Wealthy Affiliate Training, Our Vision for the Future.

byKyle

2.4M followers

4 years ago

Hey everyone,

Today I want to discuss education, in particular the training and education you are getting here at WA. This is a critical element to the success of your business, and it is one of our key focuses with the future advancements here at WA.

We also want to answer a bunch of questions in relation to the current state of our training, and the future of the training platform.

So, let's get right into things here. ..

Our Current State: The Most Progressive Training in the World.

At the core of Wealthy Affiliate we are an education platform. We always have been. Dating back to the 2005 period when we started out, we were an education platform teaching people how to become affiliate marketers (and leverage PPC to do so).

Obviously over the years we have evolved drastically into offering training on pretty much every topic you can imagine in relation to not just the affiliate marketing business, but the online business in general. There are 1,000+ training modules, over 400 hours of live classes, 100,000's of blog posts/discussions, and over 2.2+ million members.

And the tools have advanced with each day and year that have passed here at WA, offering industry leading research tools, writing tools, an 8 platform website suite, state of the art hosting...and I could go on and on.

But outside of all the tools we have, if we cannot offer a current, comprehensive, and leading edge training platform here at Wealthy Affiliate, we are not doing our job. That is our utmost focus now, and will be in the future.

Before I discuss some potential faults in our existing training, and where we are headed, I want to clarify exactly what level of access to education you have here at WA. Because outside of anything we have planned, you currently have access to some of the most sophisticated training in the world, on a wide breadth of topics, delivered in a variety of training formats.

Weekly Classes. Each and every Friday you have access to an hour long live class with Jay (magistudios), our resident expert here at Wealthy Affiliate. He teaches you on brand new topics each and every week. Topics that are on the leading edge of what is popular and what you "need" to know to grow your skill set, and ultimately your business.

These all offer full replay capabilities, and you can watch them as many times as you like. There are currently over 400 hours of classes available to you as a Premium member, with 52 new classes (minimum) being added each and every year. Additionally, I typically offer 1-2 live classes each and every year, with more to come in the year ahead. ;)

Core Training/Certification. The core training (between Bootcamp and OEC) is 120 lessons in total, each lesson including a video to go along with the written training. These training lessons are frequently updated, and as we move forward in 2020 they are going to be going through a weekly maintenance protocol where we make sure this training is not only current, but will keep you ahead of the industry in terms of strategies and techniques to create, grow and manage a business in ANY niche online.

We also have new core courses slated to be released in 2020 that will be included into both the Online Entrepreneur Certification, and the Affiliate Bootcamp runs of training. Exciting additions coming.

Weekly Community Training Additions. On a daily basis, there are new contributions being added to Wealthy Affiliate from your comrades (and experts) within the community here at WA. There are currently over 1,000+ training modules available to you as a Premium member, and as each day passes this training only continues to advance and become more robust. Many of these training courses, tutorials, and videos are full of brilliant content.

We truly are a community and one with the largest subset of affiliate marketing/internet business expertise in the world. As a community we are going to continue to push the envelope as to where the education will head in 2020, and far beyond.

You can take the training at Wealthy Affiliate, apply it to your business, and BUILD and actual business. That is the basis of quality training and the "applied" or "actionable" training approach, where you learn and then are able to take action on it right away. This is going to be continue to be our focus moving forward.

But the training is not perfect. And we know that, it never will be perfect. With so much training, and with the speed in which the internet advances, not every single training resources in a vast educational offering like Wealthy Affiliate is going to 100% current. As time goes on though we are going to be moving closer and closer to the point of perfection as we improve some minor inconsistencies and weaknesses in our training.

So I wanted to discuss and address the training element, in particular "outdated" training...

Outdated Training Will Be a Thing of the Past

Some people are noticing within the training, that some visuals within the training are outdated. You might be seeing an old version of Wordpress, a plugin that doesn't look exactly the same, an older version of Wealthy Affiliate, an older Google interface, etc.

This can happen and we certainly are not immune to it. When Google makes an update it could impact 40 training resources here. If Wordpress updates their back office, it could impact a 100 training videos. If we update our design, it could impact the visual relevance of even more resources. You can see the problem with training becoming "dated".

Also, what can happen with training sometimes is you get "caught in the middle" of a design update, as we are currently right now. I have personally been updating a great deal of the training in recent months, but many of the videos have been left alone. Even some that are outdated. The reason is that we have a HUGE update to the design of Wealthy Affiliate coming end of summer. With that update you can expect a full refresh of All the core training by the end of the summer as well. :)

I have known about our new UX since last year, so I have been holding off creating new training that involves the UX (User eXperience) here simply because it doesn't make sense to update something now, only to have to update it again at the end of the summer. Because of that, some training interfaces in the videos appear a bit outdated.

For example, here is a look at just how much any training will have to shift that is in the current UX, versus the new UX. The differences in terms of organization are much different.

The reality is, pretty much all the training will be outdated in terms of the interface you see in a few months because of our new roll out, thus why my efforts and focus is going to be on getting training ready for the new UX. This means some cool idea/strategy refreshes, content updates, and advancing to Wealthy Affiliate training to the BEST it has EVER been.

Although we are in a bit of a limbo being inbetween Wealthy Affiliate UX Designs, we are the most excited we have ever been about the platform here at WA. We are in the process of setting up our designs and our underlying technology for the next 5-7 years ahead.

Are the training resources outdated in terms of their substance? No. Are there new UX, platforms updates, that have made them feel outdated? Of course. This happens with every company delivering a platform, and delivering training online.

Not a day goes by that I am not within Wordpress docs, or Google docs looking for a solution to a problem with their platform and I come across walk-throughs that are outdated and using an old user interface. Big companies simply are not immune to this, in fact the bigger you get the more difficult it can become to manage.

But we can do better, any platform/service can be better and I can assure you that you will continue to have the best training in the industry and come end of summer when we anticipate our new UX to be rolled out, you can expect a full refresh of all the core training, purging of training that is no longer relevant or totally outdated, and we will continue marching along with the most progressive training in the world for online business owners.

Weekly classes (or more regular), regularly addition of new video/text training, new courses, better training designs, more experts, and a plethora of interesting and helpful discussions about relevant topics in relation to your business. Exciting times are ahead.

Our Future: More Training, More Experts, More Success.

MORE is not always better. That is certainly the case when it comes to training. You are sometimes better off having less training, that is better, than more training that is inferior (and in some cases outdated). We are going to be tackling training on both ends. We are going to be focusing on MORE expert training that will help you advance your business across a breadth of different categories.

One thing that I will never say is that I am an expert in everything online, nor is Carson. We have a combined 36 years of knowledge to share, but there are literally 100,000's of years of experience that fellow members can share here at WA. At any given time you have 1,000's of experts logged into the back office of Wealthy Affiliate. Some members are experts in local marketing, whereas others are great at Facebook Ads, some are masters of Pinterest, and many are great at running their own e-commerce websites.

That is like having access to 1,000's of subject matter experts all at once, under one roof. That is the reality of what you get here at Wealthy Affiliate. The key is going to be offering a platform that makes it conducive for experts to communicate and share their ideas, offer incentive for doing so, and to provide you a beautiful platform to get educated, to get help, and to learn in an ongoing basis.

And this leads me to...

Our Future: Improved Organization, Brings Clarity to Education.

One key focus in the year ahead with the training is going to be improving upon the organization. We currently have a classroom architecture that works, but could work better. There are going to be much more sophisticated and useful solutions that we will be implementing to FIND things, and to create communities around certain topics/subjects/categories.

There is A LOT of amazing training here, 100's of hours of classes, 1,000's of training tutorials/courses/videos, and 100,000's of blog posts. Most of this training never gets any exposure at all and as the sheer size of the training increases, it can become impossible to actually find. Even if you use the search bar, you may not get access to all the training that is actually available to you on a particular topic. These are going to be focuses as we move forward through the training in the coming months ahead.

If you want to learn about email marketing, you can. If you want to learn about local marketing and become an expert in that business model, you can. If you want to drive one or more businesses through Google Ads, you can. If you want to become a Pinterest all-star, you can.

Everything is going to be at your fingertips. Everything from world-class tools that set the industry standard, education that will advance the industry, expert access that no other community offers, and a platform that you can thorough love and embrace to manage and grow your business.

That is what Wealthy Affiliate is, and what it will continue to be. We are more excited than ever about the future of WA and your future in the online world. We have been working hard. The opportunity has never been greater, and Wealthy Affiliate will continue to lead the industry for many years to come. That we can promise you.

Of course, and as always, we love to hear your feedback, comments, suggestions, and experience. If you have anything to share about the training platform here at WA, things you love, things that need improvement, and things that you want to have we would love to hear it.