Speaker 1: How do you ensure your trainings work long-term, even when you stop working with that team? I have long wondered how scrum trainers do this.

Speaker 2: In the past, I've coupled quite a bit. I've coupled training with consulting. I've often thought this about training is that it's like, it's like injecting steroids a bit. Eventually those steroids are going to wear off and even potentially have a negative effect, right? So I don't know why that's the example that I thought of like many years ago when I was flying out of Wisconsin. I'm like, I just injected steroids into this company. And then on the way away, I'm driving away and the manager calls me like, what'd you do to my team? So we do a lot when it comes to last year, actually, from when it comes to EBM, I was doing a data study to know how many returning students we had and how many organizations came back to us. And it was like 9%. And so that to me means that maybe there's area for improvement to have people coming back and keep the conversation going. We do a lot to follow up on with newsletters and things like that. And that's why we have an entire YouTube channel dedicated to this stuff. So I could say, I see they said this in class. Here's exactly what they said. I can't describe it the way they described it. There's that. I will tell you that I have worked in an organization or two extensively from a consulting and a training perspective. And then when the person that really took to it or the few people there that became the staples of holding up the improvements and continuing to pursue professional scrum left, that it faltered. So this isn't easy stuff. So there's a lot of different ways that we've attacked it from blogging to YouTube, to

Speaker 1: consulting, to all these things really. Yeah. I like your analogy of injecting steroids into a team, Todd. And something that you and I specifically do is that we make sure that people have the opportunity to stay in contact with us. So we don't just ring and run. We don't just cash the check and leave. We don't just teach and disappear. So there are a number of students who want to continue their journey and we're supportive of that. And so I think just being open to the fact that, look, as trainers, we don't see this as a transactional thing. And I think that's really important. There's some that see it as, look, you paid money, you got two days, we're done. We're fostering community. As Todd mentioned, we're trying to build out Agile for Humans as a place where people can come to learn. And where we're trying to remove the barrier of that financial piece so that people who may not have the means to join us in a class or who just aren't ready for that can still get started. And for those who have been in a class, they can look at some of these playlists and some of these shows we do and actually continue that learning. And so I think part of the long-term benefit past the two-day training or the three-day training or whatever it is that we do is maintaining relationship, providing opportunities for further growth and learning, and actually having an interest in that student long-term. And so we have the hearts of teachers and that's what we want to do. And is it the right business choice? Probably not. But from a human perspective, it's Agile for Humans, it's not Agile

Speaker 2: for Profit. And so that's where we're at. I'll also say too that it's been Ken Traver's longstanding, long-standing opinion that validated learning comes in the form of difficult exams. And that's why we're Scrum.org trainers, because the exams are difficult. And we go and we look, we trend, and we like to see what our students are doing and how they're coping with any of the exams. And we'll even help try to some of the higher level ones, which we're trying to create this series for, because we really only have so much time in a day. That's why we're trying to deeper into Scrum series. It just becomes difficult to mentor a lot of people. But I also like the idea behind validated learning, and I feel pretty strongly that Scrum.org exams help with that.