Airtable Academy | Fall Launch Recap & Roundup

[kev]

Hi everyone — @kev here from Airtable! For those I haven’t yet met, I lead the teams responsible for Airtable Academy and Airtable Community. As we say goodbye to Airtable’s Q3, I wanted to offer a quick roundup of all of the helpful educational content that we launched in the Academy in this past quarter.

And as a reminder: as of October, Airtable Academy is now available free to all users, regardless of Airtable plan!

Content Launches from Q3 / Summer 2024

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: Admin Essentials

Launched in August, this 9-course learning path was designed and developed to help Airtable Admins master the core administrative functions in Airtable, including user and workspace management, security and compliance protocols, effective use of reporting features to optimize organizational processes, and the Enterprise Hub. 

The learning path includes the following courses:

• Intro to Airtable Administration: Learn to effectively administer an Airtable organization, understand user activity, billing, and AI admin settings, and perform functional admin actions for smooth operations.
• The Users Menu: Learn to navigate, add, and manage users within your Airtable organization, understand account statuses, billing, and resource allocation.
• The Groups Menu: Explore user groups in Airtable, their benefits, creation, and management for efficient collaboration and organization.
• The Workspaces Menu: Learn to manage workspaces in Airtable and provide a productive environment for team collaboration.
• The Bases Menu: Learn to navigate and manage bases in Airtable, ensuring data organization and accessibility for your team.
• The Interfaces Menu: Learn to navigate and manage interfaces in Airtable, enhancing productivity and user experience for your team.
• The Datasets Menu: Learn to navigate, understand, verify, and manage datasets in Airtable for efficient and accurate data handling.
• The Reporting Menu: Learn to navigate, manage, and leverage reporting features in Airtable for tracking progress, auditing, and ensuring transparency and accountability.
• The Global Settings Menu: Learn to manage Airtable's global settings, security, compliance, integrations, and authentication for efficient organization management.

You can check out, and register for, this learning path here.

🏅 Certification: Airtable Admin

Maybe our most exciting update from this past quarter is that we launched our *second* certification—the Airtable Admin Certification!

With a 65-question exam anchored to the concepts and topics taught in the Admin Essentials learning path, the Airtable Admin Certification is designed for those who want to master the comprehensive suite of administrative tools offered by Airtable. It equips individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to manage, optimize, and secure an organization's data and collaborative processes within the platform.

The certified Airtable Admin is proficient in managing a wide range of administrative tasks within the platform. They are well-versed in the responsibilities and operations of an Airtable admin, including understanding user management, billing, and the application of various global settings.

They are skilled in inviting, reviewing, and adding users, understanding and managing organization memberships, defining and provisioning various permissions and seat types, and more. Their expertise extends to managing user groups and workspaces, thereby fostering efficient collaboration and organization within the team. They also have the ability to verify and manage datasets, ensuring accurate and efficient data handling.

In terms of reporting features at the Enterprise level, the certified Airtable Admin can effectively manage share and invite links, access the audit log, and manage API keys and tokens, ensuring transparency and accountability within the organization. Additionally, the certified Airtable Admin is adept at navigating and managing the global settings of Airtable, including security and compliance, integrations, and domain federation and verification.

In the realm of security, they are equipped to set up SSO, SCIM (with Okta, EntraID), and two-factor authentication, and are capable of implementing functional security strategies. This comprehensive set of skills prepares the certified Airtable Admin for effectively managing an organization, ensuring its security, compliance, and efficient integration of resources.

Ready to test your skills? You can register for the certification exam here.

And don’t forget—once you pass, make sure to add to your LinkedIn profile and share with your network using #AirtableAcademy in your post!

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: AI-Powered App Building

Launched in October, this 3-course learning path (soon to be a 5-course learning path ✨) was created to help you learn how your digital operations function can harmonize with AI to drive workflow transformation. In this learning path, you will learn the fundamentals of large language models, the foundations for crafting thoughtful and impactful prompts for LLMs, a deep dive into suitable use cases for AI at your business, and more.

The learning path (today) includes the following courses:

• The Generative AI Crash Course: a course introducing how generative AI and digital operations can work together.
• Prompting Essentials: A comprehensive course on prompting, covering essential prompt writing skills and AI application in diverse business contexts.
• Advanced Prompt Writing: Refine your AI skills and learn how to apply advanced prompting techniques through the most common applications of artificial intelligence in the Airtable platform. Join us to enhance your AI capabilities and achieve tangible results in your workflow.

In this upcoming quarter, learners can expect two more courses to be added to the learning path—with more details below. In the meantime, you can register for this learning path here.

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: Advanced Builder

While this learning path isn’t a net-new launch this quarter, we did incorporate two net-new courses (inclusive of 6 new lesson videos) to round out the curriculum & topics taught. Those two new courses are:

• Introduction to Advanced Automations: Discover advanced automation techniques in Airtable, learn conditional logic, actions, and repeating groups for streamlining workflows and enhancing team communication.
• Data Sets and Advanced Sync: Master two-way syncs, multi-source syncing, and verified data sets in Airtable to centralize data and establish a single source of truth.

Already registered for (or completed) the Builder Advanced learning path? No worries—you can jump back in and find these new lessons here (or by looking in our full course catalog).

🧑‍🎓 Course: Building Your App

A smaller scale update was published to this course, which you can find in the Builder Essentials learning path, that includes both a net-new lesson video supporting the App Library launch and a new experiential, interactive tutorial lesson.

These updated lessons are:

• Understanding Enterprise App Library App

• (Tutorial) How to Create a Managed Component

Revisit this course here to check out the new lessons (and please, we’d LOVE feedback on the new tutorial-style lesson).

Looking Ahead to Q4 & Fall/Winter 2024 (pssst….!)

While we are excited for you all to check out all of this new content, we are already under way with our next wave of curriculum development for this quarter.

Here are some of the projects underway that you can expect to see in the Airtable Academy in the months ahead:

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: Learning Path: AI-Powered App Building

Users can expect two additional courses for this learning path to (sshhh!) prepare you for our third certification with concepts on both designing a strategy for embedding AI into your workflows and for implementing those workflows at your organization.

• AI Strategy Blueprint

• AI Implementation Blueprint

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: Builder Essentials

We’re excited to also grow our Builder Essentials learning path with a handful of additional courses. We know that a builder’s job goes far beyond data configuration and interface design, which is why we’re excited to rollout a bundle of new lessons that teach best practices around user testing and publishing your app, migrating and/or onboarding collaborators to your app, and calculating quantifiable impact and the ROI of your app.

🧑‍🎓 Learning Path: Intro to Airtable

As accuracy and relevancy are guiding tenets for the Academy team, we’re actively auditing the courses in our Intro to Airtable learning path and prioritizing updates to ensure this content remains aligned with the current state of the Airtable platform. More to come on the specifics as we audit and prioritize, but this is a key area of focus in Q4.

🏅 Certification: No Code AI App Builder

We are VERY excited to launch our third entry into the Airtable Academy certification catalog—a certification for Airtable Builders that power their apps with AI.

More to come on the specific details, but users can expect the same, 65-question exam experience and passing requirements as the Builder and Admin Certifications.

🧑‍🎓 Course: Building for Product Ops (with ProductCentral)

You may have seen the announcement of Airtable’s new ProductCentral product, which connects the entire product development process, from customer insights, product roadmaps, team resources, strategic goals—and ultimately—delivery. Users can expect a course in the Academy on the Product Ops departmental use-case of Airtable and how to configure your own unified solution with ProductCentral.

🧑‍🎓 Course: Change Management

We know that Airtable is a highly customizable tool that supports the transformation of key processes—and that the lasting success of this transformation and lasting adoption of your app(s) relies heavily on change management. That’s why we’re eager to begin developing a curriculum on navigating and managing change—how to build your change network, how to train and empower your end users, and more. 

More details coming soon!

Call for Feedback

As you may (or may not?) know, we include a satisfaction survey at the end of every course in our course catalog—and I’m not joking when I say that our team reviews every single one. So please consider this a CTA to provide your feedback via this survey at the end of every course you complete.

However, the team is all ears if you have any feedback you’d like to share on this post! 👇

Things we’re interested in hearing from you on:

• Content Requests: is there a learning path, course, or lesson that we don’t currently offer that would be of interest and of value to you? What topics, subjects, and use-cases would you like to see featured next in the Academy?
• Tutorial Lessons: as we experiment with, and incorporate, these lessons into our catalog—how do you feel about these?
• Improving Accessibility: we are eager to design a platform that is accessible to all—have you encountered any barriers to learning with the Academy? If so, what and where?

I also want to acknowledge the effort it takes to submit feedback, so I thank you all in advance for any energy you put towards this.

Thanks all for your continued learning and engagement—see you next time!