I spent the last couple of days at the Pluralsight Live conference, which is the first time Pluralsight had a conference for customers. It was, of course, amazing. When you have a company that is as successful as Pluralsight, and as big as pluralsight, and puts so much attention to detail as they do, you get a phenomenal experience.
What’s Pluralsight, you ask?
It is a site that has over 5,000 technology courses to learn, and keep up with, technology.
Is it like Lynda? Yes, but Pluralsight has more, and deeper, tech courses. Is it like Udemy, Coursera, etc.? Not really… on those sites you buy individual courses, whereas on Pluralsight you buy a subscription (about $30/month) and you get access to the entire video library. It’s pretty awesome. Also, the courses on Pluralsight have been vetted and are curated… they are very particular about the courses they allow in.
You probably know that I have created 31 Pluralsight courses. 31 is a lot. It took my four years to get those done. I’m not actively creating Pluralsight courses right now. As a Pluralsight author I’ve been able to give some of my users a 30 day pass… a perk of JibberJobber 🙂
So, here’s what you need to know: Pluralsight is changing the way companies educate their workforce. You could already figure that out by reading what I wrote above. This week, though, they launched something that I think will be revolutionary: Pluralsight IQ.
It’s such a simple idea that I’m surprised that no one has been able to do this before. This is something that LinkedIn should have done years ago… but they didn’t. Here’s what I think is the most amazing aspect of this:
Your company has needs… let’s say there is a new project and they need to put a team together. They need people with certain skills and experience… but they aren’t sure where to go to find those people.
They can do word-of-mouth, which is only as effective as the communication travels out (and gets back to the hiring managers).
They can ask managers for recommendations, but that might lead to some people getting placed for favoritism (or a small network) and not based on merit.
They can post internally, but they might miss the right internal applicants who are too busy, or having too much fun, with their own projects.
They can post externally, but they might find people who are very expensive to find, hire, and train, and who are not as good as some of the internal experts available to them.
There’s a NEED, and the search is on for the right talent, or SUPPLY.
Pluralsight IQ is a system to solve this problem.
The way it works is that employees use Pluralsight for learning, and assessments (think tests), and certification, etc. As you use the system (more than just watching courses), you build out your Pluralsight IQ. This is a way that an employer can identify your strengths, knowledge, skills, aptitude, etc. It’s a deep look into an existing workforce.
Imagine you have one hundred people in your company (we heard from a company executive who has 250,000 people… can you imagine how valuable this would be to a company that large? They have the talent, they just haven’t known how to tap into it the way Pluralsight IQ can!). The CEO says she wants to put together a team of five people to work on a new project. She has no idea who the right people are, but she knows what skills each team member should have. With Pluralsight IQ, she’ll have the ability to look into her talent pool in a way that allows her to choose the right people for this small team.
The SUPPLY was already there, she just didn’t know what it was.
Can you see how amazing this is? Our companies have NEEDS, we have SUPPLY, and now, Pluralsight IQ is the bridge that helps bring these two together. It’s really quite revolutionary, and Pluralsight is the first to crack this nut in a huge way.
I imagine non-employees will allow access to their IQs to companies to make hiring and team building decisions in the future. When that happens, talent management and talent acquisition will be changed forever. If they play it right, this can be the next revolutionary change since LinkedIn.
That’s a big deal.
As an HR Tech company, we definitely see the need for future training and development of current employees. Instead of going through an extensive hiring process every time you need some new skills, why not find or train up someone already working at the company to fulfill the need? These type of technology courses paired with Succession planning are going to change the future of the workplace. Great article