Google has launched Gemini Study Notebooks, an adaptive learning space inside the Gemini app with a diagnostic quiz, personalised lessons, and a progress dashboard. It is pitched at students, and for that audience it looks genuinely useful. For an Australian business asking a different question, how do we upskill our team on AI, it is a good prompt to think about what kind of learning actually builds capability at work.
Take the Gemini specifics as reported, and set the student framing aside, because a team is not a classroom. The goal at work is not to pass a quiz. It is to get people confidently using AI on the real tasks they are paid to do, and that changes what good training looks like.
Learning to pass a quiz versus learning to do the job
Structured lessons and quizzes are good at one thing: building a foundation. They give people the vocabulary and the basic mental model, and a progress dashboard can keep a self-motivated learner moving. That has real value, and a tool like Study Notebooks does it well for an individual working through the basics at their own pace.
Workplace capability, though, comes from somewhere else. People get good at using AI by doing their own work with it, on their own data, with someone on hand to show them a better way when they get stuck. A marketer learns by drafting a real campaign, not by answering questions about prompting in the abstract. The best team upskilling blends a little structure with a lot of hands-on practice on tasks that look exactly like the day job.
There is also the matter of what sticks. A quiz score fades within a week if it is never used, while a skill applied to live work on Monday is reinforced every day after. This is why training that ends with a certificate but no change in daily habits so often disappoints. The measure that matters for a business is not how many people finished a course. It is how many are doing something differently a month later, and that only happens when the learning was attached to real work from the start.
Real tasks: people practise on their own work, not generic exercises.
Role-relevant examples: what accounts needs to learn is not what sales needs.
Safe practice: a space to experiment without risking live data or customers.
Measurement and support: track who is applying it, and keep help available after the training ends.
Where Claude fits for team upskilling
This is the work we do, and it is why we built the Claude Builder Course. It is designed to take a team from curious to capable using hands-on sessions built around Australian examples and the tasks people actually face, rather than a generic survey of features. The aim is for someone to finish a session having done real work with Claude, not just watched a demo. For a team of fifty, a focused programme in the range of $15,000 tends to pay for itself many times over in hours saved, provided it is tied to live work and followed by ongoing support rather than left as a single event.
Choosing for your team
To be fair to Gemini Study Notebooks, it is not competing for the same job. If an individual wants to self-pace through AI foundations, a structured study tool is a reasonable place to start, and there is no need to be precious about which brand provides it. The distinction that matters for a business is between learning about AI and becoming capable with the specific tool your team will use every day. For the second, hands-on training on Claude, grounded in your own work, will move the needle further than any quiz-based course.
The practical takeaway is to be clear about your goal before you pick a method. If you want a few people to understand the basics, a self-paced tool is fine. If you want a whole team to change how they work, invest in practice on real tasks with support around it. The tool is the easy part. The capability is what you are actually buying, and that is built by doing.
One last point worth making is that capability built this way compounds. A team that learns Claude on real work this quarter applies it to new problems the next, without needing another course to get there. That is the return a business should look for from training, and it is the reason hands-on practice beats a one-off certificate nearly every time.
If you want to upskill your team on Claude in a way that sticks, we can build a programme around your real work. You can book a brainstorm and we will design training that leaves your people genuinely capable, not just certified.
