Online course subscription service helps users address their skills gaps

TODAY'S rapidly changing career landscape requires workers to learn skills quickly, be agile, and adaptable - but it may not be easy to identify the skills needed and acquire them quickly. This is where online platform ZilLearn can help close the gap, said David Yeo, chief executive officer of Singapore-based digital learning technology company, Kydon Group, in an interview with The Business Times.

With ZilLearn's AI-driven skills analytics tool, users can identify which skills are associated with specific jobs and roles, and then look for appropriate courses hosted on ZilLearn.

"So if you just go into our platform, and you enter, for example, the title, 'digital marketing'... according to this job information that we have, we are able to tell you what employers are looking for, for that position, and how popular that position is," said Yeo.

The skills analytics tool taps Big Data on the jobs market and learning space, having "crawled through" websites to identify about 17,000 skill tags associated with 3.4 million job descriptions.

ZilLearn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kydon Group, is an education technology company that started in 2020 and now has about 70 staff.

The beta version of its website was launched last September, after more than a year in development. Rather than producing its own training material, ZilLearn hosts courses by external creators - a business model that allows it to offer over 10,000 courses.

In the past, learning a skill could probably carry you through in your career for about 10 to 20 years, but now, a skill might be relevant for just a year or two before it needs upgrading, Yeo said.

"In the past, you probably stuck with one or two jobs your whole life. Now you probably have one or two jobs every couple of years," Yeo said. "Even within a job itself, because of the very dynamic nature, your boss expects you to also be able to cross function, and not just (perform) a singular function."

Given the fast-evolving work landscape in a world influenced by digitalisation and technological advancements, there is a need for "just in time" content that can be learnt within a day or two, Yeo added.

For example, the ZilLearn-hosted course Build an Interactive Data Analytics Dashboard with Python has a duration of 7 hours and 30 minutes - which means it is possible to learn that skill in a single sitting.

"Increasingly we move towards 'just in time' (learning), it means as we encounter (a need), we learn. This allows us to be adaptive," Yeo said. "With 10,000 courses you can't possibly consume everything, but it's enough for you, that just in case (it is required) you will have the content relevant to you."

On Dec 13 last year, the company launched ZilLearn Plus (ZilLearn+), a subscription-based service on ZilLearn's platform.

Users can either access courses on a pay-per-course basis, or take up the ZilLearn+ subscription service for S$16.50 per month, which amounts to S$198 per annum. The subscription grants full access to all courses on ZilLearn.

ZilLearn's courses range from areas such as technology, business and marketing, to health, lifestyle and fitness. They come from independent content creators or reputable institutions that have created online courses, said Yeo.

Each course is curated and quality-checked by the ZilLearn team before it gets hosted as a paid course, he added.

In an effort to be "unbiased", apart from courses on ZilLearn+, the platform also presents related information about courses from other providers like Coursera or Udemy, said Yeo.

But he said that the advantage of ZilLearn+ is that it features a library of courses in in-demand areas such as technology and personal development skills, which are constantly evolving. The platform also adds new content every week, allowing learners to access a "wide spectrum" of courses with a single subscription plan, he added.

Apart from independent creators, ZilLearn has recently been working with organisations like the Infocomm Media Development Authority and Institute for Adult Learning to reach out to training providers for course content.

Yeo also highlighted that although the platform has a global reach, it will focus its efforts in Asia, hosting more regionally-contextualised content such as courses in Bahasa Indonesia. ZilLearn+ has already started to onboard Chinese and South Korean content, he added.

"We think that we can make a difference here because we understand Asia, we know Asia, and we can give an Asian answer to the problem of education in this rapidly changing, skill-hungry world," Yeo said.

ZilLearn+ is part of SkillsFuture Singapore's pilot initiative to support subscription-based online learning platforms. As such, adults aged 25 and above can use their SkillsFuture credits to offset the costs of their subscription.

In launching ZilLearn+, Yeo said: "The rapid creation, distribution, engagement and adaptation of knowledge is to be expected in the digital age. Our mission is to make this scalable, affordable and at a high quality globally. I believe Singapore can lead the charge in bringing such innovation to the global stage."

Other than ZilLearn, Kydon Group also runs the media platform LEARNTech Asia, which organises events such as conferences, webinars and workshops related to learning development.

Read more:

• 660,000 took part in SkillsFuture-supported programmes in 2021
• Growing digital skills gap: Businesses need to take action now