In starting a new tradition, I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the milestones and successes at 5miles in 2021.
It is great to be able to share that 2021 has been the best year for 5miles thus far. As COVID-19 continued to impact our lives, most of our clients and members worked from home, which strongly boosted online learning.
Like our members, we also love numbers. Let’s start with some stats:
- 200,000 learning moments
- 25 new clients
- 107% revenue growth
This wouldn’t have been possible without the endless drive of our members, the strong support of our customers and the unbridled dedication of our team.
To cap off the year, we’ve selected the accomplishments we’re most proud of on the product, training, and business sides.
Check them out below!
Product
At 5miles, our mission is to create the best learning experience for business professionals. Throughout the year, our team has focused on improving the overall experience of 5miles by launching new features, improving the design and usability of our learning tool, and by making it faster and more reliable.
The highlight of this year was the launch of Experience Points in May. We believe it is a great way for our members to stay motivated and continue their learning journey. The impact on learning activity has been astonishing: 2,328,920 XPs have been collected this year and we saw a 25% increase in the overall engagement.
It is our top priority to make sure that our trainings are relevant for everyone, whether you are a beginner or an expert. Hence, it is key that people start learning at the right level. In August we took this to the next stage by designing short skill level assessments, which enables our members to quickly determine the starting point of their personalized learning journey.
Finally, we have made an important step in making 5miles more accessible. We are fully integrated with Degreed, a learning experience platform (LXP). Our members can easily log in with Single Sign On (SSO), and now our course library as well as the course completions are fully integrated. Next to this, we've strengthened our partnership with Studytube, one of the fastest growing learning portals in the Netherlands. The 5miles trainings are now all available via Studytube.
Training
To deliver the best learning experience to our members, our Content team plays an crucial role. Our Content-experts create new trainings and make sure our library of over 700 online bite-sized challenges stays up to date. I’d like to share four milestones with you.
Throughout the year, our team has been constantly working on updating the Teams training. With nearly 250 million monthly users, Microsoft’s communication and collaboration tool is also very popular with our SME and corporate clients. Year to date, there have been 23 releases, so keeping our training up to date was top priority. Key changes comprised of updates in the Teams layout, an updated meeting experience and new emojis. It is very cool to see that Teams is now the 3rd most popular 5miles training, after Excel and PowerPoint.
In May, we launched a new PowerPoint training, focused on creating better presentations. Our content authors collaborated with communication and PowerPoint experts Suzanne Meijles from ProTaal, Wouter Spoor from ROOPS and some of our key clients. Our goal is to help people create well-structured presentations that leaves their audience both inspired and convinced of the message and storyline. It is built upon the Minto Pyramid Principle, a well-known framework developed by McKinsey for writing and presenting ideas.
Moreover, since we discovered increased demand for our trainings from Germany, in June, we have launched the first German versions of the Excel Intermediate 1 & 2 and the VBA Beginner learning tracks. More than 3,000 German challenges have been completed this year and they are rated with an 8.6 out 10. To facilitate the best learning experience, our member support services are also offered in German. A special thanks goes to our launching customer in Germany for their valuable support in the translation process.
“5miles is ein tolles Programm” ?? pic.twitter.com/ysiAAzT5yy
— Chris van Voorden (@ChrisVoorden) November 13, 2021
Finally, our Power BI curriculum is also becoming more popular with dashboarding skills being highly in demand at most of our clients. In 2019 and 2020, we created the first beginner and intermediate challenges together with the Dutch Power BI expert Jeroen Heerschop (LinkedIn) and his team at Get Responsive. In 2021, the 5miles Power BI trainings have been followed by thousands of professionals globally. At this moment, the team is working on expanding the Power BI offering and we are also creating the first challenges for Power Apps and Power Automate.
Want to stay up to date? Follow the 5miles LinkedIn page to be the first to hear about our new training launches!
Team and Company
As COVID-19 continued to play a significant role in our way of working, the team mainly worked from their homes in the Netherlands or while traveling abroad. During 2021, our team members made the best of it and worked from Colombia, India, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
After so many Teams calls, it was super nice to finally catch up with at least part of the team in September at Zandvoort beach. We combined a healthy lunch with our quarterly review meeting.
What’s more, during 2021, we welcomed 25 new clients and saw our revenue increase by more than 100%. It is amazing to see that companies in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK and USA are offering 5miles to their employees. We are very grateful to be working together with so many inspiring people at these organizations.
In February, we launched our new website and in November we launched the new career page. At this moment, we are recruiting for an Enterprise Account Executive and a Customer Success intern to keep up with the high growth rate.
In May, we released our first whitepaper for our Dutch community to discover the trends and best practices around corporate learning. Check out this page for more information (in Dutch) and to download the whitepaper. A big thank you to Cees Colijn, HR Director at Euronext in Amsterdam, for his contribution to the paper.
To top off the year: in August, we were listed as one of the leading elearning scaleups in the Netherlands by BestStartup.eu!
Ready for 2022!
We realise we have been really lucky in a year that has been tough for many people and businesses.
We are committed to delivering our (small) bit: to empower people to grow, have fun while learning and work more efficiently with only 5 minutes of training each day. This will continue to be our focus in 2022.
See you next year!
