Covid-19 has already seen a strong response from the technology community, ranging from Google and Apple joining forces to develop a contact tracing protocol to Sam Altman leading crowd-funding for a billion face masks to Jack Dorsey donating $1 billion (almost a third of his wealth) to relief programs . Governments are also mostly doing a creative job of helping -- here in the UK including widely-publicized salary support, tax relief and loan programs, as well as an Innovate UK competition for business solutions to challenges of Covid-19 (which we have entered, as we hope have many others). What should start-ups like LearnerShape do to be part of the solution? Besides being CEO of LearnerShape, I am an investor in UK start-ups, and all are moving fast to deal with changes in demand, working practices and investor funding appetite . These changes are not all negative -- online sales at one of my portfolio companies are up 400% in April -- but mostly there are serious challenges.

What do cavemen and cavewomen, blacksmiths and babies have in common? For one thing, they learn “on the job” (so to speak … we don’t actually want to put babies to work) in the traditional learning ecosystem involving learners, teachers, content and jobs/trades (babies do have important jobs to learn like attracting attention, eating, crawling, etc). Here is how we illustrate it in one of our presentations. This traditional ecosystem matters because learning content is engaging for users when it is consequential , and this is rarely more the case than when it is relevant to a job (or other activity of interest). There is consistent evidence that user engagement and satisfaction with corporate learning and development (L&D) content is abysmal, and we think that the move away from the traditional learning ecosystem is a big part of the problem. This move started centuries ago with the advent of formal schooling, which has steadily moved jobs and trades outside the core l

LearnerShape is building a solution for computing individualized reskilling pathways, so we pay close attention to what other companies are doing in this space. Increasingly, we are observing that the market is coalescing around a reskilling “pipeline” : assess existing skills of individuals (what we call ‘point A’) determine target skills, on an individual or organizational basis (what we call ‘point B’) identify learning pathways from point A to point B deliver learning content. The combination of the urgency of the future of work problem and the ability of information technology to help address it has led many companies (including a bevy of startups) to tackle pieces of  this complex challenge. Most players are aiming at one or perhaps two segments of the pipeline , with some division between those focusing on skills analysis (i.e. steps 1 and 2 above), content recommendation (step 3) and content production (step 4). Some are trying to serve more of the pipeline -- for exam

Hello, world! This is the LearnerShape blog. LearnerShape was founded in 2019 (based upon ideas developed since 2017) to compute learning pathways for future jobs, using robust data science . We are funded by a grant from Innovate UK (the UK government innovation funding body) and private investors. We intend this blog to focus on the education technology ecosystem addressing the 'future of work' — including issues of reskilling (training people for new jobs) and upskilling (augmenting skills for changing job requirements) — although we are likely to wander into related areas that interest us, including the edtech sector more generally, and data science (including artificial intelligence and machine learning). This first post briefly describes the core problem that we are solving. The future of work problem , and the challenge of reskilling and upskilling in particular, is widely recognised. Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is widely cr