Our Story

On March 23rd the team at LastMinuteTraining.ca got together for the same daily virtual “what are we going to do” meeting that we’ve had every day since we decided to enact social distancing measures and work from home.

We’d all heard or watched the depressing news that day - as we had for the last couple of weeks and it showed on our faces. We were tired - tired of all the doom and gloom. So we made a decision.

That decision was to stop obsessing about cash flow, runway and revenues. Instead we decided to focus on trying to do something to help.

Our conversation centered around training - since it’s our industry - and in particular, virtual training. A lot of our training vendors were advertising virtual training courses - we had over 3000 of them in our marketplace - and how this was a great option for training while working from home.

But we realized that, for many people, it’s not such a great option. Taking a six hour long training session when you are sharing your space with your family isn’t ideal. And forking out thousands of dollars for training just doesn't work if you are unemployed or worried about your business surviving.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to make it easy for anyone who wants to attend training to take it - even for free.

Sure there are elearning and MOOC programs available, but we’re all isolated enough right now, it would be so much nicer to have a human touch. Virtual instructor led training fits that need.

And so we came up with a plan - we created and launched PayWhatYouCan.Training - a portal that borrows from the ‘Pay What You Can’ model. That model has been used in different industries during tough times. And never has there been a better time to apply it to the learning industry than right now.

PayWhatYouCan.Training connects instructors who want to help, to people who need and want to take training.

The program is easy - instructors create, upload and schedule short courses that they can teach virtually. People looking for training find and register for courses on the portal. Our team does everything else.

We’ve set an audacious goal of teaching 100,000 people by June 30th. Our launch happened for April 15th with our first courses starting on April 16th. That gives us just over 11 weeks.

We hope you will take advantage of this great resource.

Sincerely,

Louis, Audrey, Jeremy and all of our fantastic instructors, supporters and sponsors.