Progression is joining the career.io family

Today we have some huge news. After over 5 years of building a true first-of-it’s-kind career path and skill platform, Progression is joining forces with Careerminds (part of the career.io family) to provide a crucial missing piece of their career experience platform.

Our mission has always been to give a generation of employees a career that they love. While we’ve seen an amazing impact for the customers we’ve served, built on a truly novel platform that we're insanely proud of, we believe that this is now the right move to unlock the next level of growth for the business.

Our team will work with the Careerminds team to integrate Progression into their broader offering, allowing Careerminds customers to benefit from Progression as well as giving our customers the opportunity to make use of Careerminds’ huge expertise in this space.

For Neil and I personally, this marks a major milestone in what’s been a challenging, fascinating and fulfilling journey trying to give a generation of employees true career clarity. Progression was born in 2019, before a global pandemic, interest rate spike leading to a crash in the tech world and the end of the ZIRP era, and major global events impacting workforces worldwide.

Similarly for us as founders, the last five years has seen personal journeys involving new members of families (with two legs and four), moves to new cities, growing our team to at one point nearly 20 wonderful people, fundraising from fantastic investors in the UK and US and working with thousands of customers, many of whom have been with us for years now.

So why join forces with another company?

While Progression is the best option for smaller teams to deliver exceptional career growth, the broader tech landscape for HR teams is incredibly fragmented and (for good reason) experiencing significant pressure from budgets and consolidation of tools.

Progression has been profitable, growing and in a strong cash position for the last year, but the more we learn about this unique people challenge, the more we understand that everything affects everything else. It’s increasingly challenging to just ‘solve one thing well’ in this market, when today’s organisation wants tightly bound process across the employee lifecycle.

In short, the best way for Progression to deliver against the mission it was built to fulfil is to become part of a more holistic platform, where multiple “people problems” can be tackled by one dedicated team and offering. That way we can get into more employees’ hands and impact more careers.

What’s going to change?

Progression is in safe hands. While I have no doubt (and truly hope) that as part of Careerminds the Progression platform will evolve, it will continue to stand alone as a unique offering for customers from hundreds to thousands of employees. Our existing customers – with everything from tens to thousands of employees – will continue to be supported and we hope to bring on many more and larger customers over time.

What next for us?

Neil and I will be supporting the transition of Progression to the Careerminds team before moving on in early 2025. We’ll always have a bit of Progression in us (as any founder will tell you, sometimes it’s hard to separate yourself from your creation) and will keep being cheerleaders, whatever we end up doing next.

But for the journey so far, we just want to say a huge thank you to our investors and supporters (many of whom have been true rocks), our team members both past and present, and mostly the customers that believed in us in 2019 and continue to believe in us today. It’s quite something to build a product that has such a profound impact on people’s lives. What an honour it has been, and continues to be.

Jonny and Neil

Check out Careerminds' announcement on Linkedin here