Hi, I'm Leon Petrou

I'd like to start this letter by thanking you for choosing me to be your teacher.

To understand why I'm so thankful to you, I'd like to share a personal story that I've never told anyone.
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It's the story of how a Google search changed my life.

There are very few things in life that I genuinely hate, but one thing that I know I hated was my first job.
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I remember my first day of work, 4 January 2017, coincidentally my birthday.
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I had just relocated to Cape Town, the most beautiful city in South Africa, working a fancy corporate job next to the V&A Waterfront.
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I didn't have to be stuck working in a dark, dirty factory like some of my friends.

Things couldn't be any better.
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I had that feeling like it was all worth it and I'd finally made it.
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It represented twelve years of schooling and four long and difficult years studying engineering at the University of Pretoria.
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I was excited to finally launch my career as an Industrial Engineer.
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The first task I was assigned was a geo-coding assignment, where I had to manually convert a list of 10,000 addresses (like a street address) into their geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude).
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It was my first assignment, so I wasn't going to complain. I just started.

I was one week in and I was slowly losing my mind, one address at a time.
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It was the most dreaded, tedious and boring thing I have ever had to do in my entire life.
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Then, I thought to myself, "there has got to be a better way to do this".
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And so, as we all do, I googled it.

I remember googling "how to automate boring office work?"...
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That's the Google search that changed my life.
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That search led me to something called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
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I'd never heard of it, but the idea was simple…
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Software that could do repetitive computer work for you. Faster, and more accurate.
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I got excited thinking I could just automate the remainder of those 10,000 addresses.
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I took the idea to my boss to use RPA for our repetitive processes, and they blatantly refused.
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At first, I thought this boring exercise was an attempt to build grit and test the patience in their new employees.
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But it wasn't that, it turned out that the company I worked for had a very old-fashioned mind-set and didn't want to change their ways of doing things.
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The boring and tedious work didn't stop for months and I knew I needed to make a change.
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So what I did is, while I still had my full-time job I started learning UiPath after-hours.
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I discovered UiPath had some free courses on their website called UiPath Academy.
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It helped me understand the basics of UiPath, however the courses were very fast-paced, skipped vital steps and worst of all, the courses were very academic.
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They were not project-based so it was difficult to learn how I would use the tool in real-world projects.
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It took me months just to cover the basics.
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I then did something that terrified me.
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I created a profile on the freelance site UpWork before I felt ready.
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I got a few small RPA jobs and gained some real-world experience.
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I then landed my first RPA contract of $3000 per month to automate some business processes for a health-tech startup in Texas.
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At the time, that contract was triple my salary as a junior engineer in South Africa, so I handed in my resignation the same week.
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And I started RPA consulting full-time.
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I then landed another contract, then another contract and then another contract which moulded into my automation consultancy, FutureRPA.
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I could see the amazing things RPA was capable of and what a massive impact it had in my life and my clients' companies.
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However, I was disappointed with the current educational material available to learn RPA.
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So I decided that I needed to help others learn RPA too.
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I had already had an interest and passion for teaching, because while I was in university, I created a few online courses teaching a few of my first year engineering subjects (statics, electronics, and machine design).
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I filmed them during the summer holiday and uploaded them on Udemy.
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In fact, they're still live on Udemy, I can’t make myself delete them, they’re strangely sentimental to me, and they’re still helping engineering students around the world to this day.
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I created those courses because I wasn't satisfied with the quality of teaching from my first year engineering lecturers and I believed that because I was a student, I understood how students think and how to explain concepts in a way that students understand.
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The lecturers were too advanced. They don't explain the basics because it's so obvious to them.
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I later learned that this phenomenon has a name, it's called the "curse of knowledge".
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Being a beginner to RPA, I knew I could probably teach RPA better than most experts out there on Udemy and YouTube because being a beginner was my biggest advantage, because I didn't have the curse of knowledge.
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Knowing what students want, I created a UiPath course but with one core difference, building real-world RPA bots, because just like myself, most people like to learn by doing.
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So I created another Udemy course, I called it, "Complete UiPath RPA Developer Course: Build 7 Robots"
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I took a big chance because my "competition" so to speak was UiPath Academy who were experts who work for UiPath and the courses are completely free.
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I had no idea if anyone would even buy my course.
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I launched it, and within a week, it was the best selling UiPath course on Udemy, and has maintained that ‘best seller’ position with over 400 UiPath courses on Udemy.
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It has since grown to over 70,000 students from across 130 countries.
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But then something interesting happened…
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Some of the students who completed my Udemy course wanted to switch careers and get a job as an RPA developer, so they would reach out to me for help.
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That's when I started my online RPA mentorship program.

I worked one-on-one with students to teach them some more advanced RPA skills, get certified, build a project portfolio, review their resumes and show them how to position themselves in the job market to get hired, because I knew what employers were looking for, because I was one.
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Through trial-and-error, I found a system that works.
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A system that takes someone from complete beginner to landing a job as an RPA Developer.
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What I like to call "the proven path".
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I wanted to help more people take the next step in their career.
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Whether that's getting into tech, getting a higher salary, working remotely or just having a job that they don’t hate!
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But I only have so many hours in a day to help people one-on-one, so I decided to package this proven path mentorship program into an online training called the "Complete RPA Bootcamp".
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I prefixed it “Complete” because I took everything I knew from my experience freelancing on UpWork, consulting with clients at FutureRPA, hiring RPA developers, teaching and mentoring students one-on-one.
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All the lessons I learned the hard way.
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All the hundreds of mistakes I made.
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And neatly packaged it into an online bootcamp to help people around the world switch careers and become an automation developer.
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This bootcamp has since helped hundreds of people learn automation and either start their career or switch careers into software automation.
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It has been the most fulfilling journey of my life.
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And the reason it’s so fulfilling, is because helping others get a job they enjoy is deeply personal to me.
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I know how it feels to hate your job after working so hard for years just to reach a point that makes you feel like “what was even the point?”.
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I was able to make a change without any risk of quitting my job, by working after-hours.
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And now I help others make that change too, without quitting their jobs, without the risk.
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Now, it’s 10 years later after starting my first job, and I'm blessed to have built a program that truly changes people's lives for the better and that I get to wake up every day and do what I love.
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So for that, I say thank you.
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Thank you for allowing me to be your teacher, and I hope this bootcamp changes your life for the better too.