UK-based QA, owned by CVC Capital Partners VI, is a training company that provides a complete range of training, talent development, and learning services. The company has announced that it has acquired London-based Circus Street – an online platform that teaches people how to do business in a digital world.
Building global digital capability
In the current scenario, digital disruption continues to drive significant global change. This is where Circus Street believes to close the gap. The company offers online training solutions to businesses to build and develop digital capabilities across their organisation at scale.
Circus Street provides digital skills, including e-commerce, data analytics, and digital marketing skills through its subscription-based digital platform. It helps leading brands, upskilling their talent and helping them to build and develop digital capability across their organisations at scale.
Currently, the company has over 500,000 people in more than 150 countries who are using Circus Street to increase their digital knowledge. Some of its clients include Sanofi, Nike, Nestle, Pfizer, P&G, and Coca-Cola.
Circus Street was founded in 2009 by brothers Richard and Jonny Townsend. Speaking on the development, Jonny Townsend says, “This acquisition allows us to significantly expand on our commercial success across our core regions of the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Together we will build an offering that further enhances the uniqueness of our proposition and continue to help the world’s largest brands understand how technology is modernising every aspect of their operations.”
A brief about QA
QA helps its clients build their tech skills through training and talent solutions, including training courses, reskilling bootcamps, tech apprenticeships, and degree apprenticeships. It also offers over 150 undergraduate and masters’ programmes in conjunction with its university partners.
More than 200,000 people learnt with QA last year. It serves over 80 per cent of the FTSE 100, many parts of government and the public sector, and is one of Microsoft’s largest learning partners globally. It also has a strong partnership with Salesforce, AWS, and other technology vendors.
Aim of this acquisition
QA is a technology skills organisation that offers training and talent solutions such as cloud computing, cyber security, software engineering, data, and agile. And with this acquisition, QA can now provide organisations with digital marketing and data analytics skills.
QA plans to accelerate digital transformations for enterprises. Earlier, the company acquired Cloud Academy – an enterprise e-learning platform for cloud technologies including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and the DevOps ecosystem. Now, the addition of Circus Street will allow them to build digital and data capabilities across their entire enterprise, while Cloud Academy will systematically assess, build, and validate the skills of their tech teams to deliver it. Besides, QA will now also be able to offer its clients different modes of training from live virtual to in-classroom training and fully digital, self-paced training.
Srikanth Iyengar, Chief Client Officer at QA, says, “Today our clients tell us they want to understand and build digital capability right across their business, away from the traditional silos that stand in the way of full digital transformation. As someone who already provides apprenticeships in data and digital marketing, we already see how these disciplines are at the foundation of every digital transformation, and that’s why we’ve been keen to extend our solutions into the commercial functions that design products and take them to market.”
“Circus Street’s digital learning platform and exceptional content will make QA’s enterprise offer stronger than ever. We have significant opportunities to introduce Circus Street to QA’s clients, particularly in financial services, tech, and Government, and to introduce QA to Circus Street’s clients in FMCG, Pharma and Manufacturing,” he adds.
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