Guild Jumps Headfirst Into The Corporate Learning Market

Guild has been a fascinating company to watch. Founded by Rachel Romer, Guild was founded in 2015 with a mission to help companies connect their employees to high-value education programs, leveraging investments in tuition reimbursement. Today, through the acquisition of Nomadic Learning, Guild moves into the corporate L&D market directly.

Let me explain. US companies spend more than $28 Billion on tuition reimbursement, largely as an “education benefit” to help employees maintain and improve their skills. Unfortunately, however, most of these programs are administered as benefits so the employee gets very little support, other than the company asking them for an educational transcript to qualify for reimbursement.

We did a study of tuition reimbursement a decade ago and we found that 87% of US businesses offer this benefit, yet only 12% felt this spending was aligned with their talent strategy. Why? These programs are often viewed as a retention and engagement program for ambitious people, and they also promote employer goodwill. Given their cost, the study found that only 19% of companies rated the program as “high value.”

Along comes Guild. Guild set out with an ambitious goal to help companies fully align this spending with corporate and employee needs, building a complete platform with 2,000+ credentialed programs that could be tailor-tuned for each employee. With Guild, for example, a large number of medical technicians could be trained for accredited nursing. Employees who worked in the distribution center could become IT professionals or software developers. And people locked in operational roles could learn to become supervisors or P&L leaders.

Guild did this through a variety of platforms and services. Not only does Guild give employees (and employers) a custom portal to design career paths, it provides coaches and advisory services to companies so employees get help and accommodation to progress on these paths. The result is a win-win-win. Employers get more aligned employee development; employees get new career opportunities; Universities and credential institutions get new customers.

And as Guild grew, companies like Bright Horizons (EdAssist), Instride, and others followed suit. This became a real marketplace, and employers realized that blanket tuition reimbursement checks could be used in a strategic way. Today companies like Wal-Mart, JP Morgan Chase, Providence Health, Disney, Tesla, and others use Guild to engage, develop, and transform their workforce. And this is good for the US economy as well.

Despite this good work, Guild’s management felt there was more. The company aspired to be a “platform company” (even though their DNA is that of a customized solutions company), and the L&D buyers kept asking Guild to fit its offering into the company’s long term skills and career strategy. They built a lot of tools and integrations, but Guild knew they needed more.

Acquisition of Nomadic Learning

Along comes Nomadic Learning, the company we partner with for our Josh Bersin Academy. Nomadic had built a robust, highly-engaging “Corporate Capability Academy” platform, and was staffed with excellent content developers and instructional design. Nomadic, which competes with other technology and content vendors, wanted a partner. So Guild decided to acquire them.

I think this makes a lot of sense. As part of the new offering, Guild is launching a series of academies, designed to help companies build capability journeys for employees, leveraging Nomadic’s cohort learning model and library of content. (The Josh Bersin Academy is one of these, by the way.) Guild also plans to enhance the platform and add additional services so companies can deploy custom capability experiences for their employees (mentors, coaches, developmental assignments, and expert-led assessment).

This puts Guild formally into the L&D market. Not only can Guild help CHROs reskill and redeploy individuals into credentialed, high-value positions, the company can work with L&D leaders to build integrated academies for all employees. There’s plenty of competition (Degreed, Cornerstone, Docebo), but with an integrated content offering Academies are clearly a winner.

The L&D market is about to be massively disrupted by AI, forcing companies to rethink their platform strategies. Through this acquisition, Guild can invest in the L&D tech space and increase its value to thousands of companies around the world.

Additional Information

The Capability Academy: Where Corporate Training Is Going

Following The Theme Of Rebirth, Guild Education Now Valued At $3.75 Billion

The Josh Bersin Academy: A Capability Academy for HR