Acorn

I am the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Pursuit Technology, developer of the Acorn learning management system. My role involves overseeing high-level development, marketing strategy, people, and operations. I am very hands-on in every department. I do my best to attend every meeting amongst my teams and want to make sure everyone’s voice is heard within our company in terms of direction and improving processes.

Acorn is a commercial off-the-shelf platform with a suite of features that empower organizations to manage the learning, onboarding, recruitment, and performance management of their entire workforce. The platform provides employees with thousands of courses from third-party providers as well as custom interactive modules. Organizations can create personalized learning pathways to support workforce planning and ensure their learners have access to the best compliance and procedural training. Integrations with existing HR and payroll systems, as well as Acorn’s robust reporting capabilities, further allow organizations to easily track individual progression.

Overall, I wanted to innovate the antiquated space that is HR technologies. We started with the learning management system because nearly every solution we saw on the market was unintuitive and hard to use. So many LMS options just didn’t think of the user and followed old design philosophies.

Our integrations and partnerships such as LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Go1, and Microsoft Teams. Each one is amongst the first alliance of its kind in Australia. Integrations enhance the employee experience on our platform and provide additional value to our current technology stack with direct access to otherwise inaccessible content and segregated collaboration services. These integrations complement many of our clients’ job family frameworks, giving them the ability to map specialized third-party content to their unique needs. It further enables them to automate their capability development mapping and planning.

Our development strategy is innovative and collaborative. We utilize iterative improvement cycles. We plan according to triannual, annual, and quarterly roadmaps. Our goals are focused on what customers and clients actually seek. We utilize the knowledge of subject matter experts to guide our path.

Our support is a huge focus and strength for the Acorn product. Typically, IT support gets a bad reputation, but we are able to promise a 30-minute response time in our service level agreement, and we deliver. Our support team aims to meet specific KPIs which are linked to consistent feedback.

Our initial vertical was the government, and this has remained our most common industry to this day. We have, however, expanded and around 60% of our clients are now based within industries such as software, healthcare, resources, and legal.

Our integrations with existing internal systems and third-party content providers, security compliance (including IRAP, ISO, and WCAG), SCORM and TinCan compliance, gamification features, and capability mapping. 
All features of our product come ready-to-use within Acorn.

One hundred percent. To cater to our customers’ needs and requirements, we make certain that from to get-go our solution matches the solution a potential client needs and is looking for. We also provide an onboarding questionnaire to confirm we meet every expectation.

Yes, during our past seven years we have maintained a 100% retention rate.

We provide a wiki full of tip sheets, guides and patch notes. We provide in-person training. We also have Acorn Academy, which is filled with video guides and courses on how to use our product.

We have a support desk that delivers phone and email support, ticket support, and live chats as needed. We also have dedicated Customer Success Managers. Our support has enabled us to commit to and succeeds in providing a 30-minute response time in our SLA within AEST working hours. Whether that is technical support or minor bug fixes, we guarantee that all our customers are contacted by a dedicated Customer Success Manager less than half an hour after the first flag something with us. As part of our service to clients, we conduct regular meetings at their requested frequency, where stakeholders can engage the Acorn team with questions and provide feedback to ensure that our solution is the best-in-market product for the needs of their organizations.

About 3 million.

Our main focus will be the shift to incorporating capabilities within organizations. We want to be able to empower our users to find learning, career, and personal opportunities that are relevant to their skill sets. We want to enable clear development pathways and goals for each individual and organization within our ecosystem.