Ooh, shiny!
What's your biggest disappointment?
Spending weeks writing a new Excel Office Scripts course, including lots of fun exercises, to have only a single delegate ever attend it :'(
I spent ages drawing all those trees!
What's the weirdest thing that's happened on a course?
Apart from Gordon Ramsay walking into one of my training courses (accidentally I hasten to add!) at the IoD in London, probably when one of my delegates became so bored with me droning on about SQL that they decided to take an impromptu nap in the middle of the course!
There's a delegate underneath that exercise booklet!
What's next?
With the advent of AI tools like ChatGPT I wouldn't like to predict that I'll still be doing this twenty years from now. But let's go to the source for a definitive answer:
Well, that's reassuring!
Perhaps I won't be able to retire just yet then!
And finally
A big thank you to each of the ~5000 people I've trained over the past twenty years. Here's to the next twenty and I'll see you on the next course!
