Accelerating time to skill - Arnaud Blachon (Rise Up)
Employees spend less than 25 minutes on formal learning each week. How do you make those minutes impactful? Read on to get the Rise Up LXP/LMS creation story.
The Guest
Pure players, if they are not delivering enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.
Arnaud Blachon is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Up, a specialist provider of learning software solutions that help organizations stay up-to-skill. With an engineering background he began his career as an application developer and in 2014, he co-founded Rise Up with his brother Guillaume, aiming to revolutionize corporate learning through blended learning solutions at the time.
They have now raised nearly 50M EUR in funding and have more than 130 employees who support 5 million active learners. This year they are transforming learning personalisation at scale with the acquisition of the adaptive learning AI specialists, Domoscio.
Company profile
Segment: Corporate learning
Business model: B2B
Geo: Global
Year started: 2014
Funding: Series B
Location: Paris, France
The view of the Garage
Rise Up has positioned themselves as a refreshing player in the European market for learning management software with their post-sales service offering as a key part of their value proposition. With the latest acquisition they are integrating further in the HR/Learning tech stack and are able to provide better targeted learning.
What do they need to go further? Here are a few key areas to look at:
Personalization
The key to engaging learners is to provide them with relevant content. Through Domoscio, Rise Up will be able to personalize content. The question is how far do they go? Will they be able to dynamically provide personalized content based on all types of learning resources and formats? Also embedded in the flow of work? The next step in personalization could be using predictive analytics on learner data to predict future learning needs. This would need a much larger volume of data outside the information provided just within an LMS system. However, with a combination of Large Language Models and external content libraries & skills matrices the building blocks are already there to guide and coach the learner towards a desired outcome.Differentiation
How do Rise Up differentiate themselves from the thousands of LMS / LXP providers on the market? With the ability to accommodate a blended learning approach, personalized / adaptive learning, learning in the flow of work and service-based approach they already propose a strong suite that fit well with small to mid-sized companies in their target group. What about skills? For now they focus on integrating with talent / skills platforms and plan to develop more around this themselves. With organizations increasingly focusing on skills as a basis for HR, talent development and learning, being the base platform for skills taxonomy, mapping and tracking can become a key differentiator when selecting a must-have solution.Integrations & partnerships
Being able to integrate with tools and platforms for content creation, talent & performance management, HR and more will be key to help organizations simplify the tool stack, ensure maximization of resources and create a cohesive learning ecosystem. Already Rise Up has a baseline of partners that integrate with their platform, but to expand to other markets and potentially bigger clients, they might need more partners that both integrate and can be resellers of their platform. Being able to propose a package of partners for organizations buying their first platforms & tools will establish Rise Up as a trusted advisor and can elevate their positioning above the LMS/LXP market.
Listen to the story
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Extracts
How to make learning count
The difference between Rise Up and the rest of the world is; we want to accelerate what we call the time to skill. On average, if you look at the last Gartner research and Josh Bersin as well, even if we are all convinced that training is key, people spend less than 25 minutes on formal learning every week.
At Rise Up, we believe that your main goal as an L&D manager is not to increase those 25 minutes because we all have a daily job we have to deliver and we can't spend multiple hours a week on it. We decided to make those 25 minutes count. Each minute needs to be impactful. And to do so, we invest in personalization in two ways.
The first one is learning in the flow of work, the capacity to embed learning pieces in applications people daily use, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack. And the second one is the adaptive learning experience at a micro level, which is adapted to your level.
And it's a complete game changer because instead of delivering the same training for everyone, I will deliver a customized training at a scale for each learner by starting with a positioning test and an adaptive one which is based on AI technologies to be sure that I will detect sooner your level of skills proficiency and I will give you only the content interesting once we analyze the skill gap.
COVID pushed the digital transformation
COVID completely changed the game. The first years pre Covid, it was a matter of convincing people that digital learning is the future. It won't replace everything, but it's useful even for face to face training, if it's used correctly. And the whole sales pitch, the first years was about how to convince them that they need to invest in it.
Then COVID happened and it completely changed the game because day two, you need to train people. If you don't have any solution, everything is over. You improvise Zoom meetings. But even with Zoom, if you don't have a platform to manage those report questions, pre learning, post learning, it's a mess. And after those three to four crazy months it was not a matter of anymore convincing people on digital learning solutions, but convincing them that we were the best, basically.
So it completely changed the game. It also moved from an HR decision to a general management topic, which completely changed the game in terms of how to unlock budget. Companies were convinced that investing in digital was key. It accelerated, and I think not only in the HR space, but the whole digital transformation of every department.
AI and the Domoscio acquisition
Overall, I think AI will change the game, but we are just at the beginning.
And this is where the acquisition we made with Domoscio completely changed the game because everyone started just to generate content. That was the easiest use case to think about. But 99 percent of the output is really medium quality or poor quality most of the time. And why it's because if it's based on nothing and it's just a standard question you ask, you will have a standard answer.
What changed the game with Domoscio is they completely built their algorithm, AI, based on cognitive science research first and neuroscience, which completely changed the game. Because it will not ask the AI to generate content. It will take the content provided by the company. It will guide you on how to write good questions. It will then use it to create an adaptive positioning test, which is based on each answer we have the algorithm to select what's going to be the next question we ask to the person. And it completely changed in terms of output in this case.
So it's not just recommendations. Everyone can do recommendations. You don't need AI for simple recommendations. But it's really like the adaptive learning framework behind it which, when merged with the right AI engine will deliver the right experience in the end.
The skills framework
Having the right skills framework is important because it first will permit to really align learning objectives with business objectives. So first, from a learner perspective, it's important when I follow a training to understand why I'm doing this. So if it can be related to my skills development plan, because my skills development plan is linked to my next job, I always know why I'm doing this. So I'm self motivated and I will finish my training because I understood why I'm doing this. So the skills framework overall is really key to user engagement in the end.
What we have seen at Rise Up, is we really delimited what's the Rise Up perimeter as a learning management system, as a learning platform. And we decided that most of the time we won't have our own skill repository. We believe that our job is to link training to skills, have the capacity to have a mapping for each learner like why I'm doing this. It notifies skills gaps, but then we are most of the time synchronized to applications, which are connected to every other HR application to centralize the skills repository.
So either the application Rise Up will work as a standalone solution, and we will have skills theme, questions bank related to skills and the capacity to generate a skills map for a learner related to the objective. And then we synchronize this data to the central skill repository every large corporate should have anyway, because you need it in staffing, mobility, and other HR applications connected to this.
Centralization of learning tools
It's been challenging, you're right, the past 18 months. If we go back after COVID, we had a first period which was completely crazy in how buyers were looking for solutions and were happy to multiply solutions at this time. And it went up to a certain peak where a company could have maybe five or six different tools just to manage learning.
So it was crazy in another way because they had like a mobile solution, digital learning solution, face to face solution, virtual classroom solution. It was good because they were trying things and really happy to experiment and sales cycles were shorter. Budget was here. Everyone was excited about new solutions, trying new things.
And then it's true that maybe 18 months ago, it completely changed. It completely changed. We started a new cycle, which was all right; now we have tried a lot of things, but we need to rationalize because it doesn't make sense, which means the level of required features, the perimeter you need to work in a company was different.
It was over to just sign a company for a specific modality in a small perimeter, like the RFPs were more complex. They were looking for solutions to centralize things. Which was good at Rise Up because as we started with the multi modality, we had the capacity to do this. So it was a good time for us, even if sales cycles are longer, budgets are not overextended.
They want to do less with more, basically. So first you need to have the right solution. Secondly, you need to be patient because you need to wait for the replacement of the whole pool of solutions they deployed. But it's interesting and I think it was required also because it was a total nonsense for companies to have a solution for mobile, solution for web, solution for virtual classroom.
You completely denature the goal of those solutions which are creating the best learning experience. If as a learner, I have multiple entry points and no one is centralizing what I'm doing, it's useless. So I think it's the right direction, completely makes sense. Just a matter of how to be sure that you are positioned and you can do this.
That's why also the market started to consolidate, because pure players, if they are not delivering enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.
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