I read an email last week from a student. It said, “It took me 11 months, but it was wildly important for me to get certified.”

Eleven months.

Most people would have quit at month two, but she didn’t, and I wanted to understand why.

This is episode seven of nine of The Analog Renaissance, a series where I’m sharing the eight ways that we’ve stepped fully into this analog moment as creatives and as entrepreneurs.

So far, we’ve talked about physical products and print and hands-on learning and boxes on doorsteps, all of the ways that analog deepens connection. If you want more context, I would suggest listening to episode number one of this series, called The Wake Up Call.

Today’s shift is about what all of that is actually in service of.

Analog advantage number six is course completion, because honestly, none of it matters if people don’t finish.

The problem with online courses, and this is a brutal statistic, is that self-paced courses have a 3 to 15% completion rate. That means that 85 to 97% of people who buy never finish. They feel guilty. They feel like failures. But it’s not their fault. It’s a design problem.

So often, courses sell content when they need to be selling completion.

I’ve said for a long time, I don’t want your money. It doesn’t stop there for me. I want your completion. I want your life transformed. I want to see you step into your biggest creative dream come true. I want that for you, and I can’t get that for you unless you show up and finish this course.

So completion really means transformation. Success equals success stories, equals better lives, more joy, dreams coming true.

It means nothing to me if we don’t get them to the success that they set out to achieve.

Now, cohort-based courses with community and accountability, get this, they have an 85 to 90% completion rate. Same content, completely different outcome.

So once we saw that gap, we stopped asking, how do we add more content? And we started asking, what actually gets people to the finish line?

So we landed on a simple framework: content moves to accountability, moves to coaching, moves to credentials.

We’ve got three different levels that we’ve been working with in our own course that I want to share with you, and my hope is that it will get your gears turning as well.

Level one is something that we call Study Groups.

Now, Study Groups is a $97 order bump, and this puts students in peer-to-peer study groups of five to six people. We meticulously, and very manually, place these people based on where they are on the success path, what time zone they are in, and when they can meet during the week.

These groups fall in love with each other. They stay together for years and years, and putting people together in groups like this has been one of the best things that we’ve ever done.

Now, this offer has changed a lot over the years. It started out as free, but what we learned over the years is that people who pay, pay attention. And when we started to charge for Study Groups, we got people who were really serious and committed to showing up for their group.

And the Study Groups just took off. They became wildly successful.

The next level is something that we are trying brand new this year, called Course Coach.

Now, this is a $997 upsell on the back end of our course experience.

A Course Coach is part of our trained, Immersion-certified alumni who are already experts on our Love Squad and have been for many years, and they become personal coaches.

So this Course Coach experience gives students a kickoff call, a one-to-one meeting with their coach that lasts about 30 minutes. And from that kickoff call, students get a personalized, we call it the Pattern Path, a personalized Pattern Path roadmap that is specific to where they are, what their goals are, how much time they have to contribute to their progress, and what industry they want to end up in.

It is all completely personalized to them.

And then they get direct support, priority support, during the 12 weeks of the course. So the course is eight weeks long, and then we offer four extra weeks of priority support through Course Coach.

Now, Course Coach means that you have a direct line to your coach and a small team of other coaches that you’ll get to know, so that you always have a response time of 24 hours or less.

And then at the end, you get a portfolio review.

This is our response to how people want to learn more quickly, more supported, more guided, more seen, more connected.

We’re really excited about offering this this year for those who really want to uplevel their experience and really uplevel their accountability, and thus their completion.

Pattern is having a moment.

From bold wallpaper to checkered mugs to striped pajamas and floral notebooks, the world is embracing color and texture and personality again. We are officially living in the era of pattern drenching, and honestly, I’m so here for it.

If you’ve been noticing it too and thinking, I wonder if I could make patterns, you absolutely can, and the best way to do it is by using Adobe Illustrator.

It’s where I created my very first repeating pattern over a decade ago, and it’s still the tool that I use and teach today, because it’s designed for this kind of creative work, and it’s trusted across the entire industry on a global basis.

Illustrator makes designing seamless repeating patterns feel intuitive. You can easily tweak colors, scale your artwork, and move things around without starting over. Everything stays crisp because it’s all vector-based.

And when you’re ready to put your pattern onto a real product, Illustrator works beautifully with printers, manufacturers, and licensing partners.

So whether you’re creating patterns for your notebooks, your living room walls, or dreaming of turning your creativity into a career, Illustrator helps your ideas go from sketch to “look at what I made.”

Head on over to our show notes. Open Adobe Illustrator and have some fun.

Pattern is having a moment, and Illustrator is how you join it.

Now, level three is certification.

This is the second year that we’re offering certification, and it has been a game changer. It is completely optional for students, but at the end of the course, you can take an exam.

It’s a two-part exam. One is multiple choice and fill in the blank, and the other is practical. You have to actually design, and we manually grade these Adobe Illustrator files.

Becoming Immersion Certified means that you are instantly recognized as qualifying with specific skills.

You receive a badge, the credential, and the test. It tests on your course material, but it also tests on your skill level, and the impact has gone way beyond anything that we ever expected.

I think why it works is that a credential really creates a finish line, something to work towards, and a reason to keep going even when life gets busy.

The student who took 11 months, she wasn’t working toward completing module six. She was working toward mastering the skill and becoming certified.

And that changes the stakes.

Becoming Immersion Certified brings credibility and visibility. It’s a way to show licensors and clients and other industry professionals that you are Immersion Certified.

It helps in licensor outreach. We’ve introduced our certification program, and what it stands for, to over 400 of the top premium licensors looking for designers.

It boosts your portfolio credentials because it adds this layer of certification to your website. You can add it to LinkedIn and all your pitch materials, and it’s becoming more and more recognized in the industry because you are part of a select group of certified Immersion designers.

So why does analog really support completion?

This is where I think it does the best work.

Workbooks on desks, boxes that arrive in the mail, people to connect with, a coach who knows your name, and a badge that you can print and share with your printed portfolio that you hold in your hands.

When learning is physical, it’s harder to ghost.

When your progress lives in the real world, quitting just feels different. It doesn’t even feel like an option.

So for every creator, what would it take to guarantee your students actually finish?

This is one reason why we have one of the highest completion rates in the industry.

And what do you think they would pay for that?

Think about things like small group options, peer-to-peer pods, accountability partners, what it would take to have someone check in and just say, “Hey, how is module three going?” and a credential that adds true value.

The goal has always been transformation, but transformation requires completion.

So how can we go all in on getting our students to completion?

Here is what happens when you obsess over this concept of completion.

Students finish. They get results, and they become success stories. They get the transformation that they were looking for. They have more joy in their lives. They’re living their biggest creative dreams.

And because of that, naturally, they begin to tell people. Then more people learn about what you’re doing, and more people finish the course, and the flywheel spins faster and faster.

We like to think that we don’t sell a course. We sell a success story that’s waiting to happen.

And just in case you’re curious, you can see how we display our success stories for Surface Design Immersion on something that we call our Celebrate page. You can see it at surfacedesignsuccess.com.

I’ll also link that for you in the show notes.

We have thousands of success stories that we are so proud to build on that page.

But there’s still one piece that I haven’t told you about, one way that we meet people that doesn’t require them to be on a screen all day, a way to be with them even while they’re making biscuits or driving carpool or tending to their garden.

In the next episode, I’ll tell you why we recorded an hour-and-a-half audio version of our newest resource, and what we discovered about meeting people in their analog life.

My friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world, and remember, there’s room for you.