[Written in partnership with Supernewsroom, but the editorial team had full control over the content.]
When I first came across the local training platform, ReSkills, I was sceptical.
From personal experience, I felt like I was getting marketing guru vibes from the app, especially with courses titled “3 Secrets on Fund Selection to Get Your Winning Funds” or “Build Your Powerful Negotiation Skills”. Not to mention, the thumbnails either depict stock images meant to evoke a sense of motivation or coaches dressed in blazers with their arms crossed.
Those wary of digital marketing or lifestyle gurus would likely clock these as red flags for legitimacy, but as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover. Thus, we spoke to the team to learn more about the site.
Categories of training programmes you’ll find here are in business entrepreneurship, career enhancement, and self-improvement, taught by “master coaches”. This made me wonder, who even are these coaches and what expertise do they have?
CEO Jin Tan explained that ReSkills’ 100 coaches from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines each have a minimum of 10 combined years of practice and experience training in their respective industries.
To further justify their quality, ReSkills is a registered training provider under the HRDC (Human Resource Development Corporation of Malaysia). The app was also developed to help coaches move their services online, as corporate training was one of the industries grimly affected by the pandemic.
Finding a different audience
When COVID-19 hit our shores, Jin noticed the panic and uncertainty faced by corporate trainers and educators who were hesitant to shift their services online. They held onto the hope that things would go back to normal soon.
Simultaneously, his involvement with youths through non-profit organisations brought a concerning issue to his attention. Many youths were lacking direction and couldn’t see the potential they had in themselves.
Jin wondered if there was a way to help trainers share their expertise with youths who may want to learn from it. With over 12 years in the tech industry, Jin and his CTO Ivan Tan partnered up with Jegan who’s been in the training and development scene for more than a decade to found ReSkills.
Learning is a 2-way street
ReSkills works as a live learning platform where seminars are conducted in real-time so students can interact with coaches as and when they have questions. Called OnLIVE, courses are available every day, and users are notified about upcoming classes two weeks in advance so that they can plan ahead.
These daily live classes are likely one of the platform’s standout features. Although schools have been doing these every day via Zoom calls, some edutech platforms outside of a school setting choose to host their video classes on a pre-recorded basis.
The live classes hosted on these sites tend to be one-on-one classes and are not held daily, depending on your arrangement with your trainer or coach.
But the benefit of pre-recorded videos is that students have the ability to learn at their own pace, which Jin acknowledged, but argued that learners then have to fill in knowledge gaps with their own assumptions. This may be counterproductive when it comes to effective learning.
“In fact, one thing all our expert coaches can agree on is that learning should be an interactive, 2-way process. This means that they should be able to question, seek clarification from, and even challenge the instructor,” Jin added.
Of course, videos can also be re-watched via ReSkills OnTheGo, in case learners need to revise the lesson or have missed out on the live classes. To date, Jin reported that ReSkills has already conducted over 180 OnLIVE sessions.
A few Ringgit a day to upskill
To monetise, ReSkills operates on a subscription model that’s charged annually:
- USD150/year (about RM622): 1-year access to ReSkills OnLive;
- USD300/year (about RM1,244): 1-year access to ReSkills OnLive, ReSkills OnTheGo, and ReSkills Library, which is where you’ll find the course’s learning materials.
The annual fees may come off as hefty at first glance, but when broken down to 365 days, users would be paying RM1.70 or RM3.20 per day to access content and speak to industry experts. For those committed to upskilling and taking advantage of ReSkills’ daily classes, its prices seem fair.
“Think of Netflix, we are the Netflix model of e-learning focusing on high impact and interactive live learning space. Our main motto is making education affordable and accessible to everyone, everywhere,” Jin justified.
At its heart, coaches on the platform are primarily corporate trainers, and ReSkill also provides packages for such training programmes via ReSkills OnDemand and ReSkills for Business.
ReSkills OnDemand works as a free marketplace for coaches to set their own prices for courses, and participants pay on an “a la carte” basis. On the other hand, ReSkills For Business is charged as a corporate bulk package for organisations looking to host specific training programmes for employees.
“Or, to make things easier, [employers] may contact us directly to arrange for a particular class on their topic of choice as well as to their coach of choice,” Jin said.
Capturing more learners
While Jin did not share too much data about ReSkills’ subscribers, he told us that the majority of its users are individuals instead of businesses. It points to the fact that people are looking to upskill themselves during the pandemic, whether it’s for furthering their careers or for personal enrichment.
To scale, the app has since partnered with Celcom where 50,000 subscribers will be given 15 months’ access to ReSkills OnLIVE. In a statement, Celcom shared that it saw a 70% data traffic growth during the MCO, so this partnership should give ReSkills the leverage to scale up.
If the edutech site can focus its marketing efforts on reaching more of the middle-class market of individuals who are looking for jobs or who want to grow their careers, ReSkills has the opportunity to become their go-to site for a variety of live classes.
Featured Image Credit: The team at ReSkills
