What to know:
- Guild Talent Advantage is a first-of-its-kind product suite that pairs education, skilling, and academy experiences with AI insights to empower HR leaders to address a range of urgent talent transformation priorities.
- Guild has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Nomadic, a leading capability academy company, and will incorporate its offering into Guild’s multi-product suite as Guild Academy, enabling learning across multiple modalities and empowering L&D leaders to skill teams faster to drive business strategy, without sacrificing outcomes.
- The new Guild Academy will be a collaborative learning product that combines peer interaction, practical application, and expert guidance—delivered through easily customized learning from Guild’s curated Learning Marketplace and organized by functional area or strategic need—to instruct employees in their company context.
- “Guild’s acquisition of Nomadic and the launch of Guild Academy is an important move in the L&D and HR tech markets,” said Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. “As a customer of Nomadic, we’re intimately familiar with its ability to deliver a unique and engaging experience for employee development and career growth. As Guild couples its experience building career pathways for employees with this new platform, the company is poised to take a leadership position in the next generation of corporate learning solutions.”
DENVER, CO – October 9, 2024 – Guild, a comprehensive education and skilling solution for building talent, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Nomadic Learning, a leading capability academy company. The company also announced the introduction of Guild Talent Advantage, which pairs education and skilling experiences—across multiple learning modalities—with actionable talent insights. In addition, through Guild Talent Advantage, employees receive career resources and coaching to ensure they don’t just know more, but they perform better and drive businesses forward.
In a time of accelerating artificial intelligence and technology-driven skills disruption, it’s business-critical for employers to invest in programs that enable agile workforces. Employers need talent strategies built for disruption and with continuous learning at their core. Companies that make strategic investments in employee development increase their profitability by at least 11%. But, identifying what skills are needed and how to train that workforce requires deep data systems, hands-on learner support, and a range of disparate learning agreements. Today’s content providers and learning systems leave employees adrift in a sea of videos, gaining surface-level knowledge without mastering the skills they need for their current roles or future careers. At the same time, the lack of data and insights leaves leaders struggling to connect learning to business outcomes, with 57% of CHROs reporting skills shortages as a hindrance to their business’s ability to perform and grow and only 5% of leaders strongly agreeing that their organizations are investing enough in helping people learn new skills to keep up with workforce changes.
“In this new era of work, employers must move with urgency and identify partners who can efficiently transform the way they build their talent across a diverse set of workforce needs and business objectives,” said Bijal Shah, CEO of Guild. “Guild is building on our strengths of employee engagement and proven outcomes by expanding our product offerings with the acquisition of Nomadic. This, in addition to the introduction of Guild Talent Advantage, further enhances our ability to tackle a wide array of talent needs, be a data-driven strategic partner, and deliver proven results that matter.”
Guild Academy: Guild’s New Collaborative Learning Product
Through the acquisition, Guild will offer Guild Academy as a distinct product within its product suite. Guild Academy will pair Guild’s Learning Marketplace of vetted, high-quality, and digital-first educational programs with Nomadic’s expert-led and business-specific curriculum. It will be a collaborative learning platform that combines peer interaction, cohort-based learning, and practical application. Guild Academy will be delivered through customized learning and organized by functional area or strategic need—so that employees can apply their skills directly in their company context and employers can build organizational capabilities for their teams at scale.
Nomadic’s strong, active customer base, including AB InBev, Accenture, The Josh Bersin Company, Microsoft, and many others will now have the ability to access other high-quality solutions that address multiple skilling needs – all through Guild Talent Advantage, including its broad access education benefit and its targeted, skill-specific program offerings.
“We are thrilled to become a part of the Guild team and about the ways Guild will help us bring Nomadic’s core offering to the next level by pairing our product with access to Guild’s vast Learning Marketplace,” said Matt Burr, Co-founder and CEO of Nomadic. “With Guild, our customers will be able to more efficiently build needed skills at scale—both individual skills and collective capabilities—by leveraging content in Guild’s Learning Marketplace and tailoring it to fit their specific business functions and context.”
Josh Bersin, an existing customer of Nomadic, partnered with the company to develop the Josh Bersin Academy, which provides expert-led, cohort-based courses designed to upskill HR leaders, unlock their full potential, and ensure they remain ahead of industry changes.
“Guild’s acquisition of Nomadic and the launch of Guild Academy is an important move in the L&D and HR tech markets,” said Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. “As a customer of Nomadic, we’re intimately familiar with its ability to deliver a unique and engaging experience for employee development and career growth. As Guild couples its experience building career pathways for employees with this new platform, the company is poised to take a leadership position in the next generation of corporate learning solutions.”
The acquisition of Nomadic is expected to close in the coming weeks subject to customary closing conditions.
Guild Talent Advantage: Transforming The Way Talent Is Built
With the addition of Guild Academy, Guild is expanding its product suite. Already a partner to America’s largest employers – including Chipotle, Hilton, and Target – Guild offers purpose-built solutions that span the entire spectrum of business transformation needs.
Within the suite, Guild is enhancing its core education benefits product by continuing to bring new, credentialed, high-quality learning experiences into its Learning Marketplace. In addition, to meet employers’ specific and immediate skill needs, fill distinct skill gaps, and prepare employees for their current and future roles, the company is leveraging deep learning partner relationships to quickly bring new, and in some instances customized, programs to market. For example, the company launched a curated bundle of AI skilling programs designed to address specific gaps at every company level, recognizing the acute and varied AI skilling needs of an organization.
Each product available through Guild Talent Advantage offers a differentiated learning experience—with specific context, speed, and depth of skilling required—tailored to each business’s talent strategy and goals. From nurturing foundational knowledge to cultivating job-specific skills and preparing for licensed roles, Guild is doubling down on its ability to turn learning investments into tangible business growth and sustainable talent pipelines for employers.
Talent Insights That Lead To Data-Driven Decisions
Underpinning these education and learning experiences within Guild Talent Advantage are in-depth talent insights capabilities. Guild can assess all of the current and future jobs within an organization, pinpoint the tasks that employees do within those roles, and calculate their opportunity and risk for augmentation and automation. This empowers leaders to identify skilling needs of their specific workforce and prioritize and swiftly adjust learning investments in the face of disruption based on critical business needs.
Guild continues to enhance its investment in its Talent Development Analytics reporting, which allows employers to track and support individuals’ learning progress and skills assessment to connect them with in-demand and hard-to-fill roles. Together these talent insights enable employers to make data-driven decisions that champion both their people and their businesses.
Learn more about Guild Talent Advantage here.
About Guild
Guild is transforming how employers build talent to drive business innovation and growth. Guild Talent Advantage offers a range of transformative education and skilling experiences, supported by actionable talent insights for employers and personalized coaching for employees. Guild partners with employers – including Walmart, Chipotle, Discover, Hilton, Target, and healthcare systems like UCHealth – to unlock human potential and fuel organizational growth. It does this through broad access learning to attract, retain, and nurture a diverse workforce; targeted, skill-specific programs to close acute skills gaps; and cohorted, tailored learning to train employees in their company context. Guild ensures learning investments translate to sustainable talent pipelines that propel businesses forward. For more information, visit https://www.guild.com.
Press Contact:
Brooke LaRue