The global pandemic, COVID-19 has forced consumers and companies to learn and work with virtual classrooms and other digital tools. Many corporations have taken or are in the process of taking decisions to either fully or predominantly move all learning online. As a consequence, ed-tech services are growing significantly, while spreading their wings across different industries. They are transforming the way learning is perceived.
Noteworthy ed-tech companies such as Learnship embracing innovation in their excellent offerings. They are driven by the objective of providing in-depth learning experiences, while ensuring that the audience remains hooked to the content. Learnship also marches on a similar path to help the users to learn and grow with enthusiasm.
Learnship is a language learning solution provider helping enterprises to succeed in global markets by breaking down cross-cultural communication barriers. It assists organizations to deliver business impact by improving their communications with a client-centric, data-driven, precision learning approach. Today, it serves over two thousand clients and more than half a million learners in a professional context.
Learnship was founded in Cologne, Germany, in 2008, with the ambition of providing digital language learning solutions that meet global enterprises’ requirements of flexibility, content quality, and skills relevance. The company developed a pioneering, cutting-edge product for online face-to-face business education.
Thanks to its ground-breaking product, it evolved into the world’s leading provider of premium, online face-to-face foreign language training, serving over 2,000 corporate clients globally – including Mars, IBM, NTT Data, and Salesforce.
In 2019, Learnship acquired GlobalEnglish, a global self-paced e-learning leader with 20 years of worldwide business education experience. Emphasizing on business knowledge, education expertise, and cutting-edge technology, Learnship now offers a unique, data-driven, contextual approach to language and cultural training that delivers faster proficiency improvement and measurable outcomes: the innovative Precision Learning format.
Learnship gives a voice to global talents everywhere with the most comprehensive suite of enterprise solutions in 12 languages meeting every learning preference, proficiency level, and business skills requirement. It helps to build a more engaged, more inclusive, and more collaborative workforce for better business results.
A Leader with a Vision
Learnship has made acceleration in research and development under the focused leadership of Thomas Engelbertz. He joined the company as CEO in 2021. He has a background in the digital, telecommunications, and software sectors, where most of his roles involved making enterprise customers successful. With the Learnship teams, Mr. Engelbertz shares a passion for languages – and speaks six of them. Having performed a CEO function in international environments for many years, he has personally experienced the pitfalls of language inequality and understands the benefits of having a fully equipped and developed team – without any communication and cultural barriers.
Kickstarting the Journey
Learnship was founded on the experience that language and intercultural understanding were a huge barrier for productivity in global settings. The management believed that finding a way to unleash the disruptive power of those global, diverse teams and making organizations more productive, while helping learners advance in their personal career would be a double win.
The way Learnship envisioned was to connect learners with the best trainers globally, regardless of geographic location. Something that was made possible with the spread of digitization and connectivity. The teams are now very proud that Learnship truly left a dent in the universe, touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of learners every year.
Delivering a Buffet of Offerings
Before launching any program, Learnship conducts a comprehensive survey within the company to better understand the needs and expectations of the learners, their managers, the program owners, and company directors. Eventually, it comes up with a tailor-made action plan. The company’s product portfolio covers all the skills that international organizations need to break down intercultural and language barriers: self-paced digital language learning, fast-paced blended learning, premium online face-to-face learning, executive coaching, and more.
All its products are built within the unique Learnship Halo platform. Halo is a one-stop shop for all learners, regardless of their location, department, or course. From a single platform, learners can on-board their courses, access their assessments, digital activities, proficiency tools, group sessions, trainer-led classes, and more, depending on their customized options. A personal dashboard allows them to track their progress and schedule their training accordingly.
Halo is also the gateway for program owners. From Halo, L&D professionals can single handedly drive and monitor all their learners’ journey worldwide. They can monitor their main KPIs (global learner distribution, learning hours, and activities completed), download detailed reports, and manage multilevel access for their teams.
The Socrates AI at Halo’s heart accelerates processes for a fuss-free and streamlined learning experience. It reliably assesses the proficiency of learners, helps match them with the best trainer, and automatically generates exercises tailored to a learners’ location, interests, and capabilities.
Overcoming Challenges with Efficiency
When Learnship was launched in 2008, EdTech was primarily another word for e-learning, and e-learning courses for language skills development had a poor track record. People could not imagine virtual classroom learning ever being as productive as traditional classroom training. Hence, getting people to try Learnship was the hardest challenge. “Once they had done a single session with us they realized that digital learning was the future,” expresses Mr. Engelbertz. This future is becoming even clearer now as a result of COVID-19, and today literally everyone is willing to embrace digital learning. “These are great times for a company like Learnship,” adds Mr. Engelbertz. The company’s products and services are already enriched with AI features so that it can use the data to improve its clients’ learning outcomes. The management believes that digital training will become the dominant format in the language training industry and data will be essential to demonstrate the business impact of courses.
Adapting to the Pandemic
In spite of these challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic, Learnship proudly maintained its service delivery at the highest level of quality. “Working remotely has always been part of our DNA,” states the management. Shifting to remote work for an extended period of time was no major challenge for team Learnship. “We have lived the ‘new normal’ already throughout the last decade. Now, this helps us a great deal in supporting our clients on this journey,” expresses Mr. Engelbertz.
As Learnship is completely in the B2B sector, 2020 was challenging with a good part of its clients suffering from the economic impact of Covid-19. However, the company’s clients recovered quickly. In 2021, the company has already picked up pace in business, and it believes that 2022 will be more significant from a business perspective.
Thoughts on the Ed-Tech Industry
Expressing his views about the ed-tech industry, Mr. Engelbertz states, “It is a great time to be in ed-tech. Probably the best time we have ever seen.” Accessing good quality education is one of the world’s main challenges in fostering prosperity. It is the need of the hour to hire all the creative talent and energy to democratize education and bring it to the next level. Mr. Engelbertz believes that the ed-tech sector will be instrumental in tackling these challenges, while bringing huge growth and success to those who try and engage in ed-tech.
Education is one of those sectors that is still predominantly analog and based on methodologies developed well over 100 years ago. It is time to challenge the status quo and re-think what most are taking for granted. “We tried – and succeeded – in re-thinking foreign language training. There is so much more in education waiting to be disrupted and changed for the better now,” concludes Mr. Engelbertz.
