Tried and tested
Having built up significant business in Ireland and the UK, Prodigy Learning has extended its global footprint to Europe and Asia Pacific
Opening an office in Sydney, Australia in October 2017 marked Prodigy Learning’s entry into the Asia Pacific market and served notice of the education technology (edtech) company’s export ambitions.
Set up in 2000, Prodigy provides digital skills certifications and learning solutions for some of the biggest technology companies in the world, including Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk.
The company has over 2,000 customers in the education, training, corporate and public sectors in Ireland, the UK, Europe and now the Asia Pacific region. It employs 16 full-time staff across its three offices in Dublin, London and Sydney.
High profile customers to date have included the NHS, London School of Economics and University of St Andrews in the UK, and Solas and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) in Ireland.
Exports currently represent over 70% of the business and are the key driver of growth for the company. After establishing and growing its base in Ireland, Prodigy entered the UK market in 2008 and subsequently increased turnover by 300% in the following two years.
Chief executive Andrew Flood says that despite the UK market already representing a significant percentage of revenue, the company is continuing to experience accelerated growth there.
“Based on the timeline of achieving critical mass in the Irish academic sector, we expect UK revenues to quadruple by 2020 through increasing our market share and establishing more local awarding organisation partnerships,” he says.
Prodigy branched into mainland Europe in 2016 and plans to continue to grow its presence there. “In addition to increasing revenue and increasing global footprint, European expansion allows the company to leverage its existing Dublin base to drive operational synergies across the group,” says Flood.
The opening of the Sydney office coincided with the announcement that the company was partnering with Microsoft Australia to deliver its digital skills and STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – programmes in education.
“With existing offices in Dublin and London, this development makes us the only multi-region global player in our sector and one of Ireland’s leading companies in the fast-growing edtech sector,” says Flood.
Last September, the company was named Certiport EMEA Partner of the Year for 2017. Certiport delivers over 3 million performance-based certification exams around the world each year. In the UK and Ireland, Prodigy Learning is exclusively responsible for managing the Certiport’s Adobe Certified Associate (ACA), Autodesk Certified User (ACU), Autodesk Certified Professional (ACP), IC3 Digital Literacy (IC3), Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS), and Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) training and certification programmes.
Going forward, as well as continuing to expand its reach, Prodigy intends to build out a wider range of assessment and learning-as-a-service product offerings.
“European expansion allows the company to leverage its existing Dublin base to drive operational synergies across the group”