We Trained 50,000 People. Most Still Didn’t Finish.

Helen and I have been building Collab365 since before most people knew what Microsoft 365 even was.

Conferences, five-day challenges, Power Apps workshops, Power BI training, Power Automate Success Paths, and eventually a full Academy for Microsoft 365 professionals.

Over the years, we’ve trained more than 50,000 people.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth we learned after 20+ conferences and countless online programmes.

Most people don’t finish.

Not because they’re lazy. Not because they don’t care. Not because the content is bad.

They start with every intention of changing something. They pay. They show up on day one. They tell themselves, “Right, this time I’m actually going to do it.”

Then life eats them.

Teams pings. Email. Kids. Client work. A manager needing “just five minutes”. A production issue. A phone full of apps designed by people much cleverer than us to drag your attention back every six minutes.

Or, in our house, Hugo (the dog) running off with a cushion at the exact moment you finally sit down.

By day five of many challenges, we’d often be down to a small fraction of the people who started.

Our Vacation Booking Challenge, where people built a real working Power Apps app step by step, saw about 7% reach day five.

That used to depress the life out of me.

We’d spent weeks building the thing. Good content. Real project. Proper outcome.

And still, most people vanished.

For a long time, I thought the problem was the course.

Maybe the videos were too long. Maybe the reminders were wrong. Maybe we needed more accountability, more live sessions, more nudges, more community, more badges, more “come on, you’ve got this” energy.

We tried all of that.

Cohorts. Live support. Group chats. Office hours. More encouragement. More structure.

It helped a bit, but commercially it was tough.

Our PL-900 cohort at $200 pulled in 20 people from a 50,000-strong list. The on-demand version of similar content sold hundreds.

That was the market saying something we didn’t really want to hear.

People liked the idea of deep guided learning.

But in practice, they needed help that fitted into the chaos of their actual day.

The more I looked at it, the more I realised we were blaming the wrong thing.

The problem wasn’t just course design.

It was the old learning contract.

Traditional online learning assumes people have three things: time, focus and a stable target.

Most people now have none of those.

They don’t have long uninterrupted blocks of time. They don’t have clean attention. And in Microsoft 365, they definitely don’t have a stable target.

In the old on-prem days, you could build training around an interface and it would stay recognisable for years.

Now Microsoft 365 and Power Platform move constantly. Names change. Screens shift. Features appear. Licensing tweaks. Admin centres evolve. Copilot lands inside the workflow and changes how people ask for help in the first place.

A course can take months to plan, build, record, edit and launch.

By the time it goes live, parts of it are already ageing.

Oh shit, it’s out of date.

We were asking people to sit through long-form training about tools that were moving faster than the training format could keep up with.

We didn’t quite solve the problem, did we?

Helen and I feel this ourselves.

I struggle to sit through a film now without my brain itching to check something. Too much learning in one go and I can feel my head pushing back.

That’s not a moral failure.

It’s the environment we’re all operating in.

So we stopped pretending the old model was going to magically come back.

We killed long-form as the centre of Collab365 and started building Spaces.

The idea is simple: short practical modules, specific roles, specific problems, fast updates, human fact-checking, and AI helping us move at the speed the platforms move.

No more “here’s a 12-hour course, good luck”.

More like:

“I’m a small business owner. How do I stop my email getting hacked?”

Here’s the 15-minute answer.

Turn on MFA. Check your admin accounts. Review forwarding rules. Lock down legacy auth. Here’s what matters. Here’s what to ignore. Here’s what changed this week.

AI helps us draft and research with sources. I check it as the human in the loop. When Microsoft changes something, we update the answer in minutes instead of rebuilding a course over months.

Is it perfect?

No.

It feels a bit like a hack in places, if I’m honest. But given where we are, the hack is the sensible solution.

Because a 15-minute useful fix beats a 12-hour course people feel guilty about not finishing.

That’s the shift for us.

We’re not trying to win the battle for someone’s whole afternoon anymore.

We’re trying to earn 15 minutes and make those 15 minutes count.

People still want to learn. They still want to improve. They still want to stay relevant.

But the format has to respect the world they actually live in now.

We’ve all got tabs open from courses we swore we’d finish.

What’s the shortest chunk of learning that actually sticks for you these days?