Imagine: you have had a gutful of a day and you were looking forward to home time. However, you were informed by rumour that the management have put you in for in-house training, which starts in ten minutes’ time. The course is nine hours spread over the next three days. Besides, this will be a platform for a rep from a big-name computer firm to sell more clunky products that will clog up your machine. Enter, Kareem Shalash, is the co-founder of a tech-enabled platform for learning through games.
EG: Why did you start and what’s the passion behind the business?
KS: We were unhappy with training and development experiences we had when we were employees and how much engagement was lacking. The name ‘Glued’ is the acronym for game-based learning user experience development.
EG: What is your background?
KS: I’m an electronics and communications engineer with more than 15years in operations engineering, business development and technical sales and tech consultancy in multiple domains. I’m also an entrepreneur at heart. I have founded many startups, one of which is a software house that has been in the market for more than ten years.
EG: What are the issues you are solving? What is your value proposition?
KS: Conventional employee training is, to put it bluntly, boring and time-consuming. These issue we have solved with Glued. Enabling employees to learn while they play online is more fun, saves time and slashes the training budget.
EG: Tell us more about the process, users, business model.
KS: The process starts with registration of the organisation and its employees, then the choice of training content or building their content using our No-Code platform. Employees can then learn as they encounter game-based scenarios that they experience in their day-to-day work. Our business model is based on a monthly user subscription. The organisation chooses from three different packages depending on the customisation levels they are interested in.
EG: What are your main challenges?
KS: This is a new concept which requires a lot of market education so that the corporates can understand what Glued does and how that can transform employee training.
We are lucky to be launching Glued now since we are living in the digital transformation era and everyone is hungry for solution for their digital transformation journey.
EG: What are your achievements and future plans?
KS: Our platform has been recently launched for public use and we are currently onboarding our first customer while testing with five new customers, who should be going live with us if they find that the app is satisfying their learning and development needs and requirements. We want to penetrate the Gulf region and also develop a French-language version for the Francophone market.
EG: Do you find the ecosystem helpful?
KS: Yes. The ecosystem has matured a lot over the past couple of years and all markets now are talking about digitising all aspects of their business. We fit very well in this picture as we transform the human resources roadmaps in any organisation we partner with.
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