One of the best ways to continually improve your career skills is to be a lifelong learner. However, with the day-to-day business of most professionals, keeping up with skill-building isn’t easy. Those who work nine to five or longer often don’t have time to spend several hours on course materials, but it turns out they might not need to.
Arist uses an education model called “microlearning” to help companies deliver engaging learning content five minutes at a time to employees through avenues they’re already using like Slack and Microsoft teams. The company recently raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by PeakSpan Capital to help businesses deliver on-demand learning.
One of the reasons Arist focuses on delivering microlearning content through messaging apps is because, according to a survey by LivePerson, Gen Z workers prefer text message communication to email. They also tend to engage as much as five times faster through messaging apps, making it a perfect place to increase employee learning and engagement.
“Millennial and Gen Z workers are already the fastest-growing sector of the labor force. But today’s legacy learning and development tools are not keeping pace with the way that this new generation engages with the world of work,” Arist co-founder and CEO Michael Ioffe said in a statement. “By helping businesses meet employees where they are, we’re tapping the potential of short-form, skills-focused learning content to drive engagement and retention — and, in turn, advance employers’ broader strategic objectives.”
Instead of spending hours on training and even more so on developing training, Arist allows companies to provide learning opportunities that take as little as five minutes per day to complete. Arist also allows companies to tailor content to a variety of training and skill-building areas, including professional development, onboarding and customer-centricity, future skills and more.
So far the approach has been successful. Since its launch in 2018, the company has delivered over 100,000 courses to more than 1,000 companies and organizations, including over 10 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises.
“Microlearning has always been an area with immense promise but one that has equally been stymied by poor delivery models and content that wasn’t fit for purpose,” Phil Dur, PeakSpan Capital co-founder and managing partner, said in a statement. “Arist cracked the code in delivering best-in-class learner experiences and outcomes through the marriage of exceptional bite-sized learning material with the channels that learners prefer to use.”
