Online learning has been a key lever for engaging employees and driving companies forward in a world upturned by economic disruption and a workforce adjusting to the challenges of productive remote work. To maximize the outcomes of E-learning investments, it’s essential to ensure initiatives are both aligned with business objectives and designed for a frictionless user experience.
edX For Business’s new subscriptions offering was crafted to do just that, giving employees the flexibility to discover and learn new skills with immediate access to essential, in-demand courses and programs. In this post, edX Chief Commercial Officer and Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Johannes Heinlein shares more about how this offering was built to benefit both the employee and the company, and create accessible pathways to business-critical skills.
How do subscriptions align with the edX For Business mission?
Our goal with subscriptions really goes to the heart of edX’s mission, which is to provide access to world-leading educational content, to improve learners’ lives, and to achieve positive outcomes for learners and organizations. This requires solutions that help companies and employees grow and thrive.
Subscriptions is a cornerstone of edX’s For Business offering as it presents pathways and options to both employers and employees. The world’s preeminent universities, companies, and organizations work with edX to provide access to a breadth and depth of learning experiences via our leading educational platform. The engaging, interactive educational content on our platform is designed with active learning at its core, and provides the opportunity to participate in a global learning community.
How are subscriptions designed to offer both breadth and depth?
With subscriptions, you’re providing employees with a catalogue that has the breadth and depth they need to further their career and keep them engaged.
As an employer you’re able to build pathways that will help employees be successful within your organization as the content offers the opportunity to go deep in particular subject areas and be responsive as the demands on your business and employees evolve. For example, you may build a pathway for advancement in a particular team such as information technology, to re-skill employees into specific critical roles such as in data science, or to move from individual contributor to management positions.
As an employee, you gain the ability to easily enroll in as many courses as you want throughout the year. Subscriptions offer the freedom to earn unlimited professional and verified certificates while exploring new skills and journeying through pathways that help employees accelerate their careers within the company.
What are some of the outcomes a subscription model enables?
One of the key aspects of enabling subscriptions for businesses was to remove friction and barriers. Enabling learners to engage with a variety of different content offerings at scale and with instantaneous feedback mechanisms removes barriers, as do—on a more operational side—our single-sign-on integrations with leading LMS platforms and company IT systems.
It is also important to highlight the aspect of community, even more crucial today as many of us are still working remotely. Subscriptions facilitate a collective learning experience, one which benefits both the employee and company. Large-scale corporations we work with in the finance sector or in manufacturing, for example, are looking to provide an experience for their employees where they can come together through online learning pathways, so that those who are interested and invested in the same outcome can be successful.
Last but not least, very critically for businesses, subscriptions create the ability to offer employees compelling, customized learning programs at a predictable, affordable price point.
How does the edX For Business team help companies make the most of subscriptions and skills pathways?
In today’s world, signing up for a subscription service can be overwhelming. Choice can be overwhelming, and while employers are looking for choice this cannot be at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness. So they are looking for a guide, and the edX team is here to provide that guidance to organizations.
Any organization can take advantage of our experience, be it a government entity, a multinational, or an NGO, to name just a few examples. The edX For Business team is your partner in enabling growth within your organization and to support change. We will identify pathways that are industry- or subject-area specific, solutions that offer the breadth and depth that businesses and employees are expecting and deserve from their learning experience.
In today’s ever more complex world, edX provides market know-how gained by delivering learning experiences to almost 40 million learners worldwide. It is this experience that helps us identify global, regional, and industry trends, which helps us serve your organization as a whole and your employees specifically.
Get Started With edX Subscriptions
Subscriptions give your team immediate access to hundreds of courses and programs, with the flexibility to discover and learn new, business-essential skills. Connect with the edX For Business team to learn more about how subscriptions and custom skills pathways can benefit your business.
Accelerate the workforce of the future, with edX
Whether you’re a business leader, L&D executive, or other professional, we offer compelling data and insights for why an outcomes-based skills program is key to succeeding in tomorrow’s workplace.
