Built because we could not hire the people we needed.

From one classroom to four divisions.

The first cohort had eleven students and one instructor. What made it work was not the curriculum — that was rewritten four times in the first year — but the decision that nobody would teach a subject they were not actively practising. That rule still holds. Every trainer on the roster carries live consulting work, and the labs they set on a Saturday are frequently derived from something they found in a client network the week before.

The consultancy division grew out of the training, not the other way around. Organisations that sent staff to courses began asking whether we would look at their infrastructure. By 2018 that work was large enough to need its own team, and it now funds the parts of the institute that do not pay for themselves.

Research came next, for a related reason. Graduates who wanted to go further had nowhere local to do serious work, and the ones who went abroad rarely came back. The research division exists to make the first publication possible without leaving the country — and the scholarship division exists for the students for whom leaving is the right answer.