Education · L&D · Google · UpSkill Digital

Google Hustle Academy, Advanced Digital Marketing Bootcamps

I have worked on Google's Hustle Academy skilling programme since November 2024, contracted through UpSkill Digital as subject matter expert, content developer and trainer, and this strand of the programme set out to take two audiences from a working knowledge of digital advertising to an advanced one, South African SMEs under a mandate focused on HDP-owned and controlled businesses, and qualified app developers. Both groups were already advertising and both had a basic to intermediate command of the platforms, so the syllabus went straight to search results page visibility, paid search structure, Universal App Campaigns, advanced targeting and bidding, attribution modelling, competitive positioning and the practical use of the Google Ads credits participants were given. The design problem was that the two audiences shared a subject and very little else, since an owner-manager running a small business and a qualified app developer have different vocabularies, different reasons for being in the room, different tolerance for theory and, most consequentially, entirely different availability. The single most important design decision was the shape of the timetable, so app developers ran as an intensive week of five hours a day across sessions of sixty to ninety minutes, which is a shape a developer can block the way they would block a sprint, while SME owners ran as five hours a week across five weeks delivered in person with the mentorship layer online, because a business owner cannot leave the business for a week and because the spacing gives somebody seven days to apply the previous session inside a live account and arrive at the next one with a real question, which for practitioners learning on their own money is where the retention happens. Content moved through four gates, each with a named owner and a due date and nothing progressing until the gate behind it cleared: subject matter (what is currently true of the platform, what the settings do, where the common misconfigurations happen and which numbers are worth teaching), the lesson plan written by a learning designer, the deck and workbook produced to Google SSA and Hustle Academy brand standards with the workbook built as a job aid meant to be used afterwards in front of a live account, and a train-the-trainer pack that allowed a trainer who had not written the content to deliver it faithfully. I authored the subject matter stage for eleven of the fifteen sessions on the App Developer Bootcamp, covering keyword research for local relevance, app listing workshops, Google App Campaign setup, advanced targeting and bidding, creative practice for app advertising, search results page dynamics, advanced keyword strategy for paid app promotion, ad copy and extensions, key performance indicators for app marketing, advanced analytics and attribution modelling, and data-driven testing, with outcomes written at the applied level throughout as what the learner would do inside their own account by the end of the session. The assessment model was built around the conviction that somebody can pass a multiple-choice question on Universal App Campaigns and still misconfigure one, so it ran from an intake diagnostic (a self-rating against the competency areas with a light audit of the learner's existing account, used to stream people and to set the baseline) through formative tasks performed live in the learner's own account, to a rubric-scored summative practical against their live campaign covering technical execution, appropriateness of the strategy to that particular business, correctness of the measurement setup and the learner's ability to explain the choice they made, sitting against four competency bands described in terms of what somebody can do unsupervised, with mentorship as the remedial route. Building for this audience also meant designing content that degrades gracefully, since bandwidth in the room is uneven, people drop to audio and somebody will be following on a phone, so nothing essential lived only in a visual and the workbook carried every step in text. On reflection the assessment should have been designed before the content rather than alongside it, because writing the rubric first forces the outcomes to be observable, and the intake diagnostic deserved more weight, since the sessions where the room turned out to be wider in ability than expected are the sessions where the practical tasks ran long.

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