Why We're Here

Online learning has long been one of the cornerstones and main benefits of technology. Every year more and more people turn to online learning as a way to up-skill, change careers, or simply learn something new. Regardless of age, location, and level of expertise, great online learning has been an awaited promise in the minds of many.

Unfortunately, this long-awaited land has never reached its full potential. Always in sight, but never truely tangible, the vision of a personalised learning experience has become more of a jaded myth, than a real thing to build and back.

Why is this?

One of the largest problems to solve in learning has always been the sheer amount of content needed for a personalised experience. Since everyone learns differently, content must be varied to achieve the ideal match. The classic example is one teacher for 30 students, highlighting the bottleneck of expertise distribution. To address this, many companies turned to content marketplaces, which solved the "access-to-content" issue but introduced flaws that limit online learning's full potential.

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Fatal flaw #1 - The learning experience of a student is completely outsourced.

‍When relying on third-party creators to fill content libraries, you lose control over the full student journey. In such cases, it's easy to miss crucial insights on whether students grasp concepts, struggle with lessons, or drop out due to boredom. Additionally, you lack the ability to update or adjust content, even if that data was readily available.

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Fatal flaw #2 - Access to content does not mean learning.

A major misconception in online learning is that access alone suffices. True learning requires new knowledge, application, and social validation—what we at NextWork call "the learning loop." Without applying knowledge and receiving validation from peers or the market, content alone can lead to confusion and frustration.

The introduction of AI changes all of this. Content creation will increase rapidly to the point where creating content about any skill, in thousands of different ways, will be the norm. In this future, the value is no longer in creating content...it is the ability to accurately match up the right piece of content with the right student, at exactly the moment they need it, as they learn.

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Fatal Flaw #3 - Online Learning is lonely.

Online learning today is an incredibly lonely experience. Struggling is a natural part of learning, but without support or empathy, students may feel isolated and give up. It can feel like an exam scenario at school; you can't ask anyone for help, you're on your own, and a lot of the time you don't know if you're right or wrong. Not fun.

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Fatal Flaw #4 - Industry has trust issues with online learning.   

The abundance of self-made online courses has made it hard to assess the quality of skills a student leaves with. Employers and peers often don’t trust the skills these courses claim to teach. As a result badges and certificates are quickly losing value due to a lack of transparency about the skills gained and student proficiency. Participation awards are not enough.

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Fatal Flaw #5 - Learning today is detached from reality.

The most concerning problem with learning in general is it's ever-increasing detachment from reality. We’ve lost sight of learning’s true purpose: solving real problems. The “ivory tower problem” highlights this, as scholars and educators develop knowledge in isolation, disconnected from practical challenges. This often leads to outdated curricula, limited real-world exposure, and a skills gap, leaving employers dissatisfied and students struggling to secure jobs. We need to recenter learning around the value it brings to society and the real-world problems that learning a new skill solves.

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Our Mission

This is why we decided to start NextWork. We want to re-envision the learning experience, for any topic. Our mission is to create the world's best learning experience for anything. By doing this we hope to meet the ongoing skill demand required to solve our greatest challenges, specifically the development of AI, then unlimited renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, housing, aging population.

Solving these problems without a significant leap in pace of learning will be extremely challenging. Even if we eventually solve these issues with our current skill supply, the time needed would result in the suffering of millions of individuals who would benefit from such problems being solved sooner.

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Here's how we're creating the world's best learning experience:

• Deliver a beautiful UX that laser focuses you on learning.
  
• Perfect getting exactly the right content, at the right moment, for you.
  
• Build the world's best learning community and support.
  
• Create stunning and trusted ways to showcase your skills as you learn.
  
  

These make up what we call 'the Learning Loop' - a breakdown of how we learn from first principles.

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The Path So Far

We're starting with teaching AWS and plan to expand to other topics as we grow. Since we launched NextWork, we've been happy to see how much our vision has resonated with other learners around the world. We have received countless messages of love, including students running events to promote NextWork, and making their own NextWork merch to share with friends.

Today thousands of people actively use NextWork to learn AWS. We are especially excited about this traction given the number of existing cloud and AWS specific learning platforms that already exist. Many of our top students have mentioned that they have come to NextWork directly from one of these existing platforms specifically for the quality NextWork provides in learning experience, community, and content.

"I don't think I'll ever leave NextWork. If I do, it won't be because of me...I love being here because I'm always learning and I have an identity. "

"I'm currently the facilitator of a cohort of an AWS Cloud Engineering program. I saw how valuable your resources are in terms of hands-on learning. I assigned my trainees to complete all projects on NextWork before the cohort ends. "

"NextWork has been essential in bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. A huge thank you to NextWork for providing me with AWS projects that helped me gain invaluable hands-on experience with AWS services. "

To maintain our momentum throughout the next year (weekly changelog) as we grow, we will be expanding our founding team and cap table.

We are looking for people who believe in the mission of building the world's best learning experience in order to solve the world's toughest problems. See you in the future.

Thank you to our investors: John Kells, Vignesh Kumar, Sam Wong, James Palmer, Mason Bleakley, Stephanie Benseman, Mahesh Muralidhar, Alexey Mitko, Tim Doyle.

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