As both a TrainSignal consumer and instructor, I was a bit shocked to hear the news that the company had been acquired by Pluralsight for about 23.6 million. The IT training leader has kept up a good relationship with the IT community, sponsoring nearly every local VMUG I can recall and really working hard to connect on a personal level with their instructors. However, it seems that this acquisition actually poises Pluralsight, which is known for their training materials for developers, to penetrate the training market in a whole new way. After purchasing PeepCode, which focuses on the open-source training for professional web developers and designers, Pluralsight now has a fully in-depth portfolio of offerings in its network.
Some interesting numbers have shaken out of these two purchases. Pluralsight has roughly 300,000 users across 100 different companies. Thanks to acquisitions, their library of 500-ish courses now swells to the 1000+ range, along with several hundred instructors on staff. Additionally, TrainSignal’s CEO, Scott Skinger, and the product development director, Gary Eimerman, will be joining the Pluralsight executive team with oversight into the newly formed IT division.
Contents
New Cost Model?
My first thought was “OK, but how do we now consume this new mega-sized content library.” Per the press release:
Pluralsight, TrainSignal and PeepCode all operate on a premium content model. Users from all three, not to mention the entire developer community, will benefit from the consolidation of their respective catalogs within the Pluralsight platform with no price increase.
Whew, that’s a relief! For those who don’t already subscribe to TrainSignal, the model is one of a monthly subscription. Your subscription fee unlocks access to the entire site, including the ability to use an offline video player while on the go. It’s a much easier, and more economical model, than the former DVD distribution method, and the community has been pretty vocal with their praise.
Thoughts
I realize that as a contract instructor with TrainSignal, things are going to change in some way. Part of me is excited to think about the possibilities when considering reaching a larger audience, as the entire point of me spending such vast amounts of time creating videos is to spread the knowledge! Also, this surely smacks of a “DevOps” world when both IT training and development training share the same front end portal – it will be great to see both types of content being available to a single consumer.
I’ll also be very curious to see how this transition is executed, and wish the team at TrainSignal and Pluralsight nothing but the best as time moves forward.
