Companies that want can also book the coaches at the same time.
(Photo: Neural Jam)
Munich Jamshid Alamuti knows the world of creativity – and that of business. At a young age, the native Iranian studied painting in England, produced music and worked as a choreographer at the Moulin Rouge. He later worked as a management consultant for Siemens and, among other things, set up a training academy for the then VW subsidiary Gedas.
Now he wants to connect both worlds. In 2019 he founded the “House of Creative Entrepreneurship” in Berlin. The spin-off start-up Neural Jam is set to play a leading role in the booming e-learning market. The standard is high: “I am on this planet to enable further training for everyone,” says Alamuti.
Neural Jam is based on two pillars. On the one hand, it should be a kind of digital club for young talents who want to continue learning for life and discuss current topics, and for the experienced.
In workshops, for example, the future of the auto industry or artificial intelligence will be discussed. The debates can also be called up retrospectively. Alamuti has a “mixture of Facebook and Netflix in the education sector” in mind. Daily news on management and innovation topics should be part of it as well as a digital community.
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“We are a kind of digital seminar hotel”
It remains to be seen whether such a business model will work. “Above all, I want to enable as many people as possible to learn,” he says. And so the founder relies on the second pillar: an online training platform for companies. “We are a kind of digital seminar hotel,” says Alamuti.
The digital learning and cooperation platform is intended to replace the common tools: from virtual classrooms to video conference and training programs, discussion forums and content management systems to bulletin boards. Companies that want can also book the coaches at the same time. “There is no platform that offers all of these features,” Alamuti is convinced.
A number of medium-sized industrial and service companies from Germany and Eastern Europe are already showing interest. The corona pandemic is a huge accelerator for the industry. Many companies switched to online training during the pandemic. “Now that they have seen that it works, many are sticking with it,” says the founder.
According to a study by the Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency (IAB), many companies in the pandemic are actually relying more on e-learning. Two thirds of the companies also carried out their training courses virtually. A third of them used this for the first time, 44 percent expanded the existing possibilities.
Modern learning methods are important to employees
For example, 40 chambers of industry and commerce have offered employees of their companies a free online course “Basics of Artificial Intelligence”. According to the DIHK, the umbrella association of the chambers, 45,000 people in Germany have already participated in the course.
Experts are convinced that the training market will continue to grow strongly in the next few years. According to a study by Stepstone and the Kienbaum Institute ISM, four out of five managers expect employees to have to learn new skills in the coming years. One reason is the increasing digitization as a result of Corona, with which employees have to keep pace.
Modern learning methods are important to the employees. With Alamuti this meets with open ears. When he still gave training courses himself, he delivered a “real show performance on stage”. He is convinced: “You learn more through creativity than through memorization.”
Neural Jam is slated to go into official operation in the coming weeks. The start-up is already generating seven-digit sales with the first pilot projects. So far, the company has been largely self-financed. “We want to delay the first major financing round as much as possible,” says Alamuti. Because he is not quite sure whether venture capitalists really want to combine business and creativity.
More: Booming online market: This is how the search for the right training program succeeds