Simplicity Wins: Rob Witcher on Personalized Cybersecurity Certification Prep

Course Lab - Episode 74 Simplicity Wins: Personalized Cybersecurity Certification Prep (Rob Witcher) Abe Crystal: I think anyone who is a dedicated teacher, and really cares about their area of focus can make a great course over time, if they keep doing it and collecting meaningful questions and feedback. And then do a real iteration. Danny Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I'm Danny Iny, founder and CEO of Mirasee. And I'm here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku. Abe: Hey Danny. Danny: Today we welcome Rob Witcher to the show. Rob is a cybersecurity instructor and the co-founder of Destination Certification, Inc. Rob, thanks for joining us. Rob Witcher: Thanks for having me. It's cool to be here. Danny: So let's start with the backstory. 30,000 feet, who are you? What do you do? How did you come to be doing it? Rob: I got started in technology very early on in my life. I went to university and was lucky enough to have a professor who was one of the founding members of Canada's cybercrime investigations unit. He investigated all these really fascinating cyber crimes. And I realized, this is it, this is the area I want to work in — cybersecurity. I went to work for one of the big consulting firms. I worked at Deloitte for 11 years, on a whole myriad of really fascinating projects, everything from helping little startup companies to being part of huge teams working on multi-hundred-million dollar projects for massive multinationals. That gave me a really solid understanding of the cybersecurity world quite broadly. It was at the end of my career at Deloitte where I met my now business partner, John Berti. He'd been teaching this really focused class to help people prepare for the CISSP, Certified Information Systems Security Professional certification. I got an opportunity to help him teach and realized I had a real passion for it too. My last couple of years at the firm, I traveled all over the world with him teaching these classes. And then there was an opportunity to move out on our own. Destination Certification is a very boutique firm, highly specialized in delivering just two types of classes — the CISSP and CCSP. Danny: Talk about the transition from teaching for Deloitte to going off and doing it on your own. Rob: We were incredibly lucky. When we left the firm, we actually left with the blessing of the partners to keep teaching these classes to the major corporate clients. So from the start, we had a list of really amazing clients. We've never done any marketing. It's just word of mouth. The curse of that is that now that we're trying to sell our course to the public, no one has any idea who we are. It's been a bit of a challenge to figure out how to get the word out. Danny: Talk about your delivery and fulfillment. This is not just a bunch of PowerPoints. Rob: Let me start with the system we've developed. The first obvious thing was to recreate the slides. Then we made our own flashcards, which ended up being close to 1,200 flashcards. That was the first impetus to start building our own technology — a flashcard app. And that's when something clicked. In certifications like the CISSP, there's an enormous amount of information. It's known as being a mile wide and an inch deep. Each person comes with a different unique set of skills and experience. The question students ask is, what do I need to learn? And the answer is, well, it depends on what you know versus what you don't know. So when building our flashcard app, I realized, for each flashcard, our app should ask the person if they know the card or don't know the card. Then we can build a system that understands what topic this flashcard is related to. And then you can start to give them guidance on what they uniquely specifically need to focus on. We've spent years building tools that all have the same fundamental concept: how do we most effectively test our students to figure out what they know versus what they don't know? We have over 200 videos, a 500-page guidebook, mind map videos. The really cool part is our system does a really good job of specifically identifying which topics someone needs to learn more about, and then says, here's the exact study material related to that topic. For presentation, when the pandemic hit, we adopted a technology called lightboards. You put a big piece of glass between you and a high-resolution camera and use whiteboard markers that glow. We overlay our slides so that when we're standing up teaching, it's a video of us interacting with the material. Abe: How do you tell what's working? Are you measuring effectiveness? Rob: The ultimate indicator is whether the person passes the exam or not. We have an incredibly smart data scientist, she used to work for Google and Tesla. Our tools gather a huge amount of data. We tie that back to who passed or who didn't. And based on that, we provide clear guidance to our students. The really obvious stuff is simply engagement. If someone's not taking the time to go through the assessments, they're not going to do well. For our live classes, we look at that every morning and will check in with students who are falling behind. Abe: What have you changed or evolved over time based on looking at that data? Rob: One of the most important lessons we learned: we built all this whiz-bang technology and just kind of said here's all these tools you can use. But it's very easy for someone to get lost in the complexity and be overwhelmed. Simplicity is better, and providing less and being very concise and obvious on this is what you need to work on next has been really important. We completely reworked the schedule. When someone logs in, the schedule says, on this day, this time, do this. When you're done, do this. We massively simplified our system. Most of the tools are now hidden, sitting behind the schedule. We created an accordion menu so you log in and the first thing that opens is just the welcome with a few videos. It doesn't overwhelm the person. Fundamentally, simplicity, clarity, simple steps. Abe: Any other lessons learned? Rob: When you're making slides, less is always more. Don't write paragraphs of text. Better to have a really simple picture and then talk to it. And when you have to teach an enormous amount of material, it's important to think carefully about how you're articulating concepts. Hemingway said, "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have enough time." When I first started teaching with my partner, John, he'd teach a section in about half as long as I would, and there'd be almost no questions. Whereas I'd teach it, it would take me twice as long, and there'd be 20 or 30 questions. It's because I wasn't good at explaining these complex things simply and concisely. That made me spend a lot of time thinking about how do I explain concepts as simply and concisely as possible. Danny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and I will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course. Abe: The first thing that jumped out is just the value of having a very clear focus for a course. Rob's is unique because he is literally teaching to the test. Most people listening probably won't be creating courses like that. But I think it's useful to go through the thought exercise of what would the test or assessment or metric look like. And then by doing that, it can give you a path to what Rob described as the keys to success: simplicity and clarity. Danny: I think this is actually a really powerful lesson about the impact of a diligent process of continuous improvement. If you're 1% better each day, at the end of the year, you're 37 times better. It compounds. It started really simple with a flashcards app. Finding that level of excellence leads to an elegance that just makes everything easier. But the key is to ship something and make it a little bit better every single day. Abe: Yeah. I think where it breaks down is when you spend a lot of time upfront creating content, and then it feels like this thing that you don't want to mess with. What Rob and his team did was much more foundational. They would completely restructure presentations to make them simpler and shorter. That commitment is not easy, but that's what really makes for a great course over time. Abe: Rob Witcher is the co-founder of Destination Certification, Inc. To learn more about him and his program, head on over to destcert.com.