Practically: courses accept 18+ students and the material is learnable. Strategically: NLP's tools are about communication under real stakes — negotiations, teams, clients. Without those contexts, training becomes theory that decays before use.
A sensible sequence: build the first years of your degree or early career, develop your communication the free way first (our webinar and journal), then invest in serious training when you have contexts to apply it daily. That order converts training into skill instead of trivia.