When OneRange’s co-founders, Steve Gilman and Houtan Fanisalek, were ideating their next project, corporate learning came to mind. Gilman, the startup’s CEO, told HR Brew that upskilling is an area ripe for improvement in the HR function.
“Why don’t we concentrate on something like professional development that everybody needs?” Gilman said.
Gilman and Fanisalek both had challenging experiences accessing employer dollars for continuing education, according to Gilman. The platform the duo designed would focus on easing access to upskilling for employees, and relieving some of the burden on HR and learning and development (L&D) teams.
HR and L&D pros are good at designing onboarding programs and managing compliance trainings, he said, but employees are craving more strategic, individualized, and continuous learning as a way to constantly be growing in their careers.
Founded in 2021, OneRange is “basically a marketplace that allows people to discover, get approval from their manager, and purchase any resource they want” as they upskill for their current role or even their next one. Since then, the company has raised $3 million in funding from SHRM, Hivers & Strivers, Evergreen Mountain Equity Partners, and Textbook Ventures.
New York-based OneRange is currently working with more than 25 enterprise clients across the globe including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent, said Gilman.
The platform is designed differently than a traditional LMS content library in that employees can search for the exact type of content they’d need, delivered in the way they learn best—be it an online learning course, a podcast, book, or conference—and immediately get access to those resources.
If the content they need isn’t available on the marketplace, employees can also add it to the platform.
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“We’re the only open marketplace where someone can actually add different providers and different resources to the system instantaneously and then unlock dollars from their companies to go buy it,” Gilman said, adding that this feature allows employees to have more control over their learning and access it with fewer hoops to jump through.
OneRange takes the organization and structure of learning and development “out of HR’s hands” and allows employees and managers to create bespoke upskilling programs quickly.
Gilman said this structure helps meet the rapidly changing upskilling needs of today. Employees or departments can leverage a learning budget, follow employer-set constraints, and use manager approval, to purchase external resources. And by using OneRange, the purchases are tracked in the platform and HR can use its insights to support the learning needs of other employees.
“Executives already do this kind of stuff,” he said. “But they swipe it on an Amex. Now it goes through a system.”
The platform relies on AI to tag and categorize content based on the individual contributors who are looking to unlock those skills.
This can be helpful to learning teams to better understand what employees are looking for as they develop their careers and that data can inform recommendations to others in similar roles or departments.
“Most of the time, we know it’s right for you because other people in your role across the board have been successful—no different than the way Netflix works,” he said.