A few years back I was given an interesting challenge: A local university reached out and asked whether I could take a cohort of students and teach them Digital Imaging / Adobe Photoshop in just 3 MONTHS. The idea was to take a group of students (many of whom had never used Photoshop before!) to a semi-professional level within a 3-month module. At that time I’d been a professional Digital Artist for 15 years, and didn’t think it was possible to impart THAT MUCH KNOWLEDGE within such a measly amount of time – but I was wrong.
You see, when I really thought about my workflow (creating Digital Art for the pro-markets), I only ever use a tiny fraction of the software – returning to the same tools time and again. Investigating further I learned about a mathematical principle called the ‘PARETO PRINCIPLE’ (shoutout Tim Ferris!), and had come to the following understanding:
Sounds too simple to be true right? I taught the course, and when students started handing assignments in: we were STAGGERED. The quality of the work rolling in was way beyond our expectations… the system really worked. The course was so effective, it was demoed for university open days, used for community outreach programs, and I even received invitations to teach the methodology at other campuses.
Throughout a few short years the Core Skills methodology has been taught to thousands of students across a huge spectrum: from young tweens to 80 yr old elders, from hard-to-reach youngsters to differently-abled / neurodivergent students – and that’s BEFORE we took this thing online!!
