David Blake is a serial learning tech entrepreneur.
He is now returning to the helm of Degreed, as the LXP acquires his other startup, Learn In.
What will the future hold for the combined company, and the LXP space in general?
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Learning and development have rocketed up the agenda during the pandemic.
Employees are no longer satisfied with having jobs, they want to have careers and they think their employer should help them to develop and progress.
Organizations that are failing to provide sufficient internal mobility and career development opportunities are facing high attrition rates in the ‘Great Resignation’. Therefore, it is no surprise that learning tech startups are attracting significant funding.
Hot on the heels of Multiverse becoming the UK’s first EdTech unicorn and CoachHub raising a whopping $200 million, learning experience platform (LXP) giant Degreed has moved to acquire Learn In. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Learn In was founded in 2020 by Degreed co-founder David Blake. Blake served as Degreed’s CEO from 2012 until 2018 – he has since served as executive chairman. As a result of the acquisition, he is taking over from Dan Levin and returning to the helm at Degreed.
Learn In is Degreed’s fourth acquisition – the others were Adepto in 2019, Pathgather in 2018, and Gibbon in 2016. It comes just over a year after Degreed’s $153 million Series D which valued the company at $1.4 billion.
Combining Learn In and Degreed
Blake shared with UNLEASH in August 2021 that Degreed is a one-stop-shop for employees who want to keep track of their learning and development.
But he realized that while people and organizations have gotten very good at learning, “we aren’t very good at upskilling”, aka turning that learning into actual skills.
Blake continues that “watching a cross-fit video does not turn you into a body builder”.
“It is easy to accumulate some level of knowledge [of what you need to do], but it is much harder to spend 600 hours in the gym turning yourself into that athlete,” he tells UNLEASH.
That’s why he created Learn In to help employees to do those 600 hours of skilling, and to help companies offer this at scale to their workforce.
Degreed wrote in a LinkedIn post: “The combination of Degreed and Learn In unifies the broader range of development options we know people use today, spanning daily learning to long-term upskilling for individual career growth and innovation within organizations.
“It’s also one of many steps the market will see Degreed take as they return to the original ethos of creating a more effective way to build and measure skills.”
Learn In will also introduce tuition benefits management, coaching, custom program building, and prepaid learning stipend cards into Degreed’s learning experience platform.
Talking about the deal, Blake commented: “Businesses that can quickly build effective talent are the ones that will be able to deliver on strategic business goals.
“Just as Degreed created the LXP market, Learn In has begun for talent academies.
“Now together, we have the product and technology to help our customers deliver business capabilities at scale with continued innovation in the learning and skills space.”
Watch this space. How will Blake’s return to Degreed transform the company and the learning sector as a whole?
