Join us on the podcast as we chat with Dr. Robin Sargent, a seasoned pro in learning and development. Discover her journey from teaching to founding IDOL Courses, an innovative program for instructional design. Learn about embracing imperfection, keys to success in instructional design, and the future of the field, including AI integration and the importance of data. Plus, find out how to stand out in this competitive market and explore the IDOL Courses Program, designed to kickstart or advance your career in instructional design in just 24 weeks.

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Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm your host, Doug Wooldridge. We have an awesome guest for today's show. We got Robin Sargent of Idle Talent and Idle Courses joining us today to talk about how she got into the world of learning and development and how she came to create Idle Courses, the only true academy for folks looking to become corporate instructional designers and veterans of the industry that want to find ways to improve and showcase their top tier talents. Let's get to the interview.

Thank you so much for joining the podcast today, Robin. My first question is, how did you get into the world of learning and development? my gosh, what a great way to start it off. Thanks for having me. I love Debbie, and so I am very familiar with TTC and all the great work that you guys are doing. Well, shucks. Yeah. So how did I get involved in learning and development? It was one of those accidental then on purpose stories.

It was, I was actually the assistant dean of students at Shorter University. And so then they wanted to move their programs online. And if anybody is familiar with the university faculty, especially back in, you know, the early two thousands and you know that many of them are Luddites. They are scared of technology. I have always been a fan of technology. I've always, I mean, I'm a, an old millennial, so I am a tech baby.

And so I took it on. I took on, you know, training the adjunct faculty, setting up the learning management system, converting our in -person classrooms to online content. And then I became the online academic advisor for those first round of students. And I just loved it so much that I was like, is there a way that I could just do this job full time? Yes. And it was in that search that I found corporate instructional design. That's crazy.

And how about the origins of idle courses? What drove you to build such an incredible opportunity for folks that are either new to the industry as well as veterans? Yeah, so that one was, you know, a little bit longer in the sense that from the moment I started working as a corporate instructional designer, my cubicle mate told me, well, you can freelance in this industry and you can get clients on the side and make extra money. And so from the time I got my first

role in corporate in 2012. It was also the same year I got my first client on the side. And I just kept doing that on the side all the way until I was a director of learning and development. And it was during my maternity leave for my third and final son that I had a book of business and I got another client that was going to be a large ramp for me to just exit the very cushy job.

you know, helping other people in the field because they would reach out to me because I was doing marketing to try and get clients, but I kept attracting people who wanted to enter the field. So I wanted to serve them too. But then I thought, man, this could also help me find the subcontractors that I want to work with. And it just kind of grew out of that. And so now, you know, fast forward five years later, we are

the first and only state licensed career school for instructional design and online learning. That's incredible. I have a few questions from our community that I'd like to ask here. So first up, what lessons would you share for those who are maybe just getting into the industry and thinking about making a career change, maybe from like higher ed to adult learning? I mean, I have quite a few tips that I would share for those.

that are new. I think one of the first things that people have to take into consideration is the mindset. I think a lot of times what I see, we've enrolled over 3 ,000 students over these last five years and of course we do a lot of data analysis and user student surveys and things like that and really a lot of anecdotal, like just talking to the students and all those kinds of things.

And the number one thing that I find that a lot of them struggle with at the beginning is a lot of fear around the challenge of making that transition. And with that fear comes these internal voices that say, I'm not good enough. I'm an imposter here. It's self doubt. But what you have to remember is that's completely normal. It used to be, we had the fear of the challenge of, you know, the wooly mammoth. And so that would help us.

you know, overcome those challenges or stay away, right? Stay away, you know, fight or flight. But now our challenges are different, right? The challenge is that I'm going to transition from one career to the next, which still comes with fear. And, or another part of it looks like perfectionism. Like I can't show anybody my work to get feedback on it because it's not good enough. And so the very first thing that I would say is like, do it messy. Just...

You know, progress over perfection. You've got to learn and then actually create in order to really do the things, which is get something out there to get feedback on in order to master anything, whether it's sports, medicine, academics, and most certainly learning design. Very well. That's my first one. You want me to rattle off more? I can't, but that's the number one. Yeah. What would be number two?

What would be number two? So once you start doing it, Messy, I think the other part is, it has to be about doing the work and knowing what this job entails. I think a lot of people think that the job entails, I create training to make people's lives better. And yeah, you do. I think that there is another part of it that people get surprised about. And I'd rather you just know about it upfront.

and that is that you are solving performance gaps in the organizations that are directly, usually, I mean, if we're not talking about compliance training, right? Besides that, that are directly tied to the revenue of your organization. And so if you are thinking more along those lines, you're going to be a better designer, right? You're going to put the problem in the complex task at the center of your instruction.

you're going to do the analysis that's necessary. You're going to track, you know, the return on investment. And you're also going to show up like a business person and know that everything is negotiable. And I think a lot of times people show up and they're like, I'll just, you know, take the instructions and whatever they want me to do and just do a really good job of doing it. But when you can show up as a expert in learning design as a

Business professional and understand where learning and development sits in an organization you show up differently Mm -hmm. So that would be another one. You're putting yourself on a completely different tier of professionals in this industry, which is the idea and Yeah Excuse me. We have a I have another one here from a Someone who's a little new into this. So what value?

Can idle courses add to their instructional design success? It's pretty incredible. When I started the idle Academy, it was really, it was just me and 25 students. And I just, you know, poured myself into every single one of them and really did all it started out as a beta and really just did whatever I could to get them results faster.

And what's cool about where we are now is that we've grown up. We've done all of the iterations. We've done, you know, we have focused on number one thing, which is the results. And what's been incredible are the results that have come out of our program. And most of our people land Fortune 500 company, like roles at Fortune 500 companies.

or they are full -time freelancers, they really are able to do exactly what it is that they want. And the first time, what really has blown my mind too, is that people will transition from being a teacher to a senior learning designer. And while it may seem like a mystery to others, we know what the formula is at this point, and it's no mystery. It is exactly what makes good instructional design, and that is deliberate practice,

multiple levels of support and then a comprehensive program. And so because of all of these things combined into one, that's why we have these incredible results. You get the one -on -one mentors, you get group mentorship, you have a community of people, you have academic evaluators who are senior instructional designers or higher reviewing every single piece.

of every single asset that you end up putting in your portfolio. So you are never just like building a portfolio on your own in the dark or learning how to design instruction without getting that feedback from experts who are professionals in the field, working at Zillow, working at Amazon, working at Google. Those are who our faculty members are. And so you don't get, you can get some of that on the job.

There's enough people in this field that the companies can demand and require five plus years of experience in our field in order to even get you to an interview. And so they're not, you're not accidental instructional designers anymore. You gotta be an on purpose instructional designer. And that really comes from doing the actual work. And that's, and you don't get to actually do the actual work unless you land a job.

And you've got a barrier now of, you know, experience instructional desires, applying the same jobs that you want to be your entry level role. And if you show up to that interview and you have not been there, done that before, then you're getting passed over. You're not getting the opportunity to get the deliberate practice that you need. And so that's the other part of our program, which is you have to do an internship. Now we have an internship hub that matches you with

companies and nonprofits and so on and so forth so that you are connected to the hands -on work that you need to do. But at this point in our industry, you have to show up as if you've been there, done that before, you have to have actually done it, and your portfolio has to prove it. And if you can prove it through your portfolio, you can overcome the risk, this risk that the companies don't want to take.

on hiring somebody who hasn't been there or done that before. And so if you do it and you have a portfolio to prove it, right? And then you are on top of that certified, that's really the game changer for the students that we see graduate and reach their goals. Very cool. And this kind of segues a little bit into my next question from our community. What value can I, of course, add to someone who

is let's say a senior instructional designer, they've been doing this for several years, but they just want to either brush up on their skills or maybe upskill themselves to the point of where they're really able to stand out from the rest of the pack. What's really cool is companies also enroll their teams in Idle Academy. And of course, it's because of all the things that I mentioned, but more specifically because when you are...

even if you've been in the industry for a while, right? And you've gotten some feedback from your colleagues, it's not the type of intensive feedback that you probably need in order to grow. I mean, if you go and do any research on deliberate practice, and it's, I mean, I'm obsessed with it because it works. It's like, if you look at a triangle and the triangle has A, B, and C, you can go A to B to get to C, or you can go to A to C, right? You just skip B.

And that's what deliberate practice allows you to do. And as we know, even somebody who is a master in their field is their training is never complete. Right. And how do you up level your training, whether it's in the medical profession or instructional design, it is through getting that targeted feedback on those skills that you may be missing that you might not even know about. But if you go through the entire process, right, from

analysis all the way through your e -learning development, the different tools. So we don't just train you on instructional design theories or anything. It is really focused on the deliberate practice of every single piece in our field, including the tech and the tools, including Beyond, Camtasia, Genially, Lectora, Articulate Storyline. And I don't know if I mentioned Genially or not, but it's

all the tech and the tools, right? And it's not even just about like, can you use them, but can you do it to a professional level? And of course you're not going to know if you're at a professional level unless you are getting feedback from people who are at a professional level in those things. So even our academic evaluators, right? So for every asset that you have, you submit to our evaluators. The evaluators only evaluate what they are experts in. So if you submit an animated video,

It is the animated experts that are going to give you feedback on those videos. And so that's how it really does work for the newbies of instructional design all the way up to the seniors. And we've had chief learning officers enroll in our program because even if you go through a master's program, you don't get the deliberate practice at all. You get a lot of theory and we cover that as well. And if you go, like I said, on the job, again, they're not,

Handholding right it's more like you know just fix this Fix that typo fix this grammar or itself performance improvement plan and again, that's not supportive for your growth and so all that to say it Deliberate practice works for wherever you are in your journey as instructional designer hmm and just a side note How long did it take to bring all these experts in the industry together for you know from cohort one to?

I believe you're on cohort 18 coming up soon. Yes, we're on cohort 18. boy. So, you know, in the beginning it was just me. And then in June, 2020, it went from, you know, I was enrolling about 25 students at cohort. So the first three cohorts, like 25 students. And then in June, 2020, I had so many people on the wait list and I realized I'm not going to be able to serve.

over 25 students through deliberate practice. I just can't do it. And so my founding members, a hundred percent of them went and landed jobs in corporate instructional design. So the a hundred percent, I know. And so out of the best of them, right. That's how I chose the coaches and mentors at the beginning. But at this point, I still have even founding members that are now senior instructional designers. And we have,

kind of a higher bar for our faculty. It used to be that, you know, just if you landed a structural design job, you could come and, you know, coach and mentor in our school. But now we are, you know, state licensed, and also, you know, we want to continue to increase our outputs and our results for our students. And so now alumni have to be senior instructional designers, or I'm actually been recruiting faculty from conference.

from conferences. Awesome. So yes, so I'm recruiting new faculty members for people who are, you know, speaking at these conferences in our industry, who are actually teaching at universities. And so those are going to come and start adding to our faculty pool. So we've got a good mix, but we always set the bar. They have to be senior instructional designer. They have to be a professional doing the work in corporate in order to

be a part of our faculty. Well, otherwise they wouldn't be able to give such great insight and be able to really help folks move from the beginning stages to where they can jump into any professional role. So I have a three part question here, and this one's from Debbie. So in the evolving landscape of digital learning, how do you envision the future of instructional design and online education?

I mean, I'm excited about the future. I see more and more tech and tools and I talk about things like inclusivity, accessibility, and my personal favorite, which is personalized learning. I mean, we already, in so many ways, if we just look at the ways that me as a learner, right? I know I'm not my learners, but I of course pay attention to my own way of learning.

And if I want to go and learn a thing, it's always very specific. Right? If I want to fix a toilet in my house, then I go to, I go to YouTube and I don't just search like how to install a toilet. I search for like the bobber, how to fix the bobber in the toilet. It is very specific. And then I pull up a

a video and then it has timestamps and I'm only going to this timestamp where they actually get to the bobber and they fix the bobber in the toilet. And it's the same kind of thing that I see us moving to as far as I see things like social learning networks, right? Knowledge bases that pull up personalized learning, giving people free navigation in their training libraries.

And even the AI bots that I have one even in our Academy that has taken all of the content that we've put into our school and you know, added it to its knowledge base. So you can now ask a little bot in our school, you know, what's this and this about analysis or whatever it is. And it is pulling from our own.

course materials and then I can either click on the lesson or I can just take that answer and be like, okay, good, got what I wanted. That's incredible. Moving on. And so I just see more and more of that happening. I guess just to piggyback on that, Debbie would love to know your perspective on AI as well, like how it's being used within learning and development and maybe where that's going as well. It's interesting. You know, we teach,

how to use AI even built my students their own custom bot that's based on the first principles of instruction. And it helps them brainstorm how to write problem centered scenarios for their course blueprints and things like that. So AI is certainly a part of our program. But beyond that, I see AI of course helping us do the things which is

The hardest thing I think for, and it used to be the hardest thing for me too, right? Was to be the initial creative spark. We would stare at blank pages and we would have to produce. You couldn't rely on your SME to write things for you or any of that kind of stuff. And so we had to be the ones that just generated, right? Just generated the ideas. What's cool now is that Chat2BT can do a lot of brainstorming work for you.

so that you can use that mental energy to do the deep thinking, right? And do some of those more creative processes that take a longer amount of time. The time that you get back from being able to brainstorm the ideas with AI. But what's also interesting is, I also run Idol Town, right? Which is a staffing agency that only graduates, we only place graduates from our school on these contracts.

But I bring it up because those clients, those bigger clients do not want any part of AI used to generate their training content. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, well, because they don't want the information about their certification for their big software programs to be put into to be training the models.

And so I think it's an interesting place where we are, where people are, you know, on one hand, the clients are concerned about their proprietary information getting fed into this, you know, language model. And then the other side is the instructional designers are like, this is great because I can use it for brainstorming. I can use it for outlining and even the little bot that I built, right? It can help you write.

scenarios. So I think we're at an interesting, I have seen, I have recently discovered something very cool I think is going to be useful for, with AI in education. And that is a lot of times we want to ask our learners open -ended questions, but how do you ask open -ended questions, get learner responses and give them feedback?

when it's open -ended in a digital course, right? And so what's cool is there are so many capabilities. Like for instance, you can actually program AI to read these open -ended answers, give it the rubric that you want in order to give feedback for these open -ended questions, whether they're reflective or formative or even summative. I mean, I guess it just depends on.

how you feel about getting NI generative feedback. But it's pretty cool what you can do with these things that you could never do before. It used to have to require a human resource in order to give feedback on every single open -ended response. And we don't necessarily need that for everything anymore. Right. Or have the time to do that. Yeah. Or the resources, the budget. Exactly. Every single faculty, the biggest cost,

in my school is faculty. I have one more question from the community. How is idle courses using reporting such as XAPI or other tools like that to leverage the data that you're getting from the courses to not just evaluate how effective the course might be, but also to discover more about the learner themselves, especially as it relates to creating content learning experience that are more focused on that more immersive learning.

Yeah. So we just completely rebuilt our entire school from the ground up. It was an 18 month project. It was probably, I have five team members. I probably invested over 200 grand into doing it. And I bring all that up because the amount of data.

that we had to go through in order to make sure that this next version that we're going to invest all these resources in is like the best. Yeah. The grading was immense. But if you if anyone knows anything about me, I am obsessed with automations and the wiring up automations is because there is a lot of companies and a lot of instructional desires, a lot of learning development departments.

or even businesses, they collect a lot of data, but they don't do anything with it. And of course there's several reasons why they don't do anything with the data. It's everywhere. It's all over the place. It's not synthesized. They don't have one person who just managed all the data and so on and so forth. And so since I've been obsessed with automation since like the beginning, right? I run our entire school with.

five employees and the rest are contractors means that I run a lot of automations. And so we speed all of our data collection into databases and then that is then automated to go into data visualization tools and then those reports are sent back to us. So we collect data through surveys. We collect...

data through the back end of our learning management system. We collect data just from our faculty getting reports back from students. And we have it all automated so that we're collecting a lot of data and it's also going to a single place. And then we actually are setting up some AI bots to review and make summaries of the data. As a matter of fact, I just did a

conference speaking session last week for the learning and HR tech conference. And I talked about how you could actually build a fully automated skills gap analysis for your entire organization. And it's through the use of AI, Zapier, an automation tool, and then a couple of things like a database and so on. So I'm kind of obsessed.

with auditing and collecting the data and making it useful. Because when you run a school, the only thing that matters are results. Like what I'm going to get for my students, like how fast can I get them their job? How, like what level can I get them to as a professional instructional designer? And so if I'm obsessed with results, then it's all about the data and tracking and so on. So.

I would say that we are pretty sophisticated when it comes to tracking those things. Yes, it sounds like it. I want to talk a little bit about portfolios for a moment. So we just had Mallory Steele on the podcast. And the thing that I told her was for my time working on the talent acquisition team for TTC innovations, her portfolio stood out by far.

above and beyond the rest of the portfolios that I was seeing over that several month period of time. So can you tell me a little bit about the importance of the portfolio course and why freelancers really need to focus on that piece of the puzzle for them to succeed in this industry? Yeah, I don't know if Mallory told you now, but she's actually an alumni of the Idol Academy. Okay, okay. I didn't know if that's why you brought her up just because of her portfolio or because...

She was one of my early members. But Mallory was one of those ones that my one of the early cohorts where I personally mentored those groups of students. And so for Mallory, she's like a personal mentee of mine. And so for her, her deliberate practice came directly from me. And then she actually worked for me because.

From the very beginning, we've always included paid experience opportunities as a part of our program and we still do. And so she literally had to work for my clients and he would give feedback from me as she did the work for the clients every step of the way. And so that's the same type of thing that we do in the school at a scale. Right. And it's the same thing that you want to do as a freelancer. You want to get.

every single piece that's in your portfolio reviewed by somebody who's where you want to be in five years. Right? And you don't want to just get feedback on your assets from your friends and family because you're going to be like, that's so nice. You did a great job. I love it. Like, you can do that. Look at that. You built a website. That's not the kind of feedback that's going to get you where you want as a freelancer because

You know, it's a different mindset. When somebody is hiring you as a freelancer, I know I've hired lots of freelancers at this point. I am hiring somebody who is an expert. I'm not hiring you to train you or to invest in you as an employee or any of those other feel good things. I want you to be my hired gun. You come in, you do the work and I know it's going to be spotless. Right? And the only way that you can be guaranteed that,

is if I can see it in your portfolio ahead of time. And so back to the deliberate practice, and I think it's also about, you know, everyone says quality over quantity, I say that too, but I would also say that's one other thing that you could do as a freelancer in your portfolio is to focus on creating the assets for your ideal target client.

Right, so if you want to build for the airline industry as a freelancer, then the majority of your portfolio should show them that you've been here and you've done this before and you've built training for the airlines. And so those are those types of assets that you want showing up in your portfolio. Back in the day when I was a freelancer, I just wanted to build e -learning. I wanted to do e -learning development.

on the side, because that was the fun part for me. That's the dessert, not the vegetables. And so all of my portfolio was just full of graphic design and e -learning that they could go through. And so I think that's another, that's a twist for freelancers. And the other thing that I would encourage freelancers to think about in their portfolio is that it's a different, it's more of a landing page. It's more of making your client the hero.

of the story and to solve their problem with your solutions and less about like, hi, I'm Robin, I'm an instructional designer, hire me to build your e -learning, right? And so you wanna show up more in a client -facing way in your portfolio. And so check out Brand Story or StoryBrand. That's by David Miller. That's a great book, a great formula to follow.

and apply that to your portfolio as well. Awesome. Great advice. And I find it really interesting that one of the courses that you all offer is project management. While it may not be a skill set that's required for every job opportunity, it seems like having those skills in your back pocket could be invaluable when it comes to the fluidity of project based work within the corporate world. Is that...

A lot of how you design the courses overall is that maybe you might not always utilize this, but everything comes back to having those skillsets down. So if you come into a con, a situation where you need it, you have it. I tell my students that one of the most important skills that you need to have and that you need to develop if you don't already have is self -discipline.

and self -management. And as a matter of fact, going through the academy reveals who has the self -discipline and who has the self -management. And I think that is especially true in our field. You have to have the self -discipline. You have to have the self -management. And that includes managing your own project. Now, I know there are a lot of different roles and a lot of different organizations. And so, you know, not everyone's going to end up in roles like where I was, but in all of my roles,

I was in charge of all of the project management and managing where my projects were and managing my timelines and managing those subject matter experts and the stakeholders and the milestones and so on. And so I would argue that project management is something that every instructional designer needs to know, especially if you show up and you are the one person show. And also if you are on a team that is being project managed by a

project manager, well then you need to know how even the project management tools work, right? Like the dashboards, otherwise you're gonna be lost. And then also, because our students have to do volunteer or paid experience as a part of the program, they have to manage the whole project from the beginning to the end. So it's important for them to learn project management principles.

right at the very beginning because they're going to have to manage that project throughout the program. And I've also found a lot of people discover that project management of Lourdes projects is where they want to live. And so I would say I would encourage everybody to get a little bit of project management skills because there's no role where that doesn't come into play, especially in our field.

Seems like a lot of the idle courses is about the self finding what you're interested in. Not just where you're talented at, but what you really enjoy to do. And I think that's really cool. So a 24 week course sounds like quite a bit of time spent honing in these skill sets, especially with how, like you said, a lot of folks are going onto YouTube to go,

figure out how to fix their toilet. How did EIDL settle on the amount of time for these courses, the types of courses and offerings that you have to really get folks from that starting point to where they can just jump in anywhere and find success? So we say it's a 24 -week program. We recently finished...

getting everything approved by the state of Georgia because we redid our whole school and so we had to submit, you know, a change of program and so they had to review everything and approve it and so now it's done, it's approved and so while we say 24 weeks, that actually, it will take you 24 weeks if you only have 10 hours a week to work on everything and you have a full -time job.

And it also includes four weeks of implementation, right? Where you don't have, you know, any necessary tasks other than to catch up with what you're already working on. So in that sense, it's more like, so that people are like, my gosh, there's all this to do. You know, how long is it going to take me and so on and so forth. So we just set the bar. If you can do 10 hours a week.

then you can complete and graduate in 24 weeks. But I will tell you that it's way more flexible. So now that it's all approved, when people enroll, the whole thing is open, even the job readiness parts. And so the only thing that's locked are the milestones to graduate and get, become a certified professional in training and performance. So I actually think that people are going to start running through it a lot faster. And because I already noticed like,

Some of our you know, we do collect a lot of data So for example our people were in the lockstep program while we were getting pieces approved They said well, you know, there are some weeks where it was a light week and I wanted to work on my resume Right and and it was it was locked. I had to graduate first or you know some weeks I wanted to do this that and the other so we've actually now that everything's done everything is a locked you can go where you want and I think that

A lot of people will start landing their jobs first and then working to finish the certification because it is rigorous. We are currently undergoing the process of being fully accredited. And so in that sense, you have to have a minimum of 300 seat hours to be an accredited program in career school. And so hence, you know, the ridder of our program.

It's not just to throw things in there, but like when people come out, they get interviewed by other people, just like you get interviewed with Mallory and so on and so forth. And they say, wow, you know more than we do. And that's a badge of honor for us because we really put people through their paces. So yeah, 24 week program, but that's not how long it takes for you to land your job. That's not how long it would take for somebody who has more time and more hunger and drive to get it done.

And so I might have to change that, but that's, that's pretty much what it is. It's like 10 hours a week. It'll take you about 24 weeks from start to finish. Very cool. And what's one thing or maybe a few things that you would have loved to have known before getting started with this endeavor. You mean like the idle courses endeavor or like it's actual design? Just the idle courses. man.

I'll say the same thing. I always thought everybody would, they asked me that question. And that is, I thought that I was just building something that would serve people and help them land their jobs and, you know, and, you know, develop the next generation of creative learning designers. That was my mission. Part of my vision. But what I didn't know was I needed to build a full on marketing machine.

The amount of marketing you have to do and reach your, you know, target student and, and so on and so forth is just not at all. What I just wasn't, it wasn't on my radar. Like I knew like people would have to find out about it, but you can build the best thing in the whole wide world. But if nobody knows about you, it doesn't matter. If nobody can find you, then it doesn't matter.

And so that was the thing that I was most surprised about was with the marketing machine. Well, I'd say you have it down pat now. And then those ruffles, and then the feathers that I would ruffle. I didn't expect that either. So I'm, yeah, I mean, the fact that like it used to be you either got in here accidentally as an instructional designer or you went and you got an advanced degree because they didn't have bachelor's degrees. It was either a master's degree or a PhD.

in instructional design. And then I come in here and I say, nah, this is a trade. It's a profession. It is a vocation. And to start the first and only career school for instructional design, it is an actual trade school, which is a, which when you think of trade, you think of like plumbing, HVAC and carpentry, right? And things like that. And so to equate the learning and development industry, specifically the instructional design, e -learning developer role,

as a trade has really made some people angry. And, you know, I didn't expect it, but, I'm not too surprised either because, you know, so that's what happens when, when we innovate. Yeah. Well, and I think this is such a tough industry, in general to, I think, to really learn in that true, like academia standpoint, the higher education really do need to be

thrown into the deep end and working on corporate stuff. Otherwise you learn all the theory that you want, but until you start working with corporate clients and working on that true corporate side of things, you're just really not going to get that experience to be successful at it. So it's incredibly exciting that you've developed this entire school to, to put that at the forefront of everything as opposed to just the theory and all that stuff. So very, very cool.

Last question before I get you out of here. What's next for Idol? Do you have anything exciting that you'd like to share with us? Yes, my most exciting thing right now is accreditation. Right? So you have to be a state licensed or authorized school for two years. And this year marks our two years of being a state licensed school. All colleges, all universities have to do that right before they become.

can become accredited, they have to be state licensed. And so we are now have been state licensed for two years and we are currently undergoing the accreditation process. We are applying with ACCSC, which is a career colleges and schools association accrediting body. And so what's cool about that is that, you know, it's gonna be a completely.

different thing because right now it's kind of a weird spot to be in because people don't know what it means to be a state licensed school. They're like, so does that mean you're accredited? And I'm like, well, not yet. Yeah. We're not a boot camp either. And so it's kind of a weird space that we live in. So the opportunity to be fully accredited so that also opens the opportunities for more people who are looking to get into this field and maybe don't have.

the resources to pay upfront. And so I'm looking to start expanding and putting this out in front of high school graduates and really getting this career as an option for people a lot sooner than people who just want to transition out of another career. And then of course, the veterans that have the GI bills and so on. So.

I'm really, really excited about, about being a fully accredited school. Yeah, that's very cool. So congratulations on it. I'm sure it's been a uphill battle all the way. But I think that that's incredible and I can't wait to see what you all put together in the next couple of years, cause it's just a fascinating program. And I think the impact is immediate for folks going through it. So.

Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's been a really fun conversation and I really hope that our listeners go to idlecourses .com and see what type of impact that the program can offer them. So thank you again. Thank you so much Doug for your wonderful questions and just being an awesome host. I really appreciate you inviting me on your podcast. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're interested in joining idle courses, there will be a link in the description. Next week, we have a very fun episode. We've got a surprise guest that I think you'll all enjoy. So see you next time.