What do Vic­tor Hugo and Jeff Fer­nan­dez of Gro­vo have in com­mon?  They both are relat­ed to the quote “noth­ing is more pow­er­ful as an idea whose time has come”

Jeff has raised a total of $65 mil­lion dol­lars for his start up Gro­vo to fund the newest big under­served mar­ket of cor­po­rate employ­ee train­ing with his idea of “microlearn­ing”.

In the last year Gro­vo has dou­bled their head count to 200 employ­ees and with the recent $40 mil­lion dol­lars in new cap­i­tal invest­ment most like­ly the head­count will be growing.

But what is Microlearning?

Accord­ing to the Gro­vo website:

“It’s the process of learn­ing com­plex skills in short, focused seg­ments. After years of test­ing, we’ve found that 60-sec­ond videos, strate­gi­cal­ly orga­nized into focused learn­ing tracks, deliv­er the best results in the least amount of time. After years of test­ing, we’ve found that 60-sec­ond videos, strate­gi­cal­ly orga­nized into focused learn­ing tracks, deliv­er the best results in the least amount of time.”

In a nut­shell micro learn­ing is the cre­ation of a series of short one minute videos on impor­tant top­ics like this one:

Learn how to Post to a Face­book Timeline

Gro­vo makes the claim that they are “Train­ing the 21^st Cen­tu­ry Brain”.  I per­son­al­ly would take that with a grain of salt.  There is absolute­ly noth­ing I can say that I have seen to make me con­sid­er this as true except the fact that the com­pa­ny exists with­in the same his­tor­i­cal time­frame.  There real­ly isn’t much inno­va­tion involved with mak­ing instruc­tion­al videos.  Even Walt Dis­ney made them for the mil­i­tary dur­ing World War II and those could teach a sol­dier how to put togeth­er 50 cal­iber machine guns.  Now that’s instruction!

Founded in 2010, Grovo has delivered more than 5 million 60–90 second bite size learning “moments”.

Gro­vo wants to call it micro-learn­ing, are you seri­ous? They’re just instruc­tion­al videos, like all the oth­er instruc­tion­al videos on YouTube!  It’s insane, if you watch the instruc­tion­al video about micro learn­ing on Grovo’s own web­site – you would jump out a win­dow it’s so bad.  Yet, they’ve received mon­ey out of major invest­ment firms because peo­ple hate edu­cat­ing oth­er peo­ple.  But it you want a job, they have the mon­ey to hire plen­ty of new folks.

This New York City Start­up co-founder and CEO Jeff Fer­nan­dez says it even uses this for­mat inter­nal­ly and is plan­ning on releas­ing it pub­licly.  Its own cul­ture of learn­ing has earned the com­pa­ny recog­ni­tion as a “Best Place to Work” by Entre­pre­neur Mag­a­zine.  They charge a sub­scrip­tion fee.  They just added WeWork, the Wyn­d­ham Hotel Group and the Nation­al Bas­ket­ball Asso­ci­a­tion to their list of com­pa­nies that will pay them to do what YouTube can do for free.  Fer­nan­dez claims that it’s “all about how you lay out and struc­ture the information.”

Hernandez added that throughout 2015, Grovo’s annual revenue went up 400 percent.

They’re talk­ing about adding GIFs, quizzes, pod­casts as well as expan­sion into inter­na­tion­al mar­kets, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly right away.  The glob­al mar­ket is a must for 2017 and beyond.  At present what Gro­vo offers has been used in 190 dif­fer­ent coun­tries although most of the com­pa­nies ser­vices are occur­ring right here in the U.S.

So if Gro­vo is rein­vent­ing learn­ing for today’s work­force, from onboard­ing to lead­er­ship train­ing with 60-sec­ond microlearn­ing videos teach­ing every­thing 21st cen­tu­ry employ­ees need. Maybe they should be teach­ing every­one how to write a resume that will actu­al­ly get some­one a job.  Speak­ing of which maybe you should be send­ing Gro­vo a resume.  Before they hire some­one else to make a video on how to send an inter-office e‑mail.