20 Things You Didn’t Know about Guild Education
For those of you who haven’t yet heard of Guild Education, consider this your introduction. You will hear more about it in the future. At least that’s what we predict. This top tier, brilliant company hasn’t even come close to reaching it’s potential yet. If you need to acquire a better education, then you should know about GE already, but we decided to do a deep dive and find out more than what you’ll read on their intro page. Here are twenty things you didn’t know about Guild Education.
1. Women in Business
Rachel Carlson and Brittany Stich are the minds behind this innovative enterprise. Convincing employers to help educate the workforce so they can find and retain the employees they need to fill empty jobs was a masterstroke of win-win engineering. Guild Education makes a fortune, companies can expand and retain desirable employees, and people get to better themselves and increase their wages.
2. More Than A Billion
According to Forbes, Guild Education is one of the female-led companies that reached over a billion dollars in valuation in 2019. All in all, it’s been a banner year for female-led businesses like GE. Sure, the value of a company doesn’t show it’s worth, but Guild Education doesn’t need anyone’s help with that. What makes this even more important is the fact that not very long ago, reaching that milestone was considered impossible for a business with a woman CEO. To this day, over eighty-eight percent of the top companies are male-led. Things are starting to change thanks to forward-thinking women who know how to bring technology and people together to benefit both.
3. Walmart Needed Help
Walmart was one of the first major corporations to join up with Guild Education, and they did it for a very practical reason. They were looking to expand their pharmacy services, among other things, but to do so, they needed educated employees who could staff them. Partnering with GE provided both companies with something they needed. GE got a high visibility client that gave them a foot in the door in every city and most towns in America, and Walmart got a way to create enough educated staff to fill their needs so they could expand further.
4. Disney’s 90k
Lately, it seems like Disney has been hoovering up everything good, from Star Wars to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so much more. We don’t blame them for their good taste. In fact, we’re a bit jealous, and we’d do the same if we had the big Mouse’s budget. They saw the benefit of Guild Education right away, and we’re happy to get on board. If you happen to be one of the ninety thousand or more Disney employees, then you can get into GE too.
5. Stanford Dropout
Rachel Carlson wasn’t always interested in running a tech-savvy education-based business. She worked on democratic political campaigns in high school and college. Rachel went to the prestigious Stanford University, but when an opportunity to work on the Obama Campaign came along, she dropped out to take her dream job working in politics. Regardless of your personal political affiliation, it’s easy to admire someone with so much conviction that they’d walk away from a leading University education to pursue their dreams.
6. Reddit Loves Guild Education
Reddit users and soon-to-be Reddit users don’t need to look very far to find a plethora of information on Guild Education. Sometimes you don’t want the corporate line. You want to hear what regular, non-marketing people have to say about a company, and Reddit has plenty of threads about Guild Education that do exactly that. Learn about other users’ experiences working with GE, or ask your questions and get real answers from random people on the internet. The world wide web is realistically the largest pool of information ever created in the known universe, and you have it at your fingertips every day.
7. Work With the Guild
You don’t need to be a student, potential student, or an employer to work with Guild Education. If you live in Colorado, GE is hiring. There’s always a need for more education facilitators, so why not help other people reach their dreams while working for a company you can be proud to contribute to at the same time. We can’t guarantee they’ll hire you, but you’ll never know if you don’t try. If it doesn’t work out, maybe go through them to get a degree and apply again. It can’t hurt, and it’ll look great on your resume.
8. Beyond Basics
There are quite a few programs out there that will assist you with adult education. If you need a GED/HiSET, then you’re in luck. Of course, once you have that, there’s probably some job placement assistance, but not a lot else available for most folks. Luckily, someone has that covered. With Guild Education, you can finish high school, get a trade diploma or certificate, but you can go further too. GE is helping people get bachelors and even masters degrees. They have the way if you have the will.
9. Shout it From the Rooftops
There was a time when people got news out by paying a town crier to yell it out where passers-by could hear the news. Things have certainly come a long way since then. From Buskers on soapboxes to printed newspapers, radio, television and finally the internet, our ability to transmit information and share our news and our thoughts have evolved so much in the last century or two. Now you can follow a company like Guild Education on Twitter (https://twitter.com/GuildEducation) and hear the news at the same time reporters are just getting the first hint of the story.
10. Only Three
Only three female-led companies made it onto the Forbes Cloud 100 List this year, and Guild Education is one of them. The list recognizes companies that are at the top of the tech game and run on private cloud networks.
11. Investment Opportunity of a Lifetime
A little over three years ago, things were very different for Guild Education. However, once the investors started seeing the obvious advantages of putting their money where the brilliance and common sense were, things started to grow exponentially. One of those investors was Redpoint, which saw GE for what it would become. The potential to grow is both a quality of Guild Education and their driving premise. Anyone can learn and do better, and these women are proving it thousands of people at a time.
12. Over Forty Thousand
So far, Guild Education has helped more than forty thousand people get the education they want and need to go further in their careers or to get new jobs entirely. They can see a day soon where that number is in the millions. It’s not hard to imagine that becoming the case. Moreover, we’re almost certain they’ll succeed because frankly, we can’t see a single reason why they wouldn’t. New companies are investing in their employees every day, and GE is helping them create the necessary digital platforms to facilitate that exchange. Someday, Guild Education may even have a sign that says the same thing as McDonald’s, “Billions and Billions Served.”
13. It’s Just School… What’s The Big Holdup?
It can be difficult for people from older generations to fully understand what’s holding people under forty back from getting an education. It wasn’t that long ago that a young person who wanted to brighten their future could go to college and pay off their student loans while they went to classes with a minimum wage, part-time job. If you were fortunate enough to be a part of one of those generations, we can accept that it probably didn’t occur to you to do the math. Today, a person who wants to spend even one year in college, not enough to get a degree, would need to spend more money then they could make working full time for the whole year to cover their tuition and books. That won’t feed them, or keep a roof over their heads, and forget about buying anything else, like a car. Companies like Guild Education are helping to remove that barrier for people everywhere.
14. Time is Not on Our Side
If you’re under forty and a part of the workforce, then you’re probably one of the over sixty million people who haven’t managed to get their degree. If you’re not, then you know people who are in that group. Almost thirty million people have started school but been unable to finish, and it’s not because they don’t have the brains for it. Sometimes it’s not the money, but the time that’s the biggest issue. By connecting employers and employees with online education, Guild Education is aiding in removing that roadblock as well. Now students can take the courses they need when they have enough time to spare.
15. Not Big But Huge
You might expect a company worth over a billion dollars, the sort of company that features on Forbes, to be a grandiose affair with tens of thousands of employees like Microsoft and Disney, but you’d be wrong. According to CrunchBase, a hundred or fewer employees are working for Guild Education at this time. That’s a small handful of people working to make a staggeringly massive impact in the world of education. We’re certainly impressed.
16. Less Than Half a Decade
A company doesn’t have to have a hundred years’ worth of reputation to play with the big dogs anymore. Though it was rare in the past for an upstart to do so well, it’s becoming more common now. Guild Education was founded in 2015. That means they haven’t even been around for half of a decade yet, and they’re still making sizeable waves and changing the way corporations do business all over. Hopefully, in another five years, when they reach their first decade in business, it will be as usual for employees to expect education benefits as it is for tenants to expect their landlords to offer liveable housing.
17. Working Moms Unite!
Not only can working mothers benefit from the services provided by Guild Education, but they have another reason to trust the company. Rachel is a mother, as well. She has twin daughters whom the Colorado Sun included in an article about her fantastic business. Most likely, those girls won’t ever need an employer to pay their way through school. However, if they do, it will probably only be available because of what their mother and her business partner have accomplished. Working mothers are an underserved market when it comes to education. It’s hard enough to find the time to work and care for children, let alone add more to your busy schedule. However, Rachel and GE are helping make a path so that women everywhere can get educated.
18. Not Only Ladies
We know we’ve talked a whole lot about women in this article, but Guild Education is for everyone. You don’t have to be a woman to get the benefit of this incredible company. Men and anyone else, regardless of their personal pronouns can partake as long as their employer signs the company up for GE.
19. What’s the Catch?
With all this win-win-win talk, there has to be a downside, doesn’t there? Well, we wouldn’t call it an actual ‘downside,’ but the companies do offer a ‘curated’ list of education opportunities. What does that mean? Well, you can’t just take whatever classes you want. Companies only benefit from employees who are educated in fields that are relevant to their work environment.
20. How Does Guild Education Make Money
Okay, so Guild Education helps employers and employees get access to both for-profit and not-for-profit education. Does that mean the companies are paying a billion dollars to GE to educate forty thousand people? Not exactly. In addition to their investors who put their money into helping GE expand their operations, they also make a percentage of the tuition fees that companies pay to educate their employees. There’s more to finances than meets the eye at first. Still, that’s the gist of where a billion dollars in valuation came from. It’s also noteworthy that ‘a billion dollars in valuation’ is not the same as having a billion dollars in the bank, in the same way as having a million-dollar home isn’t the same as having a million dollars in the bank.
Final Thoughts
Employers, if you want a better workforce, you need to help your employees get there, and joining Guild Education is one of the fastest-growing and most efficient ways to get there. Employees, if you want a better job, it’s time to find a company that will help you reach your goals, and managers who wish to get the big promotion should be upselling GE to their bosses. We’re a thousand percent behind this idea. The only question we have isn’t where do we sign up, but why didn’t someone think of this years ago? Guild Education is the future of the workforce, and that’s pretty much everyone, everywhere. Why not you?
