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A lot of tech companies like to throw around the word “disruptive.” Though the word maintains a certain edge of appeal, it carries with it a host of negative connotations about technology and business. It implies destruction and exclusivity, and has become so overused and inflated that it verges on banality.
That may be why mLevel, a software company changing how companies go about corporate training, describes their mission in slightly different terms.
“Learning is broken, and we’re here to help fix it,” said mLevel CEO Dave Cutler.
Traditional onboarding hasn’t been disrupted with mLevel; it has been reimagined and rehabilitated. mLevel’s approach to learning combines games, videos, and social media to make corporate training more engaging and fun while driving solid results.
According to Cutler, engagement is at the center of their platform.
“People are engaged by a lot of things right now. The challenge is that what they’re engaged by is nowhere near what they’re being provided in the workplace. So we said, let’s take what engages people in their personal lives and bring it into the enterprise to solve the challenge we currently have with learning,” he explained.
mLevel keeps its training “missions” short, usually one to two minutes, so that users aren’t tempted to zone out mid-session. Hour-long training modules have been replaced by engaging, short-burst, and repetitive games and videos which not only hold a user’s attention, but also help them retain knowledge for the long haul.
Users can access mLevel on any device, and training missions can be completed just about anywhere. Because mLevel’s training is progressive, users have to score above a certain threshold before they can unlock the next round of educational content. Their colleagues’ scores become visible once a mission is complete, adding a friendly, competitive component and an incentive to score well, too.
Not only is mLevel good for engagement and knowledge retention, but it also utilizes an analytics tool that helps employers identify where their company’s most pressing knowledge gaps lie.
“mLevel collects a lot of analytics around what your individual users know,” Cutler said. “System administrators can look at this data and track who’s progressing in their mastery of knowledge areas and who may be struggling.”
Cutler added that it can also be used to track broader trends to see, for instance, if certain departments or regions all share particular knowledge gaps.
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The Chicago-based company received a $5 million round of funding in July, which Cutler said will be used in large part to grow their team. Cutler’s approach to growing teams is at once intentional and cautious, ensuring that every hire is a seamless cultural and technical fit.
And Cutler, whose array of conference rooms consist of a Pac-Man mural and an assortment of video games, knows a thing or two about cultivating top-of-the-line company culture.
Still, Cutler said mLevel isn’t just fun and games. At the company’s core, it’s about fixing a broken system the best way they know how.
“We believe that learning can be fun,” Cutler said, “and we ultimately believe that fun drives better outcomes.”
