Why I Built RaeLearn

Why I Built RaeLearn

I did not wake up one morning and decide I needed an online learning platform.

RaeLearn came from working.

Over the years, I have had to learn things because the work in front of me required it. Operations. Admin. Tech. Marketing. Systems. Websites. Client management. Process documentation. Nonprofit work. The list kept growing because apparently one hat was never enough.

Some skills I learned properly from the beginning.

Others were learned through the traditional method of opening twenty tabs, reading everything, testing things, getting something wrong, figuring out why, and making sure I did not make the same mistake twice.

I took notes through all of it because that is how I have always learned best.

Read something. Write it down. Try it. Add context. Rewrite the note once I understand it better. Then, eventually, teach it to someone else.

Teaching has a funny way of exposing whether you actually understand something. If I cannot explain it clearly, I probably need to go back and learn it again.

At Some Point, I Looked Back

When you are constantly learning the next thing, it is easy to feel like you are still at the beginning.

There is always another platform. Another skill. Another system you have never touched. Another person who has been doing something twice as long as you have. I still feel that way often because there is genuinely so much left to learn.

But then I looked back.

And I realized how far I had already gone. Things that once required hours of research had become normal parts of my work. Problems that used to intimidate me became things I could troubleshoot. Processes I once had to follow carefully became processes I could build for other people.

That did not happen because I woke up one sunny morning and suddenly knew everything. I just kept learning, that's why.

Working With People Changed the Way I Learned Too

The people and organizations I work with have taught me a lot, especially small businesses and nonprofits.

You get close enough to an organization and you begin seeing how much work happens outside the thing everyone else sees.

A nonprofit might have an incredible program, but behind it someone still has to manage volunteers, donor information, reports, grant deadlines, files, communications, and a dozen systems that somehow need to talk to each other.

A small business might have a brilliant founder, but that founder is also answering emails, fixing the website, onboarding contractors, reviewing invoices, and trying to remember where they saved the client agreement.

That work taught me skills and it also taught me where people get stuck.

Then There Are the People They Hire

A business can hire a virtual assistant, contractor, employee, or new team member and assume the person will somehow know how everything works.

Sometimes they know the skill but they just do not know the process. Or they know how to use the software but not how that particular organization uses it. Or they are new and capable, but nobody has ever explained why the work is done a certain way.

Then everyone gets frustrated.

The business thinks the person should know. The new hire thinks they are missing something. Usually, both are right.

There is a gap and I wanted RaeLearn to help with that gap.

My Goal With RaeLearn Is Pretty Simple

As I work with nonprofits and small businesses, I want to help them grow as much as they have helped me grow.

That includes the people working inside those organizations.

The virtual assistants. The contractors. The employees. The founders figuring things out for the first time. The nonprofit staff member suddenly responsible for a system nobody ever trained them to use.

RaeLearn is a place where I can take what I have learned through work, research, mistakes, testing, and experience and turn it into something another person can actually use.

And as I learn more, RaeLearn can grow with me.

A Lot of It Comes From Trial and Error

Freelancing teaches you very quickly that knowing how to complete a task is only part of the job.

You also have to learn how to:

• Understand what a client actually needs

• Ask better questions

• Research things you have never done before

• Organize your own work

• Document what you did

• Communicate when something goes wrong

• Learn new software quickly

• Manage several responsibilities at once

• Know when you need help

• Know when you need to push back

• Fix your own mistakes

I learned plenty of those lessons the inefficient way first. If RaeLearn can save somebody a few of those unnecessary detours, good. They will still make mistakes. They should. That is part of learning. Maybe they can just make more interesting mistakes than the ones I already made.

RaeLearn Is Also for the Organizations

Training usually gets treated as something that belongs only to large companies with learning departments and elaborate onboarding programs.

Small organizations need it too. Maybe even more. When you only have a few people, losing time to unclear instructions or repeated training hurts.

That is why I want RaeLearn to eventually help organizations do things such as:

• Train new virtual assistants

• Build onboarding materials

• Assign learning to team members

• Create organization-specific training

• Keep useful resources in one place

• Help people understand the work before they are expected to perform it perfectly

The organization gets better support. The person doing the work gets a fairer chance to succeed. That sounds like a decent trade.

I Am Still Learning

That part matters to me.

RaeLearn is not being built from the position that I have reached some final level where I now know everything worth knowing.

Quite the opposite, really.

I am still reading. Still taking notes. Still learning from people who know things I do not. Still testing. Still changing my mind when I find a better way. Still occasionally staring at something and wondering why on earth it is not working.

The difference now is that when I learn something useful, I have somewhere to put it. And hopefully, somebody else can use it too.

That Is RaeLearn

A place to learn from the work. A place to make useful knowledge easier to pass from one person to another. And, for me, a record of how much there still is to learn and how far learning can take you when you keep going.

That is why I built it.