Why traditional Power BI training doesn’t work
Most Power BI training feels productive in the moment — but doesn’t lead to lasting skills.
In fact, if you understood everything in a training session, there’s a good chance you didn’t learn very much.
That sounds backwards. But after years of teaching Power BI, it’s a pattern that keeps showing up: the sessions where people nod along perfectly are often the ones they forget two weeks later.
The problem with step-by-step Power BI training
Most technical training follows a familiar pattern:
The instructor builds a dashboard.
You follow along, step by step. It works! Great.
Then a short break, and more of the same.
By the end, you’ve built something that looks right. It looks exactly like the sort of thing you want to recreate at work. On Monday you go into the office, feeling confident. You fire up Power BI (once more), and realise (again!): you have no idea how to proceed, with your own data.
If you’re lucky, you may have a recording or a course booklet of some kind. You’ll try to reverse engineer what was done, whatever you can recall — copying and pasting columns manually, shifting them around to get to a layout that looks like what you had in training. You’ll click buttons that do certain things you want them to, but you’re not quite sure how to piece everything together.
That’s really because the standard training approach is one where you don't have to think through problems. You just repeat steps.
Why following along isn’t the same as learning
Real learning doesn’t come from getting the right answer once.
It comes from trying multiple ways to break down a problem — and understanding why one approach works better than another.
That process is slower. It’s less tidy. And it’s often uncomfortable.
But that discomfort is exactly where the learning happens. It’s what allows you to apply the same thinking to a completely new dataset or question later on. And it’s simply not what is happening in a typical training, where learners work with clean datasets and straightforward problems.
What effective Power BI training looks like in practice
If learning comes from thinking, trying, and adjusting — then training needs to create space for that. That’s exactly what informs the design of our courses, and why you see features you don’t tend to find with other providers.
Our courses emphasize
Small groups (maximum nine people), so learners and trainer are engaged in a conversation, rather than a one-way lecture
Real practice scenarios with messy data, because that’s what you’ll actually face at work and is the exact skill you need
Time spent working through mistakes together, so we can understand why certain approaches didn’t work, rather than simply rushing to get to the “right” answer
Our goal isn’t to show you how Power BI works, or to make the session feel smooth. It’s to help you build the capability — and confidence — to figure things out on your own. That’s when learning truly sticks.
If you’re looking to build practical Power BI skills that transfer to real work, you can explore our upcoming courses and training approach here.
