Why We Rebuilt How Credit Training Is Taught

I’ve Never Worked in a Commercial Bank

That is an odd admission from the owner of a commercial credit training company, so it belongs up front. I can’t tell you what it is like to sit in a loan committee. Our instructors can. My job is to take a rigorous cash flow method and rebuild how it is taught.

My background is the other side of the table: 15 years in finance and academia, including three investment banks, a few hundred companies analyzed, and seven years of graduate school at Stanford in finance, engineering and political economics, then 20 years as an entrepreneur, most recently in auto repair software. Along the way I was a teaching assistant for about a dozen undergraduate courses.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Teaching the same material to very different rooms is how I learned to care about how people actually learn, which is most of what this rebuild is about.

What “Shockproof” Means

The name came from Rex Beach. A borrower’s income statement can look fine right up until it doesn’t. Cash flow analysis done properly tells you how much of a shock a business can absorb before it stops paying you. Shockproof was the goal, for the borrower and for the analyst’s judgment.

Rex had a PhD in economics from Brown and spent years at Wells Fargo, where he developed the credit department’s analytical methodology, built on UCA (Uniform Credit Analysis) cash flow: reconstructing a borrower’s actual cash flows from its financial statements rather than trusting reported earnings.

Rex, John Colbert and Dave Miller taught that method in bank training rooms starting in 2000, then online. I didn’t build any of that. I bought it, and I have spent the time since trying not to break it while changing almost everything about how it is delivered.

The Method Held Up. The Delivery Did Not.

Cash is still cash, so the methodology did not need to change. What changed is how a 26-year-old analyst’s day works: fewer free afternoons, more deals, and the expectation that training fits around them. Over time the gap between the quality of the content and the quality of its delivery grew wide, and closing that gap is the work.

Live sessions were a big deal at Shockproof for a long time. A room, then a Zoom, an instructor, ninety minutes and a Q&A. Over the last decade live attendance drifted down and recording views drifted up, until we were essentially running a live event in order to produce a video.

I don’t think that is a failure of the format. A webinar has one job, transferring expertise from one head to many, and a recording does that job with more flexibility and no calendar. The part of live teaching that is truly irreplaceable, a person answering your specific question about your specific deal, never fit well in a webinar anyway. Ninety people, one microphone. What a recording does not fix is ninety minutes of slides built for a live room, with no check on whether anything landed. That is what we rebuilt.

How Is Shockproof Training Delivered Now?

The teaching moved into short modules learners take when they want, each 10-15 minutes of narrated video, worked cases and a learning check. The human part moved into Expert Coaching, where an instructor meets with a team or one person after the modules to work through what didn’t make sense.

Learn alone, then talk. It borrows from the flipped classroom: the lecture moves to video, and time with an expert goes to the learner’s own questions. The research on flipping is encouraging but modest, and it suggests the live part and the quizzes do much of the work, which is why every module ends with a learning check.

The coaching side is where our instructors’ experience does the most good. They are not presenting to ninety people. They are working through a real question with someone who has already done the reading.

What We Kept

We kept the method, the instructors and the record of what learners actually struggle with. Dave Miller, one of the three founders, still runs our data, so the new courses are built around 26 years of experience with where analysts get stuck rather than guesses.

If you train credit analysts, or you are one, I would like to hear what is working for you and what isn’t. The best version of this gets built with the people who use it.

Frequently Asked Questions