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Bluedrop Performance Learning: online learning “in demand, on demand”

Published: 12:47 01 Oct 2013 EDT

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Bluedrop Performance Learning (CVE:BPL) was spun out from one of founder and CEO Emad Rizkalla’s other companies in 2004, with the goal of “revolutionizing workplace learning.” In its first few years, it attracted some of the world’s giants as customers for its custom-built online courseware across seven industries, with a clientele that includes such marquee names as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), and Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM).

“We really were very successful in getting in the biggest and the largest and the brightest organizations as corporate users of our services,” says Rizkalla.

From there, the St. John’s, Newfoundland-based company made it a mission to pursue two main markets. The  first, defense and aerospace, was pursued to capitalize on Bluedrop’s strength in process, scale and rigorous methodology.

“We’ve been very successful in that market; we’re expanding aggressively into the U.S. We’re going to be focused on a continuum that includes online learning and low cost simulation. A lot of the training we develop is focused around equipment, a lot of it is around helping men and women in uniform to operate and maintain equipment and run missions.”

Rizkalla points out that the “quite sizeable D&A market” covers many potential customers, including the big name companies such as Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), which provide some of Bluedrop’s clientele, as do Cougar Helicopters and the Royal Australian Airforce, to say nothing of the smaller companies which provide downstream services.

Rizkalla see Bluedrop’s defense and aerospace group uniquely positioned in the Canadian market and well-placed to take advantage of what the Jenkins report identified in 2011 as a key component in the target of building up Canadian industrial capacity in defense and aerospace. That is, training and simulation. 

“I think we're well positioned when large multinationals need to spend industrial regional benefit dollars in Canada and we see very rapid growth coming in the next 2 years especially.”Bluedrop’s D&A products run the gamut from online learning to “amazing simulation technology”, a low cost solution that makes simulation technology more accessible and thus opens up what Rizkalla calls “a really promising market in need of efficiency and efficacy.”

The other side of the company is related but distinct. It leverages Bluedrop’s proprietary eLearning platform, CoursePark, to finally bring workplace learning in a targeted and accessible way to smaller businesses and job seekers.  

“Every time we built content for a multinational corporation, we saw that we had to work with a learning management system (LMS) and our content would be run, managed and executed on that system, so we got to see literally dozens of them in the corporate world.”

It is these learning management systems that engendered such disappointment from users – indeed, Rizkalla calls them the most “widely derided” pieces of software he has seen in his two decades in business.  And as painful as these systems were to large clients, Rizkalla noticed that these solutions had nothing to say or offer for wide segments of the economy that had nothing to manage workplace training. 

Learning management systems, Rizkalla says, promise the creation of a learning culture that also helps in the formation of communities and concomitant social learning “for the good of the employee”, but instead all too often “feel like accounting systems that sit on top of the people that push down and spoonfeed learning.”

Despite knowing that the current state of play worked for so few, at the same time, Bluedrop was reticent to throw its hat in the ring, knowing that the field was already quite crowded.

“So what we started looking at was who services all the groups left behind. Ninety-five per cent of small businesses -- no-one talks to them, and these systems are completely not suitable for them. We looked at that and thought the small business market is being totally neglected.”

The workplace development market is, Rizkalla points out, an area where billions of dollars are spent, but small businesses are ignored – “no-one really had a solution that spoke to them, all the solutions were for large corporations.”

Thus, CoursePark’s point of difference: unlike other systems, CoursePark has the advantage of being person centered, so users actually exist in the cloud-based learning platform and keep access to their career learning for life – even as they switch employers. The platform also provides just the right experience and functionality necessary to help small to medium-sized businesses improve performance. The platform already powers learning for regions, industries, groups and individuals in over 100 countries. There are over 5000 courses available on the system, which both involve online assessments and offer certificates, are consistent with the motto of in demand learning, available on demand, as opposed to a more rigid approach.

And it is a platform for which there is much need. In a world coming to grips with an accelerated rate of workplace skills change -- by some estimates 50 per cent of workplace skills change every three years – CoursePark focuses, the company says, on one thing: “Helping people acquire in demand skills, painlessly, efficiently and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.”

CoursePark is an innovation in two ways – the product, which Rizkalla says “is architected from person up rather than the company down so it’s a really different approach to learning management”, and also the business model, which Rizkalla says is unique in that it “target[s] governments and friends of small business as well as [disadvantaged job seekers such as] veterans or new immigrants.”

“There’s a lot of government entities, foundations, corporate CSR and other groups spending billions of dollars all over the world trying to help improve the workforce, and help low wage workers, unemployed and, indeed small businesses, to be more productive and competitive, and they want to get them on a platform that makes sense for this.”

It is this user base that gives rise to a revenue stream Rizkalla sees as evergreen.

“It will be a dozen years before we have fully captured the opportunity in this market,” says Rizkalla. “Because even if we sign up a region as a client, they can’t afford to give us, say $30 million, to reach every small business or every unemployed person in a jurisdiction, so we typically start smaller for 1/10th or 1/20th of the need and every year as we succeed, we add more and more people we can help.”

Bluedrop thus approaches such potential clients as workforce investment boards, departments of labour, departments of economic development, and so forth, with the task of bringing these groups, “not into the future,” says Rizkalla, “but into the present.”

In Canada, the company has four provinces using its platform and has “on-boarded” thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of individuals, with an ambitious campaign underway in the United States to generate significant growth. 

And, Rizkalla stresses, consultation with employers is crucial.

“If governments are trying to develop the workforce, the goal is to engage the industry and to develop content that is user driven, so we can build and deliver excellent content that really speaks to what small businesses really need in people they hire and to advance their agendas.”

It is this intent concentration on what the employer would need that led to what Rizkalla calls “one of [its] proudest moments”, when a solution Bluedrop had developed for helping women entrepreneurs in South America was acknowledged by Secretary Hilary Clinton on stage as part of the Clinton Global Initiative. Rizkalla sees CoursePark increasingly playing a role on the world stage. 

Investors could be of the same view. The company’s shares have risen more than 42 per cent year-to-date.

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