Today, we are excited to announce the official launch of the Iterable Academy, our free, online customer learning platform designed to provide content that inspires and enables you to achieve your goals with Iterable and become an empowered growth marketer.
If you’re new to using Iterable, you can get started on your learning journey right away with our Foundations learning path where you will master the basics—everything from importing your users to setting up your first campaign, and a whole lot more.
And for those of you already enrolled in the Iterable Academy, you’ll be thrilled to see that we have recently added brand-new content with even more coming soon!
Available today, you can now dive into our more Intermediate and Advanced courses that cover topics like, Integrating Iterable with Facebook, Advanced Handlebars, and Advanced Personalization and Mobile workshops.
Behind the Scenes: A Q&A With Caitlyn Vestal
Now, without further ado, we want to introduce you to Caitlyn Vestal, Iterable’s Customer Education Manager who has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring the Iterable Academy to life and deliver e-learning content that our customers will love.
Keep reading to learn about Caitlyn’s approach to training and onboarding, her advice to companies looking to launch their own training programs, and a sneak-peek into recently launched courses in the Academy.
Tell us about yourself, Caitlyn.
I most recently come from the financial reporting SaaS industry where I held roles as a Lead Customer Success Manager, Product Trainer, and Education Product Specialist over a period of seven years.
Prior to joining Iterable, I traveled onsite to train our partners like Deloitte and Accenture, in addition to regularly hosting live training sessions for other partners and customers.
I also acted as a project manager and subject-matter expert to develop our offerings for partner and customer trainings and certifications, working with the Instructional Design team to build engaging, dynamic e-learning content.
What’s your approach to training and onboarding?
When we talk about training professionals, the most important thing is to offer a variety of modalities for all the different learning styles out there. This not only keeps the learner more engaged, but it also creates an environment where the learner wants to seek out more opportunities to learn, resulting in higher completion rates and great user satisfaction.
In onboarding brand-new customers and partners, we want to provide learning content that helps them achieve their goals in the Iterable platform. We do that now with our Foundations learning path, along with Intermediate and Advanced courses that we are adding every week!
How do you decide how to prioritize training content?
At any software company, there is an endless list of product updates, new releases and opportunities for improvement. Education efforts need to match that pace to the greatest of our abilities, and a way to do that is through prioritizing learning content for key parts of the platform.
Some questions I ask include:
- “What products and features are customers using the most?”
- “What questions do our internal teams in Customer Success and Professional Services receive most frequently from our customers and partners?”
- “ What does our Product Marketing team need in order to have an effective product launch?”
These all are huge factors in how we decide on what to work on now, and in the near future.
What’s your advice to companies launching their own training programs?
My advice would first be to ask A LOT of questions. That may seem obvious, but it is incredibly important when you are building out a training program to meet with all the key stakeholders at your company to identify what they need from education.
That not only tells you what to address first and foremost, like what courses you need to prioritize, but it also opens up those lines of communication, which are vital if your education department is to be successful.
The other thing to remember is that you need to identify your team’s mission. You can do so by asking questions, like:
- Why does your business exist?
- What goals do you hope to achieve?
- How will you achieve those goals?
- What are your communication and evaluation strategies for the content you create?
- What will your maintenance review cycle look like?
There are so many other factors to consider, but those are some of the most important ones to me. As I like to say, you have to build the house before you can put all of your favorite things inside.
Lastly, what’s new with Iterable Academy?
There are so many new things happening! Not only are we building out our content roadmap for 2021, but also we are already beginning to release new courses.
Today, we are officially launching Academy to our customers, and we will be focused in the coming quarters to release more content, create roles-based learning tracks, and make plans to build out a customer certification program. So much to look forward to, so stay tuned!
Access the Iterable Academy
Iterable has made it easier than ever for our customers to register for all of the content Academy has to offer. Visit iterable.com/academy and click “Request Access” to join today!
