City & Guilds Group invests in EmpowerTheUser as part of New Venture Fund

The City & Guilds Group has today announced its investment in Dublin-based cloud simulation platform provider, EmpowerTheUser (ETU). It’s the fourth investment from the Group’s New Venture Fund, which invests into post – revenue companies and entrepreneurs to support worldwide skills development.

EmpowerTheUser was founded in 2010 and also has offices in New York and Boston. It partners with global organisations, such as Morgan Stanley, PwC and BNY Mellon, to deliver simulations for training and assessing workplace skills and behaviours. EmpowerTheUser’s multi-award-winning platform enables organisations to drastically reduce the costs of delivering immersive, job-relevant and data-driven learning and assessment experiences.

The EmpowerTheUser^TM platform enables talent-driven organisations to:

Develop simulations: rapid collaborative building that is 350+% quicker than industry benchmarks (Chapman Alliance)

Deliver plug-n-play delivery, which is proven to reduce learning time by up to 300%

Analyse: ‘big data’ on employees’ learning provides new actionable insights to shape future learning and development on their skills and behaviors, and gap analysis

Commenting on the investment, John Yates, New Ventures Director, City & Guilds Group said: ‘We set up the New Venture Fund to support technology-driven companies with the potential to make a significant impact in skills and workforce development. Work-based simulations have been around for a good while, and are known to be effective – but they are expensive to create and until now the insights they deliver have been hard to standardise. What makes EmpowerTheUser different is that they put employer learning and development in the driving seat, allowing them to rapidly author, deliver and analyse employees’ skills and behaviours, and at scale. This collaboration is not only about supporting ETU with growth funding – it’s also about what we will learn together, about how scalable simulations help companies and their employees achieve impact as they develop their skills. We are really excited about the road ahead and to start working with the team.’

Declan Dagger, CEO and Founder of EmpowerTheUser commented: ‘This investment represents another significant milestone in ETU’s growth trajectory. We are on a mission to transform the way skills and behaviours, assessment and training is achieved. We’re really excited to be teaming up with the City & Guilds Group as we share a similar vision for the future of the assessment and training markets. Working together we can realise that vision on a truly global scale.’

About the City & Guilds Group:

The City & Guilds Group’s purpose is to help people, organisations and economies develop their skills for growth.

Backed by a Royal Charter, the City & Guilds Group has more than 135 years’ experience in making sure that people are prepared to contribute to successful businesses and thriving economies.

The City & Guilds Group partners with more than 200 companies to develop the skilled workforces that they need, and invests in learning technologies to help people learn whenever and wherever they can.

The City & Guilds Group is made up of :

• City & Guilds develops programmes of vocational learning, learning technology, certification and assessment, to support colleges, training providers and governments.
• ILM helps individuals, education providers and businesses improve the standards of leadership and management through qualifications and accredited training. ILM awards qualifications to over 95,000 managers across the world every year.
• Kineo is a global workplace learning company. It offers a fresh approach to elearning management systems and managed learning services.
• The Oxford Group provides bespoke management training, leadership development and executive coaching to the world’s leading companies.
• Digitalme designs credentials, using open badges, to recognise individuals’ skills and talent. It works with employers, training providers and over 2,000 schools across the UK.
• e3Learning specialises in online workforce management and elearning.

Combined, the City & Guilds Group operates in over 100 countries, through 10,000 training centres, delivering qualifications in 26 different industries.

About the New Venture Fund: The £2.5m New Venture Fund provides funding for post-revenue businesses and entrepreneurs in the education and training sector in return for equity stake in the companies.

Recipients also benefit from City & Guilds Group expertise and resources, helping to develop their ideas and propel the growth of their businesses.

About EmpowerTheUser: ETU provides a cloud-based platform for the rapid creation and delivery of simulations for workplace and soft skills assessment and training. ETU partners with many of the world’s largest organizations to deliver immersive simulations at scale across recruitment, selection, risk, compliance, on-boarding, leadership, sales management and customer success. ETU’s simulations are extensively proven to increase learner engagement, reduce development costs and enable data-driven business and HR decisions.