Student Experience ≠ Classroom Experience
Why most providers are measuring the wrong thing—and losing the students who care
Welcome to SitRep #002.
Each week, we send a short field note on how we fix the broken infrastructure behind CPR and medical training ops. If you’re running a training business—or building one—you’ll find tactical insight on discoverability, student experience, and the systems that scale trust.
Join hundreds of instructors, admins, and operators who are rethinking how this industry works.
It started with an email response from an industry legend.
I’ll keep them anonymous to protect the innocent. ; )
“Almost all claim that THEIR classes are better than any others. (HUGE egos.)”
—Industry vet
Judging student experience by the classroom is like judging air travel by the flight.
Or judging a dining experience purely by the food.
This is a fallacy.
If you are only measuring what happens in the classroom, then maybe it is true.
But, student experience doesn’t start in the classroom.
It starts when they think…
“I should get CPR certified.”
Maybe it’s a new baby. A personal scare. A news story.
Whatever it is… that moment should create momentum.
Instead, it creates work. And work kills intent.
What friction actually looks like
In most industries, curiosity unlocks a smoother path.
Travel, shopping, even grocery delivery.
CPR does not.
Here’s what most students face:
Google the class—land on 8 disconnected sites.
Different scheduling widgets, unclear price, multiple booking flows.
Bounce between pages, paragraphs, and vague options.
Give up before they even choose.
Here’s the shift…
If only 10% of interested students reach your classroom, you’re not measuring experience—you’re measuring survivorship.
Like measuring the views from the top of Mount Everest.
Yes… it’s breathtaking.
It also takes months of training, thousands of gear, and risk to life-and-limb to get there.
If you’re assuming students fall off because they don’t care or they’re cheap, you’re missing the opportunity. You are failing to see that 95% of the people who make it to your class are there because they have no choice.
Everyone else bounces.
Student experience starts at search
The improvements we make to the hallway—not the classroom—will predict whether this market grows. And the potential is a market 4-5x the size.
That means, improving how students:
Find providers
Choose course
Book a class
Arrive to their session
Unfortunately, most of the tools used today weren’t built to fix the hallway.
They were built to manage rosters—not reduce bounce rate.
They serve the organization, not the student.
Neighborhood cleanup: individual yards, shared streets
So. What can an individual provider do?
Cleaning up the neighborhood starts in your backyard.
Your yard → how you store your courses, how you present your availability slots, how a student completes the checkout.
The street → shared naming, SEO standards, live class feed.
Right now, the industry is invisible by design.
Everyone is using DIY tools, custom logic, and platforms that weren’t built for discovery.
Even the best providers have little-to-no ability to showcase their network’s classes.
So even the most motivated students are quietly dropping off.
Bonus resource: Before you tweak ads or landing pages, make sure Google can even see your classes. This quick audit shows you in 2 minutes—no tech skills needed.
Structure before scale
This isn’t about making Atlas better.
It’s about structuring your information so Atlas can work better.
When class data is standardized, visibility improves.
When visibility improves, conversion rises.
And when conversion rises, the market grows.
“People don’t expect miracles. They expect Shopify.”
Airbnb didn’t make rooms better.
They made booking frictionless.
“Markets don’t grow when demand increases. They grow when access gets easier.”
After Airbnb arrived?
The short-term rental market quadrupled in size.
Fix the hallway. Not just the classroom.
Is your hallway leaky?
Next week: Why Directories aren’t Discovery—and how a shared street map will grow our industry.
Jon
💬 Want to see what a friction-free hallway looks like?
We’ll show you how to:
Structure your class data so students (and Google) can find it instantly
Publish live availability—no PDFs, no phone tags
Route people from search to checkout in one flow
Give every instructor visibility without DIY websites
One call. Zero pressure. Just the anatomy of a smoother student journey.