Ahmed El-Sharkasy Co-founder & CEO from Knowledge Officer while conversing with Daily NewsPK elaborated on how they are addressing the information overload and clickbait issues of available online content and devised a strategy to provide shortest learning path towards career progression.
1. What led you to create ‘Knowledge Officer’? When was it founded?
Since I remember, I have always been a passionate reader, trying to learn more about the world around me. While working in different organisations, I started acting like a knowledge officer myself. For example, I would suggest relevant industry articles that I found interesting to my colleagues. I would even create whole reading lists for them. They found it very valuable but soon I discovered that it was quite a time-consuming task to find the most relevant articles.
I discovered that there were two main problems associated with online content. Firstly, there is an information overload – the huge amount of content out there was hard to make sense of. Secondly, the clickbait content. There is so much unworthy content and you need some time to cut through the noise.
Building on those concerns combined with the need for lifelong learning, I firstly thought about launching a startup in 2016. We started discussing how to provide the shortest learning path to career progression and how to use data to design personalised learning journeys. We began with initial market research and conducted interviews to assess the validity of our idea. We talked to as many potential users as possible and saw that there is a big demand for our product.
Next year, in 2017, we launched an MVP of the Knowledge Officer and officially launched the company by the end of the same year, after we got our first seed round. By now we have been awarded two UK Innovate grants and worked with companies like Facebook to train the next generation of professionals.
2. What is the core service/solution you are providing? What are the pain points that you are targeting and what is the key differentiating factor from similar offerings?
We currently have offerings for both individuals and companies. We help individuals with their career progression through equipping them with the most in-demand skills and then helping to land the job by collaborating with future employers. We also work closely with L&D departments and offer a personalised employee learning experience and talent insights that explain how the company’s skillset ranks against the competition.
Our main differentiation is data-driven personalisation that is often lacking in other EdTech companies. Take for example Coursera or Udemy – everyone goes through exactly the same learning experience, while our individual skills are so different from each other! We want to know what skills gaps people have and assist them only in those areas instead of wasting their time on learning what they already know.
We also use reverse engineering in our product design. Firstly, we find out what skills the employers are looking for and then we build the whole learning experience around that. We want to make sure that our learnings are industry relevant and sought after.
3. What are the parameters to measure client satisfaction?
Our absolute North Star are job placements. We measure how impactful our learning experience is by assessing how many graduates get hired in their desired role.
Other metrics we focus on to track users progress include CSAT and NPS, we use them accordingly with different scenarios. We also analyse monthly active users with their churn rate, retention rate and data specific to the learning track.
Customer care is one of our fundamental values and we often send out surveys and even ask our learners community for their direct feedback. The user feedback is very important for us and we often update the product to make sure users love it.
4. What is your future outlook and what do you stand to achieve by next year?
We see the state of education changing rapidly, with the technology transformation and the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating this pace even further. The skills gaps in the UK are apparent in each industry and around 40% of workers don’t have appropriate qualifications for their jobs. Our mission is to remove this mismatch completely. With the help of industry leaders and machine learning, we are equipping professionals with the skills that they need. This helps them to succeed in their jobs but it also helps companies to compete in the market.
Next year, we are planning to scale not only in terms of user base but especially the app graduates that we’ll be placing in the jobs. Our target is to have 1 million users by the end of 2020 and 100k job placements by the end of 2021.
We want to be people’s career companion that helps them achieve their next goal. This can’t happen without building the model that is dynamic and regionalised nor without thinking about what the employer needs.
Knowledge Officer is a training partner both for individuals and organisations. By using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, it offers a personalised learning journey to hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide on their path to the dream career goal. Knowledge Officer also helps companies to retain and grow a competitive workforce through free, Plus and Pro learning plans in careers such as Product Management, Marketing or Entrepreneurship.
