Every week, employees were reaching out for PowerPoint help. How do I merge shapes? What colors should I use? How do I format this? The CEO's executive assistant was being sent to Kennady specifically to get help with executive presentations. None of this was in the job description. It was a recurring time drain that pointed to a clear skills gap across the organization.

Before building anything, I announced the training and sent a questionnaire to everyone who signed up. The questions covered fundamental design principles: how many fonts should you use per deck, how many colors, how to work with shapes, basic formatting rules. The goal was to understand exactly where people's knowledge dropped off so the training wasn't built on assumptions. Once the responses came in, I analyzed which questions had the most wrong answers and used that to determine what the videos needed to cover.

Two pre-work videos covering the design rules I follow when building presentations, sent out before the live session so everyone arrived with the same baseline knowledge regardless of where they started. The live session itself was a virtual instructor-led training built around doing, not telling. Instead of walking through slides about what to do, we built a presentation together as a group in real time with learner participation throughout.

Feedback was entirely positive. The most telling outcome came from the COO: a town hall was coming up shortly after the training, and instead of sending her edits to me as she normally would, she made them herself. She was proud enough of the work to mention it. For someone whose job it is to lead the organization, not format slides, that's the definition of a successful transfer of skill.