2020 – a challenging year for everyone. Enough said?
Well, maybe not. I have to say that it has been truly inspiring to witness our clients’ heroic response during this trying time. Health systems’ heroic and dedicated staff took significant personal risk to care for us. T-Mobile kept lines open while delivering superior customer care. Our higher education clients helped over one million students succeed in their efforts to learn remotely. Professionals across the country found the motivation to earn certifications as their career paths were at risk. More than anything else, we thank you. Your tenacity during hard times is inspiring.
As for Amplifire, well, I think it has been a good year. You see, the world never entirely goes back to what it was before a time like this. Something we have all known for years but struggled to create just advanced 10+ years in only nine months. It’s the notion that sophisticated adaptive online training done right significantly outperforms classroom training.
I wouldn’t wish this year on anyone, but sometimes out of terrible events comes powerful change. I suspect we will get on airplanes for business a little less often now that we have broken the self-consciousness barriers and learned to look into each others’ eyes on a web call. And we have a new pattern of staying connected with loved ones across the country and the world.
And I similarly believe we will not go back to putting people in classrooms and teaching to the lowest proficiency in the room. This is the promise of adaptivity—people get instruction tailored to their location and circumstances on the path to mastery. Some go fast, others take more time to absorb information, but everyone can become proficient.
In 2020, we expanded our client relationships and added new clients. And as the radical move to online adaptive training hit hard, the demand for our advanced capabilities grew, and we added a host of new reseller partners fully embracing this new way of learning.
It was a challenging year, without a doubt. In April, we were taking pay cuts to ensure our ability to keep our no-layoff promise to our employees during COVID. Like everyone, we had no idea what the future would hold.
We will continue our focus on advancing the art and science of Knowledge Engineering to drive improved performance. It’s never been truer than this present moment that we live and work in a knowledge economy where human flourishing derives from the information stored in our minds as long-term memory.
It turns out that the most powerful, complicated, amazing computing device is not in some university basement. Not calculating rocket trajectories at NASA or finding obscure info for Google. Although it designed all the computing devices ever used.
It’s the human mind.
And finding ways to load knowledge into the human mind, well, that’s our obsession.
As 2020 draws to a close, we wish you our best and share our hopes for an exhilarating 2021.
And a very special thank you to our team, who never blinked.
Bob Burgin
CEO
