Two-day masterclass · Digital skills

Microsoft 365 Copilot at Work

Getting real value from the AI already inside your organisation

Two days of practical, hands-on training for the people who produce the correspondence, reports, packs and analysis. Every delegate works in a live Microsoft 365 training environment with a full Copilot licence, on realistic organisational data.

2Days
11Labs
20Max delegates
14Days access

The change this course delivers

Microsoft 365 Copilot at Work

Before

Licences paid for, little use, staff unsure what is allowed.

After

Teams use Copilot daily on real work, inside agreed guardrails.

Your organisation is already paying for Microsoft. The AI is already inside it. Almost nobody is using it properly.

Many organisations that buy Microsoft 365 Copilot licences see them go unused within weeks. Not because the technology fails, but because nobody was shown how to fold it into the work they already do, or where it can be trusted and where it cannot.

This programme fixes that. It is not a product demonstration and not a lecture about artificial intelligence. It is two days of supervised practice on the tasks your people carry out every week, ending with each delegate holding a written thirty-day plan for their own role.

Duration
2 days
Designed for
Finance and accounting staff, administrators, executive assistants, managers, project and programme officers
Format
Live online via Zoom or in person
Included
Hands-on labs, course material, certificate and 30-day adoption plan
Language
English or French, same dates

Why Copilot rather than a public chatbot

  • Already in your tenant. No new procurement, no new vendor security review, no new contract.
  • Your data does not train the models. Prompts, responses and Microsoft Graph data are not used to train the foundation models.
  • It inherits your permissions. Copilot cannot show a user anything they could not already open.
  • Governable with tools your IT team owns. Purview, DLP, sensitivity labels, retention and eDiscovery.
  • Data residency options. Microsoft 365 data residency commitments cover a growing list of regions, with Copilot as a covered workload.
  • Frontier models without another vendor. Models from OpenAI and Anthropic, reachable under Microsoft’s own terms.

What you will achieve

Six outcomes

  1. Understand Microsoft 365 Copilot and its key features.
  2. Write effective prompts and use Copilot across Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams.
  3. Draft, summarize and improve workplace documents and communication.
  4. Analyse data and create useful reports, formulas and presentations.
  5. Verify AI-generated content and apply responsible AI and data protection principles.
  6. Create simple Copilot agents and a practical 30-day plan for using Copilot at work.

Programme

Five modules across two days

Day one covers everything that works with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which most organisations already have at no extra cost. Day two covers what the paid licence unlocks. Delegates whose organisations have not yet purchased still leave with skills they can use on Monday, and with the business case for the licence.

1Copilot Foundations and PromptingDay 1, morning
  • The three Copilot surfaces: web chat, work-grounded chat and Copilot inside the apps, and why the same question returns a different answer in each
  • What Copilot can see in your organisation, and what it cannot
  • Where free Copilot Chat ends and the paid licence begins
  • Microsoft’s four-part prompt: Goal, Context, Expectations, Source
  • Referencing files, people and meetings directly in a prompt; giving Copilot a role and a named audience
  • Iteration, saved prompts and building a team prompt library
  • What Copilot is genuinely bad at: confident wrong answers, arithmetic, recency, meeting attribution
Lab 1.1 Sandbox orientation. Run one request across all three Copilot surfaces and record how the answers differ.
Lab 1.2 The prompt rewrite clinic. Rewrite six weak prompts, run them before and after, then score a partner’s rewrites against the course rubric.
2Email, Meetings and Daily CommunicationDay 1, midday
  • Summarising a long thread, and the catch-up pattern after leave
  • Drafting with explicit control over tone, length and register
  • Coaching by Copilot on a draft you wrote yourself, often the higher-value use
  • Extracting commitments, deadlines and owners from a thread
  • Meeting recap, decisions register and action items with named owners
  • The Facilitator agent during a live meeting
  • Attribution errors, recording etiquette, consent, and who can see a recap
Lab 2.1 The Monday morning inbox. Triage fifty messages, draft three replies at three registers, then find the point in a twenty-two message escalation where the decision was reversed.
Lab 2.2 Meeting to follow-up. Turn a recorded programme review into a recap, decisions register, action list and the email.
3Documents and DraftingDay 1, afternoon
  • Drafting from a prompt, an existing file or a meeting transcript, and why the structure Copilot returns is the real output
  • Rewrite, tone and length: shifting register for a board, a donor or a colleague
  • Working inside your own branded templates so documents arrive on brand
  • Agentic capabilities in Word: multi-step work that restructures and rebuilds a document
  • Verifying like a professional: opening every citation and confirming each claim against its source
Lab 3.1 Consultant report to board memo. Turn a fourteen-page report and a meeting transcript into a two-page memo on the house template, then an executive summary, five speaking notes, and one unsupported claim corrected.
4Data, Analysis and PresentationsDay 2, morning
  • Why Copilot in Excel needs a proper table: headers, consistent types, no merged cells
  • Asking questions of data in plain language; generating and explaining formulas
  • Conditional formatting, PivotTables and charts by instruction rather than by menu
  • Agentic capabilities in Excel, and the Analyst agent for heavier analysis
  • PowerPoint: a deck built from a document, on your brand template, with speaker notes
  • Where the ceiling is: dense data slides, and anything where the visual argument matters
Lab 4.1 The procurement extract. Clean three thousand messy rows, summarise by department and quarter, build a board chart, and catch the text-formatted column that makes the obvious total wrong.
5Agents, Governance and AdoptionDay 2, afternoon
  • What an agent actually is, in plain language, and when it beats a saved prompt
  • The pre-built agents: Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator
  • Agent Builder hands-on: instructions, knowledge sources, starter prompts, testing and sharing
  • Model choice, and why an administrator may have switched a model off
  • Permissions and the oversharing problem: Copilot surfaces only what you could already open
  • Sensitivity labels, DLP, retention and eDiscovery of Copilot interactions
  • Data protection law and data residency; what must never go into a prompt; when to disclose that AI helped
  • The thirty-day adoption plan, and measuring time actually saved
Lab 5.1 Governance tabletop. Six real-shaped scenarios decided in groups, producing a draft acceptable-use one-pager for your own team.
Lab 5.2 Build and share your own agent, then a personal thirty-day plan.

The labs

You will not be watching a demonstration

Every delegate receives a personal account in a live Microsoft 365 training tenant with a full Copilot licence, provisioned by Shared iQ. Nobody needs a licence from their own employer to take part, and nobody touches their organisation’s real data to learn on realistic material.

The tenant is populated as a working organisation: mailboxes with a fortnight of correspondence, recorded meetings with transcripts, SharePoint sites of policies, board packs, grant reports and procurement files, and a finance extract with the kind of faults that turn up in real finance extracts.

Access continues for fourteen days after the course, so delegates can practise before applying any of it to live work.

What is waiting in the tenant

  • Seeded mailboxes, including a twenty-two message procurement escalation
  • Three recorded Teams meetings with full transcripts
  • Four SharePoint sites and roughly 120 documents
  • A 3,000-row procurement extract with deliberate data faults
  • Branded memo, deck, minutes and donor-report templates
  • A Planner plan, a Loop workspace and a Forms survey with responses

Who should attend

Built for the people who produce the work

Administrators and executive assistants

Producing the correspondence, minutes, packs and schedules that Copilot handles best.

Programme and project officers

Drafting reports, proposals and donor submissions against deadlines.

Finance, grants and procurement staff

Working with data, reconciliations and compliance documentation.

HR and communications professionals

Producing high volumes of written material for varied audiences.

Managers and team leads

Who want their teams adopting Copilot properly rather than sporadically.

Organisations already holding licences

Anyone who has bought Copilot seats and is not yet seeing a return on them.

Everyday use of Microsoft 365 assumed. No technical background, coding or administrator rights required.

Delivery

In person or online

The online programme is not the in-person programme on a video call. It is redesigned for the format, with shorter blocks, structured pre-work and a follow-up clinic.

In person

Two full days, 08:30 to 16:30

  • Thirteen hours of contact time
  • All eleven labs run in full
  • Group governance tabletop in the room
  • Refreshments and delegate workbook included
Online via Zoom

Two half days, four blocks of seventy minutes

  • Ten hours of contact time
  • Forty-five minutes of pre-work sent five days ahead
  • Labs run in breakout rooms with facilitator support
  • Sixty-minute follow-up clinic at day thirty, where delegates bring measured results

Available as an in-house programme, tailored to your organisation’s own documents, templates and policies, and delivered at your offices or on your own tenant. Request a quotation or a free 30-minute Copilot readiness briefing →

Dates and fees

Public cohorts

Fees are per delegate in US dollars and include the training tenant licence, delegate workbook, prompt library, fourteen days of post-course lab access and the Shared iQ certificate. Every cohort is also offered in French on the same dates.

DatesFormat and venueFee
16 – 17 November 2026OnlineZoomUS$1,650Register
25 – 26 January 2027In personKigali, RwandaUS$2,350Register
15 – 16 March 2027OnlineZoomUS$1,650Register
19 – 20 April 2027In personGrand Cayman, Cayman IslandsFee on requestRegister
26 – 27 April 2027In personAbidjan, Côte d'IvoireFee on requestRegister
7 – 8 June 2027In personSt. George's, GrenadaFee on requestRegister

Group bookings of three or more delegates from the same organisation qualify for a reduced rate. Indicate the number of delegates on the registration form and we will quote accordingly.

Track record

Professionals from these organisations have trained with Shared iQ

Centrale Bank van ArubaCayman Islands Government, Department of Children & Family ServicesNational Insurance Scheme, GrenadaNational Bank of DominicaRepublic BankEnvironmental Protection Agency, GuyanaMinistry of General Affairs, Sint MaartenAfrican Development BankIslamic Development BankInternational Finance Corporation, World Bank GroupBanco de MoçambiqueIFADUNICEFUNEPIAEAMINUSCACGIARInternational Rice Research InstituteEuropean External Action ServiceForeign, Commonwealth & Development OfficeGlobal Affairs CanadaEmbassy of the United StatesEmbassy of the Kingdom of the NetherlandsRoyal Norwegian EmbassyGIZOxfamSupreme Audit Institution, United Arab Emirates

Registration

Reserve a place

Complete the form and we will confirm the place by email within one business day, with a proforma invoice for your finance team. No payment is required to hold a seat.

How payment works. Places are confirmed on registration and invoiced to your organisation. Payment is due within seven working days of the invoice, by wire transfer, credit card or PayPal. Delegate substitutions are free.
Needed to raise the invoice. You can send it later.
Who approves the spend, if not you.
This does not affect eligibility. Every delegate receives a licensed account in our training tenant.

How we handle your details: privacy notice.

Prefer to talk first? Email info@sharediq.org.  

Questions

Before you register

Do we need to buy Microsoft 365 Copilot licences first?
No. Every delegate is issued an account with a full Copilot licence in the Shared iQ training tenant for the course and fourteen days afterwards. Day one covers what works with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which most organisations already have at no extra cost. Day two covers what the paid licence adds, and ends with delegates writing the business case for it.
Will you touch our organisation’s real data?
Not on a public cohort. All labs run inside the Shared iQ training tenant on fictional but realistic material. In-house programmes can optionally be delivered on your tenant with your own templates, scoped with your IT team beforehand.
What do delegates need?
A laptop with a current browser, and for online cohorts a stable internet connection. A second screen is strongly recommended online. No software installation is required.
Is this a technical course for IT?
No. It is written for business professionals: administration, programmes, finance, procurement, HR and communications. No coding, no administrator rights, no prior AI experience assumed.
Can I attend in French?
Yes. Every cohort is offered in French on the same dates. Choose the session language on the registration form.
How do we pay?
Places are confirmed on registration and invoiced to your organisation. Payment is due within seven working days by wire transfer, credit card or PayPal. A cancellation in writing more than twenty-one days before the event incurs a twenty-five percent fee; inside twenty-one days the full fee is due. Delegate substitutions are always free.
Microsoft changes Copilot constantly. Will the material be current?
The course content is reviewed against Microsoft’s own documentation quarterly and again before every cohort. Where a capability differs by tenant configuration or region, we say so in the room.