Josh Bersin Academy Reaches 10,000 Users: The World’s Home For HR

It has been quite an exciting year. We formally launched the Josh Bersin Academy in May of 2019, with the intention of being “The Professional Development Academy” for HR professionals around the world. Well, today we are announcing that we have reached more than 10,000 members from more than 90 countries, and the growth is accelerating every day.

Why is the Academy so important? Not only because it is a compelling and integrated place to learn, but because the Academy has truly become the “place” for HR Professionals to grow. Companies of all sizes are joining us, and they are telling us this is their new home. So to reinforce our important mission, we are changing our tagline to The World’s Home for HR™. (listen here)

Today HR Professionals Have Been Thrust Into A Heroic Role

The HR Profession has been thrust into a heroic role in business today. Not only is HR responsible for responding to COVID-19 and all the business interruptions around, but HR teams are also now inventing work from home strategies, redesigning jobs, and rapidly changing performance management, career models, and adding immense new focus on wellbeing, resilience, and new models of leadership.

The Josh Bersin Academy, launched in May of 2019, was designed to be “the place” HR professionals go to learn all the newest, latest, and most innovative practices in all aspects of management. After less than a year in the market, more than 10,000 HR professionals have joined (almost 1000 a month now) and we realize that we are more than a professional development destination.  We have become a “Home” – a place for HR teams to connect with each other, share stories, learn, and create.

As I described in the original launch of the Academy, HR is not so much a profession as it is a craft. HR professionals and leaders are constantly inventing, crafting, and deploying new creative programs – whether they be in job design, location, pay, or training. And now, with COVID-19 taking priority, HR is intimately linked with IT, workplace and facilities, safety, and finance. In this exciting but rapidly changing role, HR teams want to talk with each other, share ideas, and collaborate. And that’s what’s happening in the Academy.

So today we are formally changing our tagline to:

“The World’s Home for HR”

This is designed to signify our new mission: which is to be a safe, supportive, developmental place where HR professionals can go to grow.

Just as your real “home” is a safe place you can be yourself, the Josh Bersin Academy is a safe place you can also be yourself – and talk about your company’s needs, the projects and activities you’re struggling with, and the technologies and tools you use.

Because the Academy is organized around programs and topics, our Home is relevant, useful, and filled with information. Since the launch of the Academy we have developed more than 70 hours of high-fidelity, structured professional development, we have published more than 400 learning resources and videos of HR professionals, and we now have more than 100,000 conversations between HR professionals and their peers.  So the JBA already is the “home” for many of you.

Going forward we are going to make our “home” even better than ever.

• First, we are continuing our reduced pricing and simplifying our pricing for your entire enterprise.
• Second, we are launching a wide library of new programs on COVID-19 protocols, remote work, resilience, coaching, positive psychology, employee voice, and adaptable HR models.
• Third, we are introducing development journeys. These journeys are like carefully designed exercise programs: they help you as an HR professional get to a new learning goal, through a set of determined learning activities – and they can be customized for large companies.  For example, if you’re an HR administrator and want to become a senior business partner with a focus on data and analytics, we have a journey designed for “The Data-Driven HR professional.” And we have a new journey specifically called “responding to COVID-19.”
  
• Fourth, for enterprise members, we now have private collaboration channels. Large companies can join the global Academy as a group, mix with the global community to learn, and also have private confidential conversations within your own company.
• Finally, we continue to add Senior Faculty. We now have 25 senior HR leaders from around the world helping advise and mentor you and these experts are helping us build the new playbooks for business in response to COVID-19. (More to come on June 29)

And there’s much more to come. We are starting a pilot of the Josh Bersin Academy Global Capability Assessment™, which brings together years of study on the future skills and capabilities of HR. This assessment will be available to all Academy members later this year and will teach you which skills are needed and help you as an individual or team benchmark your capabilities against your peers, and then immediately join a development journey to help.

Finally, let me end on a personal note. The HR profession is filled with some of the most passionate, committed, hard-working people I have met. In our growing mission to be the “World’s Home for HR” I want to welcome everyone to join us. We hope you’ll feel good that you’ve finally arrived at the place you always wanted to be.