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Pluralsight CEO turns focus to help the unemployed get back into the workforce

In an effort to help those who are unemployed, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard announced that the company will give new users unlimited access to 7,000 technology courses throughout April. He joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to discuss.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Watching Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Julie Hyman. We have been talking a lot on the show over the past few weeks about online education resources for kids, but what about adults? What about people who want to forward their professional development while they're at home?

Well, right now we're joined by a CEO whose company does just that. The company is called Pluralsight. Aaron Skonnard is joining us now from Salt Lake City, Utah. And Aaron, we all know the professional development stuff that we do through work, right? What kind of demand are you seeing for those sorts of resources? Now, I imagine not just through corporations, but also for individuals who might be out of work, going to be looking to switch their skill set.

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AARON SKONNARD: Yeah, that's-- that's right, Julie. Thanks for having me on the show. And I'll tell you, that's the thing we're really focused on right now are the 16 million people who are unemployed right now. And that number seems to be going up every week.

What we're focused on is trying to help those people get back into the workforce as quickly as possible. And we believe that one of the best ways to help them with that is to empower them with the skills of today and of the future. Those would be things like cloud computing skills, AI, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, et cetera.

Those are the skills that businesses are turning to to innovate, to change their future strategies and directions. And those are the skills that those 16 million people should be after. Those are the skills that will help them future-proof their careers.

And so that's why Pluralsight decided in the month of April to open up our platform to the public, to anyone, anywhere across the globe, for the entire month, completely free, no credit cards required, unlimited access to all courses. We have 7,000 courses on the platform today that cover all of those technologies I mentioned. And so there's no barriers to entry. We want to make it possible for people to come in, get those skills.

And the response to this offer has been incredible. In just the first 12 days of the offer, we've had over 700,000 individuals sign up to take advantage of this offer, which shows me that there is a strong appetite and a hunger for a better future, for a better career. And we believe that these technologies are a big part of that. And that's ultimately what Pluralsight is all about in the end.

JULIE HYMAN: Aaron, off-- we've heard a lot of companies that are offering various free things right now. How do you do that from a financial perspective? Is it because you've already created these modules, and so the cost was already baked in previously?

AARON SKONNARD: That's right. We have a fairly low marginal cost of distributing the content through our platform. We go out to the world to over 7,000 industry experts to create the content. We commission that content from them, deploy it through the platform. That's how we get the 7,000 courses that we have.

And then we share an ongoing residual author feedback with our authors, as people watch it and as we build our recurring revenue, year over year. Our top author last year made-- made quite a bit of money, in the millions of dollars. So that gives us the ability to attract some incredible people to the platform to produce the content. And it also makes it possible for us to do offers like-- like free April.

- I was watching the platform, and I saw Java Fundamentals. I was curious, could a beginner start on your platform or is it more for people who already have a foundational basis?

AARON SKONNARD: Yeah, it-- we do have many, many introductory courses on things like Java, Python, just introductory languages, frameworks, technologies that anyone can come in and get access to. We do serve primarily the professional developers in the-- in the large enterprises, where-- where we work, you know, the mains-- the mainstream of our customer base.

But we see countless examples of people on-- on-- on social right now. If you go out to Twitter and just look for #FreeApril, you'll see a lot of examples of individuals starting fresh, their first few weeks of coding, getting access to those skills through Pluralsight. So this is really opening up a whole new realm of possibilities for-- for these people.

- Hey, Aaron. I think the term "future-proof" feels a bit like a misnomer sometimes, because the point is we don't really know what the future holds, which is clear in the case of COVID-19, where our entire world was upended. When you think about the kinds of resources you're providing, do you feel as though-- you know, I will tell you anecdotally, I signed up for a free Stanford coding class just because I wanted to figure out what to do with my free time. As more and more people are dabbling in these sorts of side projects, do you really think it's tenable that that can result in a robust, lucrative career?

AARON SKONNARD: Yeah, I do, and we've seen many examples of it. You know, I think-- I think what-- one of the things we see often in recessions and big financial setbacks like this is companies begin to innovate. You know, it's an awful time for-- for everyone, for the companies as well as these individuals. But the-- the awfulness of it and the-- the constraints that are put on us require creativity, requires innovation, and ultimately requires learning.

And so, you know, we find that companies end up driving more innovation during these times, which requires then more of these skills. And so, you know, one of the things, one of the key points I hope everyone will take away from this is that reskilling and upskilling are even more valuable during times of uncertainty. Like that point is super clear. You know, Pluralsight's 16 years old now, so this is-- this is the third big setback we've been through as a company. And every time, we see an uptick in-- in-- in the focus on reskilling, upskilling, and reshaping one's career.

JULIE HYMAN: Aaron, just quickly, one of the knocks at times historically against for-profit education companies is that the return on investment is not great. Now, obviously free, the return on investment is potentially limitless. But in a typical time, do you have stats on what kind of return people get from these courses?

AARON SKONNARD: Yeah, absolutely. We-- we provide a skill measurement capability that we call Skill IQ. It's a numeric data point that allows an individual to measure their current skill set when they first start learning a new skill within our platform. So it's almost like an SAT score for that skill.

And then over time, as they work on developing and building that skill by engaging in all of our learning resources and our courses, we allow them to remeasure that skill. And we can then show skill progression analytics, which is a much better way of-- of illustrating ROI to a customer than just focusing on usage, which is what most learning companies do. So we really organize around a broader set of analytics that drive the real outcomes that both the individuals and the businesses care about.

JULIE HYMAN: Aaron, thank you. Aaron Skonnard it is the CEO of Pluralsight. Appreciate it.