Mike Baird (Red Education)
IT training provider Red Education’s launch in the US was a lucrative venture for the company, which claims the size of the US market presents an opportunity that's thirty times larger than that across Australia and New Zealand.
This is according to the provider’s managing director Mike Baird, who said that while Red Education provides its services across the Japan, Asia and Pacific region, the US was “a very attractive option” as it looked to expand.
“America to us represents an enormous opportunity to open in that region,” he told ARN. “To put it into context, the size of the US market [compared] to A/NZ represents a thirty-fold increase in opportunity size.”
In fact, he claimed that expansion over to the US was always on the cards, but it was more of a timing issue, which was solved in part to some “dominant” unnamed vendors.
“We already serviced some North America customers however to do it at scale to support investment, you needed market leaders to generate the sufficient volume of students, to ensure it was commercially viable," Baird said.
"It so happened that we’d had some personal invitations to support these dominant vendors making it a logical moment to fully enter the market.”
Following the announcement of Red Education’s US launch, the only course its website labelled as guaranteed to run for its new region is for Paessler AG‘s PRTG network monitoring software in the form of a virtual session.
This isn’t the only course that Baird expects to be held virtually in the region this year either.
“For 2021 we foresee almost entirely all training to be conducted virtually," he said.
“North America leads the world in pre-COVID-19 times for virtual delivery, however, it’s now the accepted method of all training, not only across the Americas but globally.
"I foresee a very slow return to requests for face-to-face delivery."
This, he continued, is expected to be compounded by factoring in multinational corporations, HR policies and workplace health and safety risk compliance. That’s not to say there won’t be any demand, but he believes it will occur at reduced levels.
“This is due to the possible risk of introducing infection into their workforce and even with that risk minimised due to a national immunisation program, there will be significant resistance to traditional training methods," Baird said.
“When we converted all our deliveries across to virtual, I was fearful that our quality would suffer, however since conducting that transition, we’ve seen an increase in customer satisfaction ratings.”
He claimed that virtual instructor lead training is a “quality learning experience” as opposed to self-paced and face-to-face learning styles.
“There are benefits for all three methodologies, however where face to face isn’t possible, by far, virtual instructor-led delivery is the preferred learning experience so long as it’s supported with immersive labs to kinaesthetically apply those learnings immediately, for positive reinforcement and immediate adoption of that learning,” he added.
“This achieves the best outcome for student learning adoption if public or private training isn’t available.”
