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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Accenture has >730,000 employees (https://newsroom.accenture.com/fact-sheet)

Much of their model is hiring entry-level to junior resources, upskill them, bill them out to clients at high mark-ups. Many parts of the workforce follow an up-or-out mentality and technical/functional upskilling is a key component to this, rather than just tenure.

Purchasing a platform to train that many people is probably a bargain compared to what they are probably doing now -- letting everyone choose their own platform and reimbursing the retail cost.

It is definitely a bargain compared to what they did when I worked there -- they owned and operated an entire University-like campus called "St. Charles Illinois" and flew people in from all over the world.

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The whole ex-MOOC and other online learning landscape has basically turned into (and mostly always was) continuing professional education. It's nice that there are still some options out there like OCW but it's mostly been a pretty dismal failure from the perspective of really transforming anything.

This is part of that list where at one point computer were supposed to totally transform learning in school. We know it didn't happen. Them mobile/smartphone were supposed to transform learning on the go that also didn't happen. But worry not, now personalized AI agents will totally transform learning. There will be individualized lectures for every students. No more lack of attention from teachers be bottleneck in learning.

Yeah. And it's not like broadcast university lectures and some rudimentary echoes of in-person grading systems are some pinnacle of providing effective education. There's nothing wrong with video lectures--I take LinkedIn classes at work from time to time for certain topics--but it's usually because something appeals to an immediate need and being visual is at least useful.

Given you were in Accenture, you might appreciate the 'vertical' (those who 'find' work - consultants and senior management) vs the 'horizontal' (those who do work, and their management).

St. Charles will still exist for the vertical, and for the chosen horizontal. An acquisition like this is for the horizontal and once internalised sufficiently to sell to clients, the selling the product not any individual training course which are pretty fungible. Online corporate in-house training's been lagging consumer bells-and-whistles for a decade, it'll be a flashier-better product than current competition.

I wonder if Accenture will also try to sell it as an add on in their contracts. Selling education to companies is much more lucrative than selling it to students.

The closest one of these companies has gotten to profitable is Udemy via their business segment.

Agree. At Accenture's training budgets level I'd imagine 5-10% of that money could churn out hundreds of new courses per year.

How would this work?

I presume Accenture still has to invest the course content that is specific for them, and then use Udacity as the distribution platform. Why couldn't they do that before just like all the universities that uploaded their courses to Udacity?

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