“The tip of the spear” is an old military idiom commonly referring to the soldiers on the front line of the troop. The trailblazers, if you will.
And that’s exactly the role Sara Leoni sees for continuing education leaders inside the larger higher education environment.
As CEO of GreenFig, which partners with universities to offer turnkey digital skills certificate courses and microdegrees, she brings a long history of trailblazing both inside and outside of higher ed.
After cutting her teeth at fintech giants like Visa and E*TRADE, as well as dot.com darlings like Yahoo and CafePress, she landed in the higher ed space by way of BookRenter, an online platform that pioneered the book rental space.
Now building on her theme of edu-disruption at GreenFig, she uses her broad-reaching experience to lead a team that creates impactful curriculum at scale for over 20 leading universities.
On Episode 04 of the Education Beyond Degrees podcast, she tells us all about how CE professionals can help diverse learners reinvent their careers and level up their earning power.
You can tune in above👆 or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the RSS feed or anywhere you get your podcasts.
On this episode, you’ll learn:
- When universities and employers partner, they become unstoppable in closing the global skills gap
- Why launching high-quality, diverse, impactful curriculum is far more attainable to colleges than it was even a few years ago
- Why “codeless” occupations (digital marketing, sales, customer success, HR) often get overlooked for microcredentials far more than their “coded” or technical counterparts
- The importance of ensuring critical thinking is prioritized in certificate and microdegree programs.
What to listen for:
[4:26] The unexpected overlap between a dean’s role in an academic setting versus a CEO’s role in the private sector (Hint: Both need to know what it takes to grow and position a business)
[6:25] The trajectory of GreenFig over the last few years, from start to scale
[9:29] Why credentialing, signalling and brand recognition are still more important than ever (and the role higher education brands play in that)
[10:21] Sara shares how half of the individuals in the market need upskilling or reskilling at this very moment in order to stay relevant
[12:17] How GreenFig goes beyond non-credit to embed its own certificate courses into existing credit curriculum to equip students with more work-ready skill sets
[14:46] Sara shares her observations on what contributes to CE’s respect and recognition within the larger university system
[15:57] A good reminder that reinvention comes at all ages, but that the average student age at GreenFig is 33. We dive deeper into a few of the possible student pathways to a new microdegree
[18:24] The questions the GreenFig team asks participants onboarding into a program to launch or jumpstart their career
[20:08] The importance of ensuring critical thinking is prioritized for certificate courses and micro degrees. As Sara aptly put it, “It’s the difference between teaching someone how to use new technology and teaching them why they’re using it in the first place.”
[22:05] Developing curriculum that can keep pace with how fast the world is changing, and why infrastructure from a partner can help CE teams save money and refresh content more quickly
[24:01] How CE professionals can use their own research and results to inform their presidents and provosts what the broader market wants — which is usually much harder for folks on the academic side to ascertain
[24:48] Getting inside the mind of a dean who thinks their team should be able to build all their own curriculum from scratch and replicate what third-party partners bring to the table (and how inefficient that often is)
[27:00] Why there will always be institutions that can build it all on their own — but why partnering often makes more sense for those divisions without deep coffers, access to faculty or the ability to develop the content and measure success
[28:18] Taking inspiration from GreenFig’s learner success team, which has the sole job of making sure the learners have what they need to be successful
[29:52] Why barriers to speed and flexibility are often found right within the university’s procurement department and why a ‘test and iterate’ mindset could benefit all involved
[34:42] The new soft skill sets employers are requiring alongside the technical skills that will take learners into the future
Links from the episode👇👇 GreenFig Sara Leoni’s LinkedIn Meni’s LinkedIn The Education Beyond Degrees Homepage
Transcript from the episode
*Today’s weather has 100% chance of some spelling errors in the AI-powered transcript below. Hope you won’t hold it against me!
Meni: Hey, Sara. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sara: Yes, it’s my pleasure. Just super excited to be here.
Meni: Well, I wanted to just get started. Like I think people should know a little bit about you and where you’ve come from and how you’ve gotten to where you are today. So give us a little idea of your background and where you are today in GreenFig and just tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sara: I always like to start with the very front end of my background, which is as a college athlete, which taught me so many different life skills. I’m incredibly competitive. I am super team-based. I love to win. I love to partner and ultimately, as I think about my career, that beginning part as an athlete really just helped to build some great foundational skills.
I went to university at UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I was an all-American softball player and when I graduated from college, because I’d had all this experience in softball, but actually pretty limited experience on the professional side, I wasn’t exactly sure where my path would lead, quite frankly.
I went to work for a small relatively well-known organization called visa. I actually started as an administrative assistant. It was a great way to get my foot in the door. Built a number of great organizational skills. I supported a whole team of executives, so understanding of how executives worked.
But really my passion was around marketing and I always knew that I wanted to figure out how to move into more of a marketing role. Specifically, as the .com boom was happening within an online organization. And early in my career, I had an opportunity to join a women.com. I ran their first email marketing program.
We supported all of the first publications and that experience led me to another small organization called E-Trade. We’re at a great opportunity. In a number of different roles, again, just to really build much more of my skill sets and experience. And ultimately, I will say the one thing about my marketing background was I was always much more of a spreadsheet, data focused marketer than I was a brand focused marketer.
And that led me to lots of different opportunities, especially as technology started to just to take hold as we had more data and analytics at our fingertips. And through my career, I was at brands like Yahoo. And being in the Bay area, I had an opportunity to go back to some smaller start-up brands that were solving really big problems in unique ways with really dynamic teams.
And I found myself in an organization called bookrenter.com. I tell you this story because it’s a big reason why I’m where I’m at today. Especially because of my passion around education and helping individuals really build that education and skills so that they can have things like social mobility super important.
But I went to an organization called bookrenter.com, where it had an opportunity to support hundreds of thousands of college students to rent their textbooks, right? To create that affordability around what was at the time, the number two expense that college students faced outside of or at least on the academic side of things.
Within that I had an opportunity not just to do marketing, but really to focus holistically on business growth, business operations. I took that organization from a couple million dollars annually to over $50 million annually. And eventually I was asked to step in and run the organization as the CEO.
And for me, part of what brought me to GreenFig, right? Build that passion through that experience within higher ed and at GreenFig, we had a great opportunity with the changing dynamics in terms of our economy, the need for new skills. I saw a really interesting way for us to be able to compliment the world of higher education in this really growing dynamic area, that’s going to be so important to our workforce, not just today, but well into the future.
Meni: So it’s really interesting, you talking about making the jump to CEO. I feel like I’ve been having this conversation with so many people recently about making a jump from a coordinator level or a manager or an associate Dean to a Dean level and how different and unique that jump is.
What was the transition for you moving into your first CEO role?
Sara: Yeah well, we were going through some pretty significant is that the time at this particular organization? I think as sometimes happens the leader of the company was either asked to stand down or decided to stand down, you can read between the lines. The board tapped me; I think for a number of reasons. One was, I have a strong focus around leadership and building really strong, amazing teams providing those teams with the ability to really spread their wings and find success and grow and all of those good things.
And I just had a really strong focus on what it would take to grow a business and what were the mechanics behind growing a business? And I think frankly, my background in marketing, given that a big part of any business is how you position that business, who are the customers that you’re serving. How do you best serve those customers?
And so the, it was, for me, it was the board asked me to step into the role and then I had a great support system with the folks that were leading that board. And I had a phenomenal team that, that backed me up. And I think that those two combined components of the top down and bottom up were key elements to help make me successful in that role.
Meni: So when you move to GreenFig. Where was GreenFig as a company? When I first met you a couple of years ago at a conference, we had talked a little bit about, and I got a better understanding about GreenFig, which is a great company, where was GreenFig at the point that I met you a couple of years ago, compared to where it’s at today.
Tell us a little bit about the company.
Sara: Yeah, so when I first joined GreenFig, it was a very small organization. We had been founded actually out of Bend, Oregon. There was a need to bring more technology-based talent to that local region and green fig was founded out of that need where basically a lot of the companies that we’re looking to hire either entry level, talent, or talent that could help them with things like digital transformation initiatives or to help them just really bring their organizations into more of the digital economy. And they found it was really hard to find talent that can fill that role and that region. And so green figs first program was brought to life through a couple of partnerships with some universities George Fox University, Oregon State University.
And it was at the time it was a 12-week certificate course. Kind of similar, at least in nature where we brought in practitioners, where we had individuals applying all their learning, where we had them in technologies, earning credentials, certifications from those technology companies.
And at the end of this experience what they found was everybody got jobs, right? Like there was very clear that this recipe for helping individuals develop these skills. Now at the time, I wouldn’t say that it was incredibly scalable or that it was in the perfect sort of position with the right sort of both scale, but also polished to take to university partners. And so that was a big part of what I did. I came in, we recruited to some phenomenal practitioners, industry experts in the core competencies that we developed certificate courses in. We developed both a combination of asynchronous learning, as well as synchronous learning. Really refined the model based on a bunch of research that we did with prospective learners about what was the ideal program, right? What would be ideal for them to either develop the new skills that make them more relevant or develop the skills that they need to get jobs in today’s economy because they were struggling? And so one part was product and really bringing the product up to scale up to the level that I was really happy with.
I have a very strong commitment to customer experience. And so we had to have, what we measure net promoter score. We had to have a phenomenal net promoter score. And then the second component was thinking about, well, how do we bring these? We know that the idea of this certificate course works, right? We know that we can help people build the right skills, both hard and soft, where that helps them with an on-ramp into a great career. Now, how do we expose this to more individuals? And there, there were a couple components for me that really led us to the strategy of working with continuing professional education.
You know, one was and we had a number of folks that came through the program and they’re like, it’s great that I went through GreenFig but nobody knows who GreenFig is, right? And that really hit home for me because the recognition, understanding that there’s an importance on credentials and recognition led me to think, wow, it would be a great opportunity to help them earn credentials that are recognizable in their local area.
So that was one component. And then the second, I’m a huge believer in the entire process around higher education. I think that we’re going to continue to see things evolve because the market and the economy is going to continue to evolve. The reality is outside of the four-year degree, lifelong learning and skill development has never become more important, right? And that’s not going to slow down. We’re going to continue to see that accelerate. I mean, we talk about stats all the time that more than half of individuals in these roles need some sort of up-skilling or re-skilling so that they can stay relevant. And we know that for institutions, especially on the, not for credit side, developing these programs or courses that speak directly to the market, right, that have those job-ready skillsets that integrate technology training on platforms like Salesforce, platforms, like Google analytics platforms, like Google ads, like that’s not a simple thing to do. And those platforms are always changing.
And so we saw an opportunity because of those things to partner with not for the, not-for-credit side of the house or the continuing education side of the house, and we’ve brought on about 20 partners, really fantastic brands. We call them partners. We collaborate with them. At the end of the day, we are serving their community, their learners under their brand. And so for us it’s just incredibly important that we are developing the best experience that drives the most impactful outcomes.
Meni: It’s so interesting how, the conversations that you and I have had, and really the conversations around higher ed in general are kind of still in the transition phase right now. Like in this last year, we know that COVID has forced higher ed to change everything. And it’s interesting to see that they’ve actually been able to navigate those waters and make those transitions pretty quickly, which is not really standard practice in the traditional model. But we know in CE and continuing and professional education, that’s been the case for years.
Have you ever, I know that you mostly work with continuing and professional education areas, have you worked with any schools with their traditional higher ed model learners and, or faculty before.
Sara: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve worked with a number of colleges and universities where we’ve embedded our certificate courses into their existing curriculum for credit because we know that, I’m a big believer that if we can graduate students with work ready, skillsets and experience of application of those skillsets, they have a much better chance of graduating and walking into jobs. And we all know how important that first job is.
So today we work with a couple of universities. I won’t see that’s a core focus. I can talk about why we would love to be able to expand our efforts there. But we have pilots running all the time and we’ve got our content integrated right now into a pilot in Denver where students are actively engaging with our content and our curriculum, and they have an instructor who’s overseeing more of the live components and the lab components using all of our playbooks, all of our activities et cetera.
And so we’re excited about the potential there. Obviously when you get into the for-credit side, it gets a little bit murkier and more challenging. And I think that over time as institutions continue to evolve and understand the importance of those work ready skillsets. Yeah, I think we’ll continue to see change and movement in that direction.
Meni: How do you think continuing professional education departments are currently being perceived within their own institution? Just in general not to a specific institution, but what do you think their, I dunno, reputation or how other people’s or how other people on campus view them as.
Sara: Yeah, it’s interesting. I can’t say that I’ve got deep expertise to give a really good perspective there. From the conversations that I’ve had, where we’re working with institutions on the for-credit side, in many cases, they talk very positively about their continuing professional education counterparts.
I know that historically there’s been a question around, well, what types of programs, courses, et cetera, they bring to market. But what I see is massive innovation happening on the continuing professional education side and whether or not they have been able to build the respect at this point and respect and recognition at this point, I think the jury is still out. What I absolutely see with, as folks bring on new programs that make an impact that bring in and I hasten to talk just about revenue because, at the end of the day, yes, we are a business, continuing professional education, they are a revenue center.
But at the end of the day, it’s also about impact, right? And how are we bringing the right sort of programs and opportunities to communities that need it and alumni that need it. And I think in that case, the continuing and professional education division is really the tip of the spear. And I see many of these organizations doing some really exciting things that if they don’t have if folks yours aren’t perked up quite yet, they will be very soon.
Meni: So I have not prepped you for this question and I probably should have, so sorry about putting you on the spot, but when you look at the participants in your programs at GreenFig, what are you seeing in terms of ages of the people participating?
Is there an age range or is there a specific age that you just continue to see as the majority of the students who take the programs?
Sara: No it’s definitely a range. Our average age is typically around 33. I will say it, it does shift some, depending on the career category that we’re focused on.
I may not have mentioned this, but we are helping individuals more in what we call the COPAS space. Well, we are more traditional business type roles, digital marketing sales, operations, customer success, where we know technology plays a role. So we definitely see a mix of individuals who are in the 23, 24 range that graduated. Maybe didn’t quite get into the career that they had anticipated. They’re now coming back to put that polish on, right? To get those jobs.
We have a huge percentage of folks that graduated 10-15 years ago, went into these roles. There’s never been any specific training around these disciplines. Again, whether it’s concept strategies, the technology, data, and so they’re coming back because they feel like they need the skills to continue to both do their job, but also advance in their career.
We’ve got small businesses, right? Especially I will say on the digital marketing side who are trying to reinvent themselves right now with COVID. And so we really see a pretty significant array of ages. We’ve had folks in the last few cohorts between 50 and 60, who are contractors who again are trying to, with the remote work, with the opportunity of more remote jobs build those skills so that they can highlight themselves on platforms like LinkedIn, et cetera. But overall, our average age is really closer to that 33 range.
Meni: I love when you talk about this era, you actually sound like a CPE Dean who is like, who actually knows what the role of CPE should be and what it can be. So it’s really exciting to hear you talk about it. So when these students come in and take the program, I’m assuming you guys do some type of pre-assessment for those students, do you ask them, before they take the program, what their ultimate goal is by completing the program?
Sara: We do as they’re starting typically. We try frankly, not to put too much in front of the, in front of the enrollment process because we don’t want to slow things down too much.
Typically, we’ll ask if they’re really new to a particular career category or discipline. If they’ve got some experience or they’re more advanced because that’ll give us a sense of what’s the makeup of that cohort that’s coming through. You know, are they more newbies and we need to start more basic or are they more advanced and how do we make sure that we are managing each of those levels of kind of equilibrium, if you will.
Does that answer your question?
Meni: Yeah, what I’m trying to figure out is are most of your students coming in to take the program because they want to get a job afterwards. Are they coming in because they just want to learn a new skill for their current job? What do you think the makeup of your student population is in terms of why they come for the program?
Sara: Yeah, I would say it’s. I mean, it’s a complete split right now. I would say that 50% are coming because they want a new career. They’re either looking at adjacent careers or opportunities. They’ve got some experience. Maybe they’ve got some work experience, but they recognize that the career isn’t really what they want to do long-term. And so they want to build new skills so that they can step into something or again, they could be brand new graduates that are looking to build skills again to jumpstart a career. And then we do have about 50% of the folks that are in jobs. And in those jobs they recognize they’re not able to leverage what is, you know, whether, again, it’s the data side or the technology side, or they see things moving really fastly from a platform perspective and understand that for them to be most effective in their roles, they need to understand how to use those tools.
And I will say, our focus is really to help people become better critical thinkers in each of these areas, right? So you can go to Salesforce, let’s say, and you can learn how to use Salesforce through their Trailhead product. The challenge is people need to understand why they’re using the product, right? They need to know what questions they ask so that they’re being smart about how they develop their business or their strategies.
And this is a big differentiator for us is that we want people to learn how to ask those questions from people who are in those jobs.
Meni: I completely agree with you and I see that same exact trend happening in the certificate programs and the development programs that we build in CPE. We are seeing, it’s almost 50/50 of people trying to learn something new for their current job or enter the workforce.
And I think it’s going to become, I personally feel like it’s going to start leaning more towards the people who are going to be looking for new jobs, especially as we come out of this recession or begin to come out of this recession at some point. So it’ll be really interesting what, your programs and what other CPE programs begin to look like in terms of student population.
Sara: Yeah, I will say we’ve definitely seen, even in the last six months, more of a shift to people looking forward, looking for jobs, right? Whether they’ve been displaced or they were laid off because of COVID and now they’re looking for whether it’s remote work or local work. But they’re coming because their end goal is to secure that position.
Meni: So then how do you think CPE units are going to evolve or change in the next one year to year up to like five years from today? How do you think that they’re going to continue to look and be different from what they are right now?
Sara: I do think that the development of this curriculum is not easy, right? There’s where we spend a lot of time and money. We bring in a lot of different perspectives into the content that we create, the technologies we integrate, et cetera. And, part of the value that we bring is we can disperse that cost across many universities, right? Versus one university having to stand up a program and over time have to make up the cost of that program, right? Say over a six, seven-year period. Our ability to do that as much, much quicker. And the challenge is that a lot of the, a lot of the skills that are needed are changing. And so that curriculum has to continue to evolve.
We change our curriculum, not all of it, to be very clear but we make updates on a quarterly basis. That can be really expensive. And so I think, continuing your professional education in this great situation where they can try things on for size, right? They can use partners to see what sticks, what doesn’t stick, what’s right for their community, what may not be right for their community, without putting a ton of money against it. And then, I think five years from now, they can start to recognize, well, is this something that we want to do differently? Is this something that we can build on our own? Have we created an infrastructure that’s similar to someone like a GreenFig and there are obviously other providers in the space so that we can create content that enables folks to build skills that are right, for our local region or economy.
And I think that shift will happen. But in the near term, they have an opportunity to be really innovative and entrepreneurial in this space. And I think again, I’ll use the tip of the spear because I think they can bring things back to their presidents and provosts on things that are working, right?
Signals that are happening in the economy, that it might be much harder for folks on the academic side to do. So I do think it’s going to shift over time. I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job, right? I think long-term work, we’re going to bring differentiation and we’re going to bring capabilities that are just going to be more challenging.
Salesforce is right up the street from my office here, and we have relationships with folks at these, both these technology organizations, but with practitioners around the country. So there’s components that we can bring that may be more difficult for a certain institutional type to develop.
Meni: I have something to admit when I was a dean and I was in the decision-making spot, anytime a vendor would come up to me with a program idea, I would always set it to the side and be like, I could build this on my own. I don’t need them. I spent a lot of my early career thinking that I could just replicate what vendors do because, why pay a vendor to do what they do when I can just do it?
And honestly it took coming to the private side and eventually building SpurCG to realize there is just so much, it’s so much simpler to bring in somebody who’s done it well and has the metrics to show that they’re successful, to bring it into their institution rather than trying to build it on our own. And I am amazed as I look back at my career and think about, I really wonder how many opportunities I missed because I just didn’t take people who’ve already created curriculum too seriously, just because I wanted my institution to own everything and to own the curriculum.
But now it feels like we’re out there explaining to deans and provosts it’s not just about intellectual property and who owns the curriculum, it’s about getting the appropriate program into your institution for students to be able to come in and take it. And honestly, companies like GreenFig and other vendors out there who have the metrics that show that they’re able to put people into the workforce based on the completion of their program. That’s what we look for as CPE professionals. Well, that’s what we expect. We want our programs to look like that. It’s always something that we’re now preaching more than ever is that you should take these organizations and these vendors seriously, because they could really make a difference.
When you’re talking to a dean or to an institution, are they just saying, ‘ah, no, thanks, we don’t need it’ or are you getting more people to listen now than before?
Sara: Yeah, we definitely see that we can get folks at least to perk up and listen. I mean, there are always going to be those institutions that believe that they can build all of this on their own. And some can, and they can do it incredibly effectively. Those aren’t the folks that we are actively working to speak to. But we’re working to build relationships with universities that don’t have those capabilities that don’t have deep pockets, right? That don’t have access to whether it’s faculty or other resources to develop this content. And I think that there’s a lot more of those universities than the former.
I will say for us at GreenFig I tend to be an incredibly transparent, very direct CEO. It’s just, that’s who I am as an individual. And when I talk about transparency, I mean, I’m happy to bring folks really far under the fold. And we do things like we integrate satisfaction scores, what we use a platform called Net Promoter Score, which is a benchmarking tool around the country (Amazon and Apple uses it) and while we’re collecting those data points for learners at every single one of our university partners, we show all of that data, right? So for us, the proof is in the pudding and we make sure we have a what we call learner success team. And that success team is their sole job is to make sure that our learners have the resources they need to be successful. And we map whether somebody is in low risk, moderate risk or high risk and when they enter high risk, we articulate that to our school partners. We want them to know and not be surprised. And we want to know why, right? Is there something we can avoid or is it just not a great match? And then we work with our partners to say, do we want to just give that person a refund because we want to maintain our brand and reputation? And so, and we share net promoter scores over time.
So I think for us it’s about transparency. It’s about results. You know, the, again, the proof’s in the pudding when 90% of the folks that start GreenFig program or course complete it. And those stats are coming through because they’re issuing the certificate of completion. Like for us, that’s a big differentiator. And again, it’s just, it’s our core focus around their community’s success.
Meni: I’m going to put you on the spot again, because now I know you’ve been working with CPE organizations and universities around the country for a while now. In the process of working with all these and with all these schools and meeting with all these individuals from deans and vice-presidents all the way down, if you could change one thing that changed the way of thinking or the minds of some of these people, how they work, or some of their decision-making to show them how the evolution of CPE or programming might go?
From an outsider’s perspective, what would you want CE leaders to finally like really come to the realization or begin thinking about as the future of where CPE is going?
Sara: It’s interesting. The barriers that we’ve hit aren’t with CPE leaders. I think most of the ones we’ve talked and talked to have, they see the light, right? They understand they are willing to, you call them vendors, I call them partners, they’re willing to have the partner dialogue. They’re interested in bringing these folks in. They’re doing their research. They’re spending the time. The challenge that we see is that they’re, in many cases, handcuffed by procurement services, right?
They have to run through an entire RFP process. And on one hand, you know, there’s probably great data points that come out of that and it gives them visibility across the market, et cetera, et cetera. In some cases, they know who they want to work with, right? But they still have to manage through this process because it’s been regulated or introduced by the university or the system or the public system. And that’s got to change. I mean, higher ed needs to have, they need to have requirements, right? Because of the fact that they are the ones that are accredited and issuing their recognizable credentials, et cetera.
I mean, their communities and the learners they serve, they absolutely deserve it. But there should completely be more flexibility for them to move faster. Because this is what we do as organizations, right? We test and we iterate and if it works, great. We improve it. If it doesn’t work, we move on.
And I think that’s the mentality that higher education, again, I say this coming from the private side, but to me, that’s the mentality that higher education needs to be able to adjust to so that they can become more nimble and really meet the needs of their students and local economies.
Meni: You hit it right on the head with procurement. Oh my goodness, what a process some of these schools have with procurement! And I know the other side of it! I actually know exactly what procurement has to go to, to approve these, but coming at it from a consultant side, it has been such a struggle when you have such like an obvious win for the institution that it’s being held up by one piece of regulatory or whatever it is, that’s holding up a potential partnership.
And it’s almost like that at every institution. So, oh man, I completely feel that.
Just to kind of close this out I’m really interested to hear, like what excites you the most about the future of what you’re doing at GreenFig and the future of what we do in the CPE space?
Sara: Yeah, I think for us at GreenFig the element that’s incredibly exciting is the number of partners that we’re bringing on across a whole multitude of types, right? So we don’t have to, again, we’re not targeting the brands that can create a lot of this content on their own or believe that they can create this content, but we are enabling lots of colleges and universities around the country to bring very diverse, impactful content, skills, curriculum to their local communities in ways that they never could before.
And for me, that’s super exciting because it just means that we have the opportunity to reach a larger diverse group and that we’re able to have a bigger impact because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, right? Is how many folks are we able to attract? How many folks end up coming out of one of our courses and they’re able to move their career forward in a different way?
So I’m excited about that potential. I see that universities are becoming more and more open, especially again, CPE more and more open. I do think there’s massive opportunity in the for-credit space to integrate the types of skills that we’re developing.
I don’t want to get too excited about that too quickly because, again, I’ve been on that side of the fence and it’s a little bit more challenging, but I do, I think the way that the world is moving and the fact that employers are requiring new skillsets. Again, many of the skillsets that universities teach, right? Like critical thinking communication. Those are always at the top of the list, but how do we help these folks build some additional technical skills?
So I think the fact that higher education as a whole is continuing to move in the space of innovation for me is super exciting. And then from a product perspective, we’re going to continue to improve and evolve. And we’re launching three new certificate courses this year, which will allow us to span, expand our reach within each of these university communities. And again, expand our impact.
Meni: That’s awesome. So thank you. You guys are doing awesome work at GreenFig. I know your metrics. We’ve worked together. And that is what excites me most about what you guys do at green fig. And Sara, thank you so much. This has been a really fun podcast with you.
Sara: Yeah, no, thank you for having me, Meni, again, it was my pleasure.
