The concept: An academy

Education has been the main focus of Yireo for some time now. We have been organizing Magento courses for years. However, in the past, we either chopped up topics in separate single-day trainings, organizing them so now and then - for instance, the Magento backend and frontend development courses spread across 4 days with each 4 weeks one of those days. Or we organized a multiday training for a specific agency. The new concept of the academy is to offer a combination of both: A multiday (or actually multiweek) training for multiple agencies at once.

The academy runs from March 6th to April 28th 2023 - eight weeks long, with two days of lecture, self-study material, coaching calls and optional assignments.

• Week 1: PHP advanced
• Week 2: JavaScript advanced
• Week 3: Magento devops
• Week 4: Magento Administrator
• Week 5: Magento Luma frontend development
• Week 6: Hyvä frontend development
• Week 7: Magento backend development I
• Week 8: Magento backend development II

The location

Since January, Yireo now has an office space, but actually this office space is setup for one single purpose: To run this academy. Simply put, it was cheaper to rent a space for a year (and add the furniture ourselves) than it was to rent a training room for separate days. The office is located in Baarn, right at the center of The Netherlands, close to cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht and Amersfoort.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been putting together IKEA furniture, printing posters, carrying books and buying some second-hand stuff. It was fun to put all of this energy into this new milestone and making it become reality. And now the time is there: The academy finally starts.

The agencies

As soon as I announced the Yireo Academy, various agencies became interested. And quickly, sign-ups came in, so that we knew the academy could become a reality (with the investment and all). Currently, six agencies are involved with the first academy:

• Vendic
• Modern Minds
• Indiegroup
• MaxServ
• Elgentos
• Epartment

Mentioning these agencies here in this blog also shows a different strategy: Instead of just having a course where people can sign up for, with the academy, we try to setup a partnership with the agency involved, plus a relationship with the attendee(s). It is not just about sitting in a classroom for a couple of days. It is about consuming knowledge in the right pace (and everybody has a different pace of course) so that an attendee becomes valuable to the agency.

As for the agency, the partnership involves a bit of coaching of the attendee, brainstorming on all of the options and being very flexible in the curriculum.

Seats left? Not really.

The original idea of the academy was to organize 8 weeks of training - ranging from JavaScript and PHP basics towards advanced Magento 2 backend development - and have all attendees follow all parts of the program. But then, the needs of the agencies came in: Luma and Hyvä are both part of the frontend development course, but not every agency had a need for both. And some attendees already had knowledge of the basics, while others didn't need to become a backend developer after all (so that frontend development was all they cared about).

Currently, there are 18 attendees of the academy, but it doesn't mean that all of them are following all modules (with one module spreading across one week). To the contrary, some attendees only follow one module. Managing all of this took a bit more effort, but after all, this offers the exact knowledge to the right students - and that's what the academy is all about.

Some weeks could still be open for additional attendees, but some other weeks are booked to the max (like the Hyvä week, week 6). Because of the weeks with many attendees, we have stopped accepting new signups for the entire academy. And with that, the academy is already a huge success, before it even has started.

Next academies

Needless to say, we are in it for more. From October 2nd to November 21st, we are organizing a second Magento academy (and we have already started with partnering up with agencies for that round). And on top of this, we are preparing for a (shorter) Shopware Academy, running from August 14th to September 5th.

There are plenty of ideas more. But we'll need to go through the upcoming 8 training weeks first, before we actually get to those. There are evaluations to come, lessons to be learned, improvements to be made. However, I assume to be blogging in about two months time about the success of this first Yireo Academy. Psyched.