Dive Brief:
- Pluralsight on Thursday announced its acquisition of online programmer mentoring platform HackHands.
- With the HackHands purchase, Pluralsight's seventh in two years, the platform will gain live one-on-one assistance capabilities, with instant requests for codign hep, video and audio chat, and two-way screen sharing and text editing available from over 4,000 developers and experts worldwide.
- Most recently, Pluralsight acquired coding education platform Code School and technical skills assessment tool Smarterer.
Dive Insight:
As we've written before, Pluralsight aims to be the "Netflix" of professional education. And it's doing so at a time that alternative pathways to job skills are gaining significant tracton.
Perhaps most notably, the HackHands acquisition will help to differentiate itself from services offered by LinkedIn and Lynda.com, the latter having been acquired by the former in April for $1.5 billion. While that deal's value proposition involves being able to direct jobseekers to the courses they need in order to gain skills for particular positions, Pluralsight's HackHands purchase will give users direct access to mentors and experts — and on top of the obvious advantage of live feedback, some of those experts may be potential employers.
The battle between the two over which becomes the go-to professional learning resource is still young, though Pluralsight certainly seems to have an advantage in coding education right now. How this plays out — and how traditional higher ed institutions move to meet the demand for these types of programs from a continuing education standpoint, if at all — will be interesting, to say the least.
