About Beesy Academy

Where this came from

Beesy Academy began in 2022, out of a complaint that three of us kept making to each other. Between us we had sat through a great deal of professional training, and almost all of it fell into one of two shapes. Either it was a recorded library you bought access to and stopped opening after the second week, or it was a two day intensive that felt excellent on the Friday and had evaporated by the following Wednesday.

Neither shape has anything wrong with it in principle. The problem is that both leave out the part where you actually change how you work. That change happens over weeks, on your own real work, with somebody experienced looking at what you produced and telling you where it is weak.

So we built the thing we wanted: a small group, meeting weekly for a fixed number of weeks, working on their own live problems, taught by somebody still doing the job. The first course was First Ninety Days as a Manager, run by Ilene Castorena for four students in the autumn of 2022. It has run every quarter since.

What we decided at the start

Three decisions were made before we taught anything, and all three have held. Cohorts are capped at sixteen. Every instructor must still be practising in their field. And every course ends with something the student made, applied to their own work, that they can show to somebody.

The third one is the reason we do not run exams. A certificate says you attended. The report you defended, the conversation you finally had, or the site you published is the thing that actually moves a career, and it is the thing students mention when they write to us a year later.

What we got wrong

Our early courses were too long, because a longer syllabus looked like better value. What that actually did was push the practice out: the week where somebody was meant to apply a tool to their own work turned into a week learning a second tool they would never use. We cut every course back to the length its material needs. Focus and Workload Design is five weeks and will not be extended.

We also used tidy sample data in our early analytics teaching, and students who breezed through the exercises got stuck ten minutes into a real export. Yasmin Halloran rewrote the material around genuinely messy files. Sessions got slower, week two complaints went up, and results afterwards went up a great deal more. She wrote about that in four years of teaching working professionals.

Where we are now

Today the catalog holds twelve courses across seven fields, taught by five instructors, with intakes every quarter. We are fully online and we intend to stay that way, because it is the only way somebody in Manchester and somebody in Toronto end up in the same sixteen person room.

We are not trying to become a platform. Growth here means more cohorts of sixteen, which means more instructors who are genuinely practising, and there are not many of those. That is a slow way to build a company and it is the only version of this we are interested in running.