Guild Education – New Partnerships with Target &
Walmart & Upskilling Demand Trends – 31 August 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Liz Briechle (LB)
Former Senior Academic Account Executive at Guild Education Inc
Agenda:
1. Guild Education’s positioning and key value proposition in the edtech and e-learning industry
2. Partnership strategy – new gains from corporate clients such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT) and Target
(NYSE: TGT)
3. Competitive landscape and the threat of start-ups such as Coursera (NYSE: COUR) and Udemy
4. Guild’s regional footprint, plus opportunities to expand internationally and beyond frontline workers
Contents
Q: Could you give an overview Guild Education’s positioning in the edtech and e-learning industry? How has
3
that market definition evolved over the last few years?
Q: Who would you say is leading the market? Do you think Guild has a first-mover advantage? How would
you classify the market’s competitiveness?
4
Q: Could you elaborate on what’s stopping large corporations with adequate resources going directly to
universities and expanding those relationships at a much larger scale, rather than going through Guild?
What value-add does Guild provide that a university cannot? You talked about outcomes – could you discuss
the company’s success or failure there? Do people go on to get better jobs? Are they upskilling and then
leaving their firm? How does this translate into results?
5
Q: Is Guild’s go-to-market strategy building relationships with universities and then targeting the
corporations, or leveraging the corporation’s relationship to approach universities? How does that dynamic
go back and forth?
Q: What skills are important to frontline workers and for employers to get from their employees? What are
the challenges when trying to implement these programmes in real time?
6
6
Q: Could you describe Guild’s ability to handle large accounts and its scalability? The company seems to
have a unique and complex way of assessing consumers and having the resources to find the right
programmes. Having the know-how around the integration tech part is a lot different from having the know-
how for medical training, for example. Could you discuss Guild’s ability to continue to meet very specific
needs for consumers or corporations across the country?
7
Q: Have you noted any challenges around scalability and meeting the growing demand? News flow suggests
that Guild doubled revenue since March 2020, which brings in a lot more work. Were the company’s hands
already full throughout your time there?
7
Q: How does Guild approach account management when working with corporations who think they’re
already experts in so many other fields? How does the company convince them to continue buying into a
service that isn’t proven overnight? How does that translate into up-selling and commanding better pricing
from clients?
Q: What programmes were more in demand during your time at Guild? Do some employers want to give
employees access to degree programmes? Do you think most demand still tailors toward specific needs and
wants of a new business or avenue that a player such as Walmart might be venturing into?
8
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Q: Employers want their employees to gain skills, so they send them to do a Guild degree programme or
certificate credentialing. They then bring them back on a higher salary, which means a higher cost and an
employee that now feels empowered to find a new job somewhere else. How does that dynamic play into how
employers consider Guild’s programmes? What are the overall macro dynamics, where employees are being
educated and their employers are priced out because they can’t match their salary?
8
Q: How does Guild manage programmes that are very tailored? The company can shift responsibility onto
the partners, but what if the partners don’t hold up their end of the deal? What happens when a corporation
thinks that it isn’t getting enough attention or results from a programme? How does that management aspect
9
come into play for such diverse and specific needs across employers or corporations?
Q: How do you consider the rise of Coursera and its degree segment or other upskilling and credentialing
start-ups? What about universities that are marketing and pushing their own credentialing products to
employers? Do you think Guild has a differentiated type of skillset so we shouldn’t expect it to be caught off-
guard by Coursera or Udemy?
10
Q: We discussed Guild’s hyper focus on frontline workers but is there opportunity with white-collar workers
further up the degree or employer chain? Do consumers typically go to grad school for two years then jump
back into the industry? How does the company consider that opportunity to target a much larger or higher-
income-grossing cohort?
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Q: Are there any adjacent areas to Guild’s existing services that could enhance its value-add across
certificates, programmes or degrees? Is there an opportunity to onboard and licence content for employers?11
Q: Could you discuss Guild’s regional footprint and focus areas? Is it the major cities where the big
corporations are located? Is it just large accounts? Are there some mid-tier accounts, perhaps with a billion-
dollar market cap?
11
Q: The edtech market that Guild operates in is very complicated. How do you think the company’s
operations would translate onto a more international scale? It focuses on frontline workers, who exist all
over the world. How do you consider that opportunity?
11
Q: Is anything about Guild commonly overlooked? What is the company’s broader opportunity? Are people
too optimistic about it, or perhaps not optimistic enough?
12
Guild Education – New Partnerships with Target &
Walmart & Upskilling Demand Trends
Transcription begins at 00:00:08 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Guild Education – New Partnerships with Target &
Walmart & Upskilling Demand Trends. I’m Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mrs Liz
Briechle, former Senior Academic Account Executive at Guild Education, Inc.
Liz, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement:
You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such
information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
LB: I agree.
NH: Could you start with a brief introduction of your background?
LB: I started my career in education by way of Teach For America. I taught in an inner-city school in Denver,
and then, after that, moved into implementation at Everfi, doing implementation of a software platform that
taught critical skills education. I worked to implement that across the US within the US’s largest school
districts. From there, I moved into an enterprise sales role, selling software to large banks and financial
institutions and also into higher-ed institutions. I enjoyed higher ed, so I moved on to work for John Katzman
at Noodle as one of the founding members of his university partnership team, going out and selling OPM
services to top universities. Shortly after that, I was the founding member of Guild’s academic partnership
team and built out a go-to-market strategy for universities and academic partners, as well as signed some of
their larger academic partners into the network over the last couple of years.
[00:01:58]
Q: Could you give an overview Guild Education’s positioning in the edtech and e-learning industry? How has
that market definition evolved over the last few years?
LB: Edtech and e-learning are huge. I’m certainly not going to be able to cover every facet of it, but I’ll just
break it down simply. Edtech, e-learning as a whole, has evolved over the last few years to really tackle and
address some of the larger barriers that have existed, that have hindered people from taking advantage of
education in its traditional form, so you go to campus as a freshman, you complete school and then you go on
to work. That’s just simply not the way that the workforce is operating now, and it’s not necessarily the way
that people are operating. Education has gotten incredibly expensive. That’s the biggest barrier. The second is
time. It’s difficult to work at the same time that you are attaining an education. Edtech has evolved to address
those two factors, and one way that the industry is addressing that is through workforce-sponsored education.
There is this inherent alignment, and necessary alignment, between the workforce and education, because it’s
not so cut and dry as it used to be, “I’m going to get a master’s in business. I have a role as a manager in a bank
or financial institution.” Tech has really evolved that, in that you have to have very specialised skills. Training
programmes and degrees really don’t prep you for that, and in fact, boot camps can do it quicker.
The biggest areas of growth in edtech over the last two years have really been education as a benefit. Guild falls
into this spectrum, and that is companies are investing in determining how to properly educate their
employees in a cost-effective way and also, as a benefit, gain retention and PR and other things from this
education while eliminating the biggest barrier for prospective students, which is cost. That’s one sector. The
Private and confidential 3
other is bringing in international students and enrolments, which is helping institutions enrol in their
traditional programmes and also new programmes. There are a lot of other countries in the world that have
evolved quicker than America in terms of trading and education, because it’s workforce-led. Online learning
and OPMs are big and then alternative credentialing, folks like StraighterLine bringing on alternative
programming to achieve your initial coursework for a bachelor’s at a low cost, so that you can go on to
complete your bachelor’s at a respectful institution. Boot camps are part of this alternative credentialing,
which has helped people rapidly upskill and start certifications and certificates. Guild is part of this, because a
lot of what Guild does is figure out how to meet the needs of their employer partners through rapid upskilling
and reskilling, so alternative credentialing is wrapped up in there, as well.
Education-as-a-benefit industry as a whole is not new per se, but in the way it’s being done, it has absolutely
evolved. In the past, employers might have a personal relationship with an institution that their founder
graduated from, for example, and they may send their employees there at a discounted rate. They may even
advertise some programmes, and it was typically local. Walmart has a great relationship with the University of
Arkansas, because it’s a local institution where the founders have great relationships. There might be large
companies like, for example, Southwest Airlines, and they have a package, a portfolio of quote, unquote
academic partners, where they offer a discount to attend and may fund education up to USD 5,250, which is
the annual taxable reimburse rate. However, folks like Guild, InStride, EdAssist have really shaken up this
industry, and have built out bespoke white-labelled programmes that are aimed at driving downstream
metrics like retention of employees, employee satisfaction and things like that. Old education-as-a-benefit
programmes really did not focus on outcomes as much as they focused on goodwill and tax benefits. They
really weren’t focused on utilisation of the benefit itself.
[00:07:26]
Q: Who would you say is leading the market? Do you think Guild has a first-mover advantage? How would you
classify the market’s competitiveness?
LB: I think Guild is absolutely leading the pack here. Having been at Guild and worked for Guild for two
years, really having to discuss the competitive nature of the market, it was very rare that I ran up against
competition within a university except a university. The biggest competition I would face was universities’
existing partnerships with employers, and those were not super strong anyway. I think the biggest competition
that Guild faces when going to employer partners and talking to employer partners is, frankly, the employer
partner’s ability to do it in-house and their existing relationships. FedEx and the University of Memphis are a
great example of that, how they have curated this really, really strong relationship. I think those employer
relationships are going to continue to evolve and get stronger.
Unless InStride pivots dramatically, I’m not sure they’re going to present a big threat to Guild over time,
because they’re doing what Guild is doing and they’re in the offensive position, where they’re trying to
differentiate themselves from Guild because Guild is going to win out time after time due to its name, due to
its partnerships. Everyone wants to partner with Walmart and Target. InStride has Starbucks, which is great,
but ASU is serving Starbucks. They’ve had to pivot and think really strategically about how they differentiate.
From what I know, their differentiator, it has been going after R1, tier 1 universities, and I’m not sure if this is
true, but potentially, in tandem with that, going after more white-collar executive firms or roles to match the
institutions. Guild has cornered the frontline employee market and all the institutions that best serve that
market, and has them locked into exclusive contracts for many years. Nobody is going to be able to compete
with Guild on that front.
EdAssist, on the other hand, has taken a different strategy. They’ve actually been around longer than anybody
else, but they have a more passive relationship with employers and schools, whereby they have a network and
they extend benefits passively to employers like, “10% off school here.” Employers buy into this portfolio of
schools, and then there’s just some sort of discount. I don’t see them as any major threat, unless they start to
really deepen some of those partnerships that they have and do a 180 in terms of branding and value prop,
because most universities see EdAssist as a very passive partner that has, over the last few years, not really
sent them any students of value. They would have to do a lot of work to really change the perception there.
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Outside of those two is GP Strategies. GP Strategies, I think they did some sort of consulting for corporations. I
do believe that they have turned their strategy around a little bit, and they’re starting to turn some of their
existing partnerships with companies into education benefit partnerships. I got some intelligence on that
which is super interesting and fascinating, because they already have the deep relationships with companies.
Now they just have to figure out how to sell the ed benefit, but I think Guild is still going to lead the market for
the foreseeable future.
[00:12:08]
Q: Could you elaborate on what’s stopping large corporations with adequate resources going directly to
universities and expanding those relationships at a much larger scale, rather than going through Guild? What
value-add does Guild provide that a university cannot? You talked about outcomes – could you discuss the
company’s success or failure there? Do people go on to get better jobs? Are they upskilling and then leaving
their firm? How does this translate into results?
LB: I’ll answer the first part of the question first, and then we’ll circle back to the second part. What is
stopping employer partners from going out and forming these relationships on their own? From my
perspective, employer partners, which I’ll call corporations from here on out because that’s what I’m used to
calling them, speak a different language than universities. Maybe, in the next 5-10 years, as universities evolve
and become a little less academic and a little more business-minded, this could change. It’s got to change, to
be honest, but they don’t speak the same language, and that’s the first hurdle. It’s tough for universities to
make inroads at employer partners, at corporations. Some have done it through training, through bespoke
training programmes and things of that nature. A lot of universities or training providers like eCornell have
off-the-shelf or customisable training that an employer will pick up, they’ll buy 40 licences and they’ll deliver
this training. That’s happening, and that’s going fine. Those programmes are not super lucrative for the
institution. They might be good for the employer, but the employer really wants very bespoke training. They’re
going to have to get over that, from my perspective, and be a little bit more open to benchmarks and training
against already-existing curriculums.
That’s already happening, but what Guild does that employers need, one of their biggest value propositions is
Guild is saying, “You have been doing this, Walmart, for 10 years, 20 years, and you have had 20 people, not
literally but just figuratively, take advantage of this education-as-a-benefit programme. You have
approximately 1% penetration into your employee base. You say you’re doing this and you say you want these
outcomes, but you all have not actually been able to make any headway in terms of penetration within these
programmes. You’re not marketing these to your employees, you don’t know how to position them, and you
don’t really know how to work with the universities to make this happen.” Guild comes in and does all the
dirty work, the really hard stuff, the tech integration. Tech integration alone with a university is rocket science,
and not because they’re using some fancy technology but the opposite. They are technologically behind, they
are transitioning to new CRMs. It’s very difficult.
The employer would have to set up a payment portal, or some sort of payment mechanism to allow them to
pay the university directly. Guild does all of this, so Guild is the go-between and says, “There’s really no fee to
us.” Guild takes a negligible fee. There’s no fee. “We’re going to just do what you’re doing, and we’re going to
do it better. We’re going to take the programme that you’ve been running, we’re going to expand it and we’re
going to ensure that, instead of 2% a year, we’re actually penetrating 10% of your employee base so that we’re
actually making gains. On top of that, we know that this is really difficult to measure, so we’re going to go
ahead and help you measure whatever metrics that are important to you, whether it’s retention or whether it’s
upskilling or public perception.” Walmart, for example. “We’re going to help you measure this, and we’re
actually going to help you with some of the PR. We’re going to do all of the marketing to your employees.
We’re going to support your employees.”
There are just so many aspects that go into this. This is only really half of what Guild does, what I’ve said so
far, and I’m happy to dig into that if that’s useful. Guild sells a package and a promise of outcomes, where they
may be spending the same amount of money now. They’re not spending the same amount of money, because
they’re going to have to commit more to Guild, but they’re not seeing impacts, and Guild is able to promise
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that. Unless you have a really savvy team of leaders on the employee partner side and, actually, academic
partner side, it’s going to be really tough for employers to do that on their own. I can see employers starting to
build out their L&D teams a little bit better, and build them out with folks that can do this. That is something I
see happening in the future, but most companies simply are not there yet.
[00:17:52]
Q: Is Guild’s go-to-market strategy building relationships with universities and then targeting the
corporations, or leveraging the corporation’s relationship to approach universities? How does that dynamic go
back and forth?
LB: It’s simultaneous, and it follows the laws of supply and demand that we all adhere to. Guild had to have
some academic partners already in the network in order to entice Walmart, for example, but they also want to
ensure that there aren’t so many university partners in the network that none of them get volume of students
or outcomes there. It’s a fine balance, and that is the balance in which I lived for a couple of years, helping to
steer Guild in the right direction so that we were lockstep in terms of the partners that we were bringing on, on
both sides, really. At a base level, Guild has a large enough network of academic partners at this point that the
academic partner network actually proves to be a massive asset for Guild. They have cornered some of the best
institutions in the nation that do something specific very well, and that thing that they do specifically is they
educate working adult frontline workers. Guild is not working strategically with Harvard, Guild is not working
strategically with top R1s. Some of them, sure, but that academic partner network has been curated very, very
carefully to serve a specific demographic of learner, and that is their special sauce.
[00:19:59]
Q: What skills are important to frontline workers and for employers to get from their employees? What are the
challenges when trying to implement these programmes in real time?
LB: It’s a million-dollar question, because every employer is different. The thing is, from my perspective,
these education benefit programmes, and this isn’t totally true across every industry or company, but most of
them were not originated or stood up in order to upskill and reskill, because traditionally, it was tough to do
that quickly and from afar. They were set up for goodwill, and actually, most of these policies in the past would
only fund degree-granting programmes. They would only allow somebody to pursue an associate’s or a
master’s or a bachelor’s degree, which is a little bit problematic, because sure, that can lead to upskilling, but
those are oftentimes more soft skills. People will argue this, on whether the education industry has been ahead
of the workforce, in terms of looking to each other at all times to figure out what to teach and then how to
teach employees to upskill.
That’s just to say that education has caught up to the point where they are offering online synchronous,
asynchronous low-cost training programmes in a variety of professions. Gone are the days where you have to
go onsite to be a phlebotomist. You can become a phlebotomist, somebody who draws blood, from the comfort
of your own home. You will get a kit in the mail, and you can learn how to do it from home. That has opened
up a lot of doors, and allows people like Walmart frontline workers to become a phlebotomist on the weekend
or after work no matter when they work, even if they work nights, for example. That’s, overall, what has
changed, and then the needs of these companies completely and utterly depend on the company and the
industry. Guild partner Waste Management. Their goals are going to be to train people into CDL drivers for
their trucks. That is a project that I worked on for six months, and surveyed all of the CDL schools across the
nation to figure out the ones that could build a bespoke programme for Waste Management. You may have
Walmart, and Walmart, this is public information, is standing up a bunch of health clinics, so Walmart may
need very specific training for a sub-set of employees that they would like to upskill into these medical roles.
On the other hand, a little bit more broadly, you may have a company that wants to implement agile
methodology within its company, to save money and time and make everyone more efficient. They might have
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to upskill thousands of middle managers in order to teach them agile methodologies, so they can have
engineers on their team or tech people on their team, and you might have to find a short, low-cost, effective
certificate programme for that. It completely depends on the company. Again, that’s one of Guild’s value
propositions, that they have the deep, deep knowledge and expertise to go out and survey the market for the
absolute best programmes that meet the company’s cost requirements, time requirements and training
requirements. Corporations, even the L&D people, they’re not experts in higher ed and learning. Everything’s
changing so fast, and so Guild provides that expertise and portfolio strategy.
[00:24:18]
Q: Could you describe Guild’s ability to handle large accounts and its scalability? The company seems to have
a unique and complex way of assessing consumers and having the resources to find the right programmes.
Having the know-how around the integration tech part is a lot different from having the know-how for medical
training, for example. Could you discuss Guild’s ability to continue to meet very specific needs for consumers
or corporations across the country?
LB: Part of the ability to do that is the fact that Guild acquired Entangled, which is a group of consultants that
is leading the academic side of things now. They have deep knowledge and expertise in a number of different
industries. The really cool thing is, at the end of the day, this really technical, I guess it wouldn’t be technical
but very specialised knowledge, you can leave that to the academic partner. These are things that you can just
learn and figure out, maybe do RFPs and really survey the market to figure out the best options. When I say
you can leave the specialised knowledge to the partner, a lot of it is likely going to be conversations with, for
example, healthcare or training schools around, “Do you train nurses for this specific certification exam?
Walmart requires that nurses are trained for this specific exam. Yes or no?” “No.” “Can you do that? Is this
something that you can create a bespoke programme around? Yes or no?” Then, it’s a ton of collaboration
between a number of teams, like operational, tech, product, employer partner team, academic partner team. It
is constant collaboration, and Guild is well-poised to handle that and are only becoming stronger. If I were to
guess, they are likely going to be hiring a lot more tech people to handle scaling the business.
[00:26:44]
Q: Have you noted any challenges around scalability and meeting the growing demand? News flow suggests
that Guild doubled revenue since March 2020, which brings in a lot more work. Were the company’s hands
already full throughout your time there?
LB: It’s so tough, because you can imagine that tech is the biggest hurdle and product is the biggest hurdle
here, because any time you customise anything for an academic partner or an employer partner, you are
adding so much tech debt to any existing relationship. Then, factor on top of that adding new relationships.
Like you’re saying, it’s a lot. I would say the route was definitely in product and tech and integration. It took a
long time to integrate with academic institutions. That was a big piece of the puzzle. I think, in the beginning,
Guild wanted to build relationships that were a little bit more straightforward, a little bit less customised, but I
think, as Guild was going out to the market, they started to realise that customers really wanted bespoke. Not
only did they want bespoke programmes but there was really no way to do it without making them pretty
custom, because they either already had programmes in place that were, they thought, going great or there
were things that they wouldn’t change about them. They had to meet those needs or they weren’t going to get
the deals, the company wouldn’t really see value in it.
All of those little things, even from one company extending benefits to dependents and another company not
doing that, these are all things that have to be figured out, especially given, for example, that Guild is doing all
the marketing. How do you market to dependents? How do you let dependents know this is available? Every
new partner brought in a new set of challenges, absolutely, but Guild was super good at innovating quickly and
meeting demand quickly and pivoting very quickly. That is one thing that they have going for them, how
scrappy their team is and how quickly they’re able to pivot. I think the biggest need was absolutely bringing in
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a larger tech team, and I think, if I were Guild, that’s what I would be doing with this new route of funding.
[00:29:29]
Q: How does Guild approach account management when working with corporations who think they’re already
experts in so many other fields? How does the company convince them to continue buying into a service that
isn’t proven overnight? How does that translate into up-selling and commanding better pricing from clients?
LB: If I was running Guild, I would say that my strategy would be land and expand. You land a partner, you
prove that you can do something great for them, you figure out what they need. Maybe they want good
publicity, maybe they want some quick wins around upscaling. Find out what the quick win is and deliver on
it, and then you take the opportunity to expand. That’s how I would do it. That has certainly been part of
Guild’s success, delivering early on some wins, and honestly, it’s not really hard to do better than these
companies have been doing in the past. That’s just the honest truth. It’s not tough to get above 2% penetration
on education benefit programmes, because you put any level of effort into it and you’re going to exceed that
anyway.
I am speaking incredibly generally, so if any companies are listening that it’s not this case for, I’m sorry, but
most companies in the past have set up these benefit programmes and prayed that no one used them, because
it was costly, it was time-consuming and there’s really no outcome. They didn’t even really advertise them,
whereas Guild, you walk into a Walmart in your local area and you should see a sign that says, “All Walmart
employees receive a free bachelor’s degree.” I don’t know where I’m going with this, I think I got off-track, but
ultimately, Guild gets out there quick and fast with marketing PR, they get some quick wins and, typically, the
partner is satisfied. It’s my opinion.
[00:32:03]
Q: What programmes were more in demand during your time at Guild? Do some employers want to give
employees access to degree programmes? Do you think most demand still tailors toward specific needs and
wants of a new business or avenue that a player such as Walmart might be venturing into?
LB: Every partner is different. They have a programme called Aspire. You can search that and figure out who
is partnered with that, but there’s a programme called Aspire, and that programme may be more aspirational
in nature. The partner may have partnered with Guild in an effort to allow employees to attend any bachelor’s
degree they wanted. They might have done that because they wanted to perhaps, in my opinion, skill-out their
employers to bring in young talent, because people don’t want to leave a park, they love working there. This is
my opinion, but COVID might have changed how they view that programme. It may have had to get pared
back a little, and be a little less aspirational and a little more driven toward outcomes because of cost.
There are other partners that may have funded bachelor’s degrees that are likely still going to fund bachelor’s
degrees, but they might pare down the bachelor’s degrees they’re offering for full funding. Maybe they’re only
fully funding certain degrees at certain institutions that will directly lead into a management trap, or will
directly lead into somebody becoming a software engineer. I think it depends on the company as to why they
started this and what their goals were. COVID certainly changed most of the employer partners goals that I
saw, and made them a little bit more focused on outcomes, cost and time spent in the programme. The time
and cost have to decrease, and the ability to measure outcomes need to increase.
[00:34:24]
Q: Employers want their employees to gain skills, so they send them to do a Guild degree programme or
certificate credentialing. They then bring them back on a higher salary, which means a higher cost and an
Private and confidential 8
employee that now feels empowered to find a new job somewhere else. How does that dynamic play into how
employers consider Guild’s programmes? What are the overall macro dynamics, where employees are being
educated and their employers are priced out because they can’t match their salary?
LB: This is a really tough thing, and it’s super interesting. I’m very excited to watch the market over the next
few years for this reason, because we’re seeing people get educated. The way that employers in the past were
able to mitigate this risk was they would have clawbacks, or they would have policies that would require
employees to work for a certain amount of time within the company in order to pay back their debt. Those
programmes, I get why companies do it, it makes so much sense, but Guild does not typically partner with
companies who mandate those policies, and Guild really does not actually allow for those types of policies that
are pretty detrimental to be a part of the network, which I think is great. Then again, you are increasing the
risk of these things happening.
There’s definitely some maths that goes into this, there’s quite a bit of modelling, but it’s also a lot of feel-good
and some historical data. Yes, you have to pay your employee more if you train them into a software engineer,
but I think you have to separate, are you reskilling an employee or are you upskilling an employee? Because
the cost savings of upscaling an employee… There are going to be more employees that are upskilled. Say you
upskill a manager into a tech role, a tech manager role. It’s going to cost less, it’s going to be quicker, you’re
going to increase their loyalty to you over time and you’re going to save on costs related to churn. Especially if
you’re in the fast-casual food industry or in the retail industry, you’re going to have a ton of churn and it’s
going to be incredibly costly over time.
Walmart puts a ton into training, and that’s incredibly expensive. If you can mitigate some of that churn by
creating loyalty and giving people opportunities, which, in turn, makes them more loyal, it’s my opinion that
you would, over time, mitigate losses there and risk. The fewer people that actually take advantage of
reskilling, for example, aren’t really going to be a detriment to the company. Even if you’re paying them USD
20,000 more, they’re more likely to stay anyway. Then, you have other employers that do not actually care as
much about before COVID. COVID actually was more detrimental to this industry than it was incrementally
valuable. Before COVID, you had partners who simply wanted to do this because they wanted to bring in a new
employee base or whatever. It wasn’t always tied only measurable outcomes, if that makes sense, PR and stuff
like that.
[00:38:16]
Q: How does Guild manage programmes that are very tailored? The company can shift responsibility onto the
partners, but what if the partners don’t hold up their end of the deal? What happens when a corporation
thinks that it isn’t getting enough attention or results from a programme? How does that management aspect
come into play for such diverse and specific needs across employers or corporations?
LB: You would need to have dedicated account managers and teams who intimately know the policies of each
of the employer partners, and are working with them hand-in-hand to ensure that their goals are being met
and there would not be a lot of switching around of teams. These are dedicated professionals who are working
directly with the corporation, and segmented parts of the tech team, maybe, and other teams like the student
support team. We haven’t talked about the student safety part of Guild yet but that’s probably one of the most
important things that they do, is support students. You would likely have teams that are dedicated to each
employer that know their policies, essentially, and their employees. That’s how you would execute on this, and
you would have very close relationships where you were talking weekly or daily. You would also likely ask
them to include you in meetings and communications that go out, and be a really deep strategic partner.
NH: Could you elaborate on that student aspect of Guild?
LB: Yes, but before I say that, just to speak to something you asked earlier, the employer is not managing
most of this. Guild is doing almost everything except what they’re asking the employer partner to do internally,
and that’s the beauty of Guild. The student-facing aspect of Guild is, I think, one of the biggest benefits to
partnering with Guild and one of its biggest value propositions. That is, Guild is actually able to say, “Not only
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are you going to commit to these education benefits, but all will not be lost if somebody drops out of a
programme or sales,” because we are going to support them at every step of the way. Guild has three student
support teams. They’ve got a team that supports the prospective student upfront, gets them in the funnel, so
does what a typical marketing team at a university would do but they do it better. They know the employer
partner’s policy, their education benefit policy, like the back of their hand, so they can help guide the
prospective student into the right programme.
That is huge. These programmes are confusing to navigate. Just in general, it’s confusing for an employee to
hear that they have benefits that will ultimately become a free degree. Employees don’t always believe that.
They’re wondering what the catch is, they’re wondering how to take advantage of it, and they’re wondering
how much money they’ll owe. Guild has a team of experts that demystify that for the employee, walk them
through everything, help them to select a programme that is aligned with their employer’s goals, help them
with the financial aspect of it, and then support them throughout their journey as a student until they
graduate, which is pretty cool. It’s one-on-one support in tutoring. Not tutoring, sorry. They don’t take on the
academic aspects of it. Life coaching, essentially, is what they’re doing. They’re saying, “Hey, so and so.”
They’re texting with their people, their caseload, and they’re like, “My dog died. I can’t go to class today. What
do I do? I don’t think I can manage class and my dog dying and work.” Guild coaches are able to help them
through that and aid in retention, so that they’re actually graduating and seeing outcomes.
[00:42:55]
Q: How do you consider the rise of Coursera and its degree segment or other upskilling and credentialing
start-ups? What about universities that are marketing and pushing their own credentialing products to
employers? Do you think Guild has a differentiated type of skillset so we shouldn’t expect it to be caught off-
guard by Coursera or Udemy?
LB: I’m bullish on Guild. I think they’re always going to be able to capture a sector of the market that is
interested in what they’re doing, sees the value of what they’re doing. I think they have proven with the
partners that they have right now that they have, and I said this before, cornered and understood a very
specific segment that they perform well in, retail and fast-casual, large companies that really can’t get it
together enough to build it on their own and need a lot of help, and also have quite a bit of money to commit to
this. It is a very niche market, so I think, over time, Guild is going to have to figure out how to pivot to capture
other segments of the market that maybe don’t fit into their very rigid model. There are only a finite number of
employers that are over X number of employees that are willing to commit X millions of dollars a year and that
are willing to do X, Y, Z to work with Guild, and again, they have rigid policies around who will work.
That is my assessment of Guild. They’re doing great, they’re going to be great. Do I think that there’s a threat
of Coursera? As it stands now, Coursera and these other credentialers coming in and forming direct
partnerships with employers, that’s already happening. I think those companies, credentialing companies and
learning providers, are just building those teams up right now and figuring out how to go attack that market,
but I don’t think it will replace Guild unless Coursera were to stand up a direct Guild competitor. Then, we
have a problem. I think there’s always going to be a place in the market for Guild, but unless they figure out
how to pivot and be a little bit more flexible on what they can do, I do think that there is risk long-term to their
model. My opinion is I feel like they would likely buy a Coursera or be bought by a Coursera, not literally
Coursera but somebody, before that were to happen. I think that’s a logical move.
[00:46:14]
Q: We discussed Guild’s hyper focus on frontline workers but is there opportunity with white-collar workers
further up the degree or employer chain? Do consumers typically go to grad school for two years then jump
back into the industry? How does the company consider that opportunity to target a much larger or higher-
income-grossing cohort?
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LB: If I had to guess, I would say that Guild is probably very focused on that potential opportunity. I don’t
know if it’s public yet, but if I had to guess, it signed a large financial institution that fits this profile. I do think
that, over time, there will be an increased focus on going after employers that hire more white-collar
employees. However, Guild is, I think, going to have to figure out what the value is for those employers,
because they don’t necessarily have the same needs as a Walmart with millions and millions of frontline
workers that they have to retain. These executives, retention is often higher, they are already skilled in some
way and the next step is a doctorate, which, to be honest, doesn’t really impact your job day-to-day.
I think that’s where these short courses, executive programmes, executive training, professional development
come in, but that’s not Guild’s bread and butter, because those are low-cost and, economically, they don’t
make as much sense within the Guild economic model. I think Guild is having to figure out how to tackle that
now, and that, from my perspective, might be a point of weakness that they really haven’t totally figured out
yet. The schools that these type of employees would command are going to be higher price points, and the
skills they’re going to gain at those schools are maybe not as valuable and scalable. You’re not going to send
2,000 executives to Harvard MBA and make a huge impact there. It’s just a little bit more difficult to figure
out.
[00:49:03]
Q: Are there any adjacent areas to Guild’s existing services that could enhance its value-add across certificates,
programmes or degrees? Is there an opportunity to onboard and licence content for employers?
LB: If you were able to see their partnerships with some of these really interesting and up-and-coming tech
firms, and some of the training that they’re doing like Salesforce trainings and very workforce-aligned
trainings, I think that they have this interesting opportunity to figure out how to better market packages of
these programmes on behalf of the learning provider to their employer partners. Specifically, these employer
partners that employ more white-collar workers. I think that’s interesting because, across the board, the
education market is changing so, so rapidly that employers haven’t really been able to keep up or get a grasp
on what is happening in education in order to pivot. I think Guild offers this interesting opportunity to coach
employers around what’s going on, and maybe match them up with some of these tech certificates and short
programmes and things of that nature. I think that’s a big opportunity. Also, I think there’s an opportunity
that nobody is really looking at now, which is how you support businesses that do not employ X thousand
employees but still have upskilling needs and how you support them in aggregate, maybe with a lighter
network or something.
[00:51:07]
Q: Could you discuss Guild’s regional footprint and focus areas? Is it the major cities where the big
corporations are located? Is it just large accounts? Are there some mid-tier accounts, perhaps with a billion-
dollar market cap?
LB: No, that’s not how Guild focuses. Guild’s go-to-market strategy, at least when I was there, it’s my opinion
that it’s purely based on number of employees at the company, and there’s a threshold for which they’re
looking above.
[00:51:57]
Q: The edtech market that Guild operates in is very complicated. How do you think the company’s operations
would translate onto a more international scale? It focuses on frontline workers, who exist all over the world.
How do you consider that opportunity?
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LB: I think that’s a great one that I missed. I think international is a massive opportunity that comes with its
own set of legal and logistical challenges, which is the reason, if I had to guess, why Guild has not yet ventured
internationally when they have partners very clearly, like Walmart, that have international presence. Is that
coming soon? Perhaps. If I were working at Guild right now and leading a team, I would probably be focused
on how to break into that market, but I do think there are a ton of hurdles to overcome to make that work. It
leaves the opportunity open for another company to come and be really great at that. I wouldn’t think Guild is
really focused there right now.
[00:53:14]
Q: Is anything about Guild commonly overlooked? What is the company’s broader opportunity? Are people
too optimistic about it, or perhaps not optimistic enough?
LB: From my perspective, to be honest, I think the strongest aspect of Guild’s business is PR and marketing,
specifically PR. I think that they do that incredibly well, and it has served the company, the CEO, the employer
partners, the academic partners very, very well. They are experts at PR. I think that has honestly been one of
the reasons for their success relative to others. There are a lot of people who partner with Walmart out there,
but you don’t know it. I think that is absolutely overlooked, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s a big part of what
they do very, very well. I think that, internally, there are probably a lot of growing pains of an organisation that
is growing incredibly rapidly, employing a young workforce and doing something for the first time. Those are
my thoughts there.
[00:55:02]
NH: Liz, I think that’s a good place to end the Interview. Let me close by saying thank you for your time and
input today. Clients, thank you for joining Third Bridge Forum's Interview today. If anyone would like to speak
with Liz in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Liz, thanks again.
LB: Thanks for your time. Bye.
Transcription ends at 00:55:16 of the recorded material
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