Why 22Academy is starting over
In 2017 the GDPR was on its way and I started reading. In 2018 I paid €2,500 for two days in a classroom to prepare for the CIPP/E. The course was official, the trainer was qualified, and most of the two days consisted of reading a textbook aloud in a room full of people who could read. I failed the exam. Then I paid for a retake. I have told that story before: it is how the first trial exam came about, and how 22Academy did. What I did not know then is that the same experience decides what happens next: 22Academy version 2.
What 22Academy was built to fix
The problem in 2018 was price, and then it was practice. The certification was new, and there was no decent mock exam to be had, so I built one to practise on myself: full length, timed, scored per domain, with an analysis afterwards of where I had gone wrong. It got me through the retake. Then I started selling it, and a year later the courses followed. 22Academy became the cheap, self-paced alternative: the substance of the course without the room, the trainer’s hourly rate or the hotel, and with tools the official route did not offer. It worked. Candidates have used the trial exams and the courses since 2018, and the platform is rated 4.8 on Trustpilot.
For years the model was the same as everyone else’s, only cheaper and with better practice: hold good content, keep it current, sell access to it. That model has a problem now, and I saw it coming earlier than I would have liked.
An afternoon in November 2022
On 30 November 2022 ChatGPT was released to the public. I tried it the same day, the way everyone did. I asked it to explain Article 22 of the GDPR to me as if I were preparing for an exam. What came back was free content, and not much more: unverified, no access to the web, trained on data that stopped months earlier, so nothing in it was current. It was not a threat to a platform that sold verified, up-to-date material and a trial exam that behaved like the real one.
But the direction was plain, and I ran a platform that sold content. You do not stand on your own shop floor announcing that shops will be finished. So I said nothing in public and made plans in private. For a while the edge held: the content on 22Academy stayed current, the trial exam and the personal results analysis had no equivalent, and the audience kept growing. The models got better, slowly at first and then not slowly. By 2026 anyone with a browser could get a competent explanation of any regulation in seconds, for nothing, and buying stopped keeping pace with the audience. That is exactly what you would expect once the explanation people used to pay for is free.
What did not become free
Here is the part that took me longer to see. Content became abundant. Five things did not.
Knowing what you do not know. A model answers any question you can formulate. It cannot tell you which question you failed to ask, and that is what fails candidates.
Measurement you can trust. Nothing on the open web tells you whether you are ready to sit a proctored exam next Tuesday.
Exam technique. How the questions are built, what the distractors are doing, how to read a stem when the clock is running.
Retention under a clock. Understanding a topic is not the hard part of an exam. Reproducing it under pressure is.
A corpus that stays correct. Keeping thousands of linked claims accurate through a change in the law is work nobody wants to do twice.
Those five are what an exam actually tests, and none of them is a library. So 22Academy version 2 stops selling the library.
Why I developed it myself
When I decided to rebuild, the sensible thing was to buy a learning platform and fill it. I looked at the plugins and the systems, a long list of them, and not one could do what I had in mind. Every standard learning system, from the plugins you bolt onto a website to Coursera, Udemy and the other large platforms, is built to feed you content: lessons in order, a video, a quiz at the end, a certificate of completion. The good ones do it well, and verified content is worth having. But content is now free, and a system built to deliver it is built for the wrong scarcity.
What I wanted did not exist: an assessment before any lesson, so the course starts where you are; every concept available in the form you need at that moment; a record of how sure you were, not only whether you were right; a trial exam that behaves like the real one and refuses to flatter you; and a corpus stored once, so that one change in the law corrects every course at the same time. So I worked the whole platform out myself, screen by screen, and developed it myself to that design. Everything in 22Academy version 2 is custom, down to the way a question remembers your confidence. That took longer than buying something. It is also the only way to build a platform for what an exam actually tests.
Traditional eLearning versus 22Academy version 2
| Traditional eLearning (22Academy until now, and most others) | 22Academy version 2 |
|---|---|
| Start with the content, work through it | Start with an assessment; [study what you do not know]([PSG URL]), skip what you do |
| One explanation for everyone | Every concept in the form you need: one line, a full explanation, plain language, a real-life example, or how the exam builds its questions on it |
| Right or wrong | Right or wrong, and how sure you were; confident mistakes come back until they stick |
| Lifetime access to a course recorded in a given year | Pay by the week, stop when you are ready, always the current version |
| Materials updated when someone gets round to it | One change to the law, and every course that uses it is correct from that moment |
| Treats AI as the competition | Assumes you use it, and shows you how to make it quiz you properly |
| A certificate of completion | A full-length trial exam, harder than the real thing on purpose, that tells you whether to book |
Content on demand, assessment first. That is the whole idea, and it is the opposite of the room in 2018.
Why the price stays where it is
This is the part I care about most. The reason 22Academy exists is that I do not think anyone should have to pay €2,500 to read a book in a room, or $375 for a retake because nobody told them they were not ready. A retake costs more than ten trial exams on 22Academy. A week of study on 22Academy version 2 costs €37, and you stop the moment you are ready. The assessment is free, and so is the first lesson, without a card.
That is not a launch discount. It is the model. Weekly pricing is what puts the biggest courses within reach of the smallest budgets: the person paying for their own certification between jobs, the one whose employer will not fund it, the one who has done the sums on the official course and closed the tab. Those are the people 22Academy was built for in 2018, and they are the people it is rebuilt for now.
22Academy version 2, in days
22Academy version 2 goes live in days. Five certifications from the first day: AIGP, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM and CIPT. The current platform moves to legacy.22academy.com, where everyone who bought something keeps their access and their progress; nothing is taken away, and version 2 is a fresh start for anyone who wants it.
If you are preparing for an exam this autumn, the free assessment on the new platform is the place to start. If you are preparing for one this week, the old platform is still open, and the story of how it closes is in the next section of the version on 22academy.com.
Eight years ago I failed an exam I had paid a great deal to pass. It turned out to be the most useful thing I did that year. I would rather you did not have to.
Bas
