C-Suite Confidential—Education Market Insights: Exclusive Interview With Jonathan Zeidan, CEO of Axcel Learning

View all C-Suite Confidential—Professional Learning Market Insights

What’s Next for Professional Learning

Professional learning has never been more important. Employers are facing widening skills gaps, regulators are raising the bar in mission-critical end markets, people are expecting AI to transform careers and the learning process, and professionals are demanding flexible, career-advancing education. Backed by Alpine Investors (Alpine), Axcel Learning (Axcel) has created a leading professional learning platform serving three end markets (architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), tech, and healthcare), each intentionally chosen for its addressable market size and durable long-term demand. We sat down with Jonathan “Jono” Zeidan, CEO of Axcel, to discuss the company’s vision, market opportunities, and what’s next for professional learning.

Jono, let’s start from the beginning: What is Axcel and the thesis behind it, and why did you launch your own professional learning platform?

At Axcel, we’re on a mission to empower the modern workforce. We are a professional education platform, carefully and intentionally built exclusively with leading brands and A+ talent.

At the heart of Axcel is a basic truth. Many industries face long-term talent shortages. When those shortages are in technical professions like technology, healthcare, engineering, and many more, it can take years, sometimes decades, to train people who can fill the most critical roles.

When I partnered with Alpine to found Axcel five years ago, we knew the professional education market was huge, growing, and fragmented—perfect for an aggregator of compliance-driven professional learning companies. We searched for the right platform investment with a simple scorecard:

• Growing End Markets: Professions with growing, noncyclical demand.
• Great Brands and Products Within Those End Markets: The No. 1 brand only.
• Platform Capable of More M&A: An ability to capitalize on the fragmented market.

We found that almost nothing met our criteria. So, we built Axcel from scratch, intentionally and carefully.

Fast forward to today, Axcel is a professional education platform on a mission to empower the modern workforce. We operate in three strong end markets: tech, healthcare, and AEC, with the No. 1 brand in every profession we serve. Axcel is built for scale, with an incredible team and platform built for M&A.

Let’s focus a little bit on the platform—how did Axcel choose its industry verticals? What are the benefits of having a multivertical platform?

As I mentioned previously, we’re in three verticals: tech, healthcare, and AEC. We have been disciplined in our acquisition strategy, both in our choice of end markets and brands. We only acquire brands serving technical professions with persistent talent shortages. Our businesses serve both individuals advancing their careers and employers solving critical skill gaps, and in each end market, we own the No. 1 brand.

By staying disciplined, we’ve created a diversified business that reliably grows organically and is resistant to macroeconomic cycles. We’ve diversified our revenue streams through our multivertical exposure. The strategy is working—every brand at Axcel has grown under our ownership.

Most professional education businesses in our market share a set of common characteristics. The similarities of every business Axcel acquires allow us to deploy growth strategies that we use repeatedly. At Axcel, we’ve done the hard work to identify and build playbooks that work across all our end markets: B2B expansion, new channels, pricing and packaging expertise, and customer experience, to name a few. These are tested, repeatable levers that fuel organic growth. We have centralized finance and HR, which enable us to move fast post-close with every acquisition and manage the enterprise seamlessly. The result is a platform that’s greater than the sum of its parts and ready to absorb many more acquisitions without breaking stride.

In addition to being in multiple verticals, Axcel also offers different types of training while serving B2C and B2B customers. How do you think about your position in the learning ecosystem? How do you see this evolving?

Axcel has a stellar reputation because each one of its brands is the No. 1 player. Today, we uniquely serve the needs of both the employer (B2B) and the learner (B2C). Regardless of the buying persona, key criteria include regulatory-driven training, quality of content, user experience, and proven outcomes, all of which are areas our brands excel in. As a result, we are poised to continue growing in the B2C and B2B markets. As you know, there is a strong flywheel effect that exists between our B2C and B2B businesses. We expect that to continue as employees increasingly play an active role in determining which platforms are used by their employers.

As we continue to grow, we’re seeing a clear opportunity to support organizations and individuals throughout their career lifecycle, which is a win for everyone involved.

From some of our prior conversations, it’s obvious that you’ve invested significantly in building out an A+ leadership team. Could you tell us about the strategy here? Have there been any exciting new hires recently?

Yes! We have assembled a world-class platform team of C-Suite executives who support our incredible brand leaders. I’m proud of our leadership team members and can see the followership they inspire, which is evident in our industry-leading eNPS.

My philosophy is that investing in exceptional people is the best way to build an exceptional business. Through our hiring playbook, we’ve recruited and sourced a leadership team that can take Axcel from where it is now to double and triple its scale.

To walk you through the team in additional detail, I started with exceptional Head of M&A and CFO hires to acquire businesses and stand-up finance. Second, we hired a seasoned people leader to manage our HR, recruiting, and career development function. Then, we hired an operations leader to focus on organic growth and playbook implementation.

Our most recent executive hire is a seasoned CMO who previously led marketing at Kaplan and Teachable. I’m incredibly excited to realize the growth potential of centralized marketing across Axcel.

At the brand level, our leaders are industry experts and icons. Take Darren Surch, for example, who leads Interskill Learning, the world’s most delivered mainframe training. Darren is one of two Lifetime IBM champions on the mainframe in the entire world. This is just an example, but it gives you a sense that our brand leaders are in lockstep with customers, learners, and the learning ecosystem.

Taking a step back, how have you seen professional learning evolve in the past few years, and specifically, the verticals Axcel is in? How is AI impacting the overall space?

Professional learning has shifted dramatically in the past five years. What was once dominated by one-size-fits-all training is now much more about flexibility, personalization, and immediate relevance. Professionals do not want theory for theory’s sake—they want skills that directly advance their careers and solve their employers’ talent gaps.

In our end markets—tech, healthcare, and AEC—the pace of change is relentless. Certifications, compliance, and upskilling requirements are growing, not shrinking. That’s why Axcel focuses on brands that own their categories, can evolve alongside industry needs, and are trusted by customers to do so.

AI is accelerating this evolution. It’s already impacting both content creation (faster, more adaptive course development) and learning delivery (personalized pathways, interactive tutoring, and automated feedback). For us, AI isn’t a buzzword; it’s an amplifier. It makes our instructors more efficient, our learners more engaged, and our overall offering more competitive.

I feel good, and honestly, excited, about our positioning with respect to AI. We’ve intentionally partnered with brands at the very top of the training pyramid, so the underlying professions we serve are here to stay.

Take engineering or optometry, for example, AI is not replacing your eye doctor. In fact, we need more optometrists than ever. The same is true for engineers, the profession responsible for our most critical infrastructure and technology. Cybersecurity, our largest line of technology business, has never been in more demand.

We serve these important, durable professions by training them for high-stakes exam prep and complicated subject review. Free options have been available forever; just search on YouTube. The reality is the stakes are too high in the professions we serve to trust half-hearted, cheaper alternatives. For some, AI could be scary. Any professional education business competing on price—those lower on the training pyramid—will likely face headwinds.

For us, AI is a huge opportunity. It allows us to increase our speed to market and improve our customer experience through amazing learning tools.

On that note, are there any use cases for AI you’re excited about exploring at Axcel?

We’re already implementing, experimenting, and seeing value with AI across the platform.
A few areas excite me most:

• Interactive Delivery: We’ve created content that is now interactive, both in our core content and with newer AI tutors, to provide on-demand support. Early feedback shows learners feel more supported and progress faster. What was once static is now dynamic.
• Content Development: AI accelerates content development, allowing us to be better, faster, and cheaper, while our teams continue to keep pace with constantly evolving certifications and standards.
• Customer Insights: On the business side, AI helps us analyze learner and employer data across end markets, guiding pricing, packaging, and product innovation.

We’re still early, but the trajectory is clear: AI will allow us to deliver smarter, faster, and more scalable training without losing the human touch and subject matter expertise that make our brands the top-ranked in their fields.

Looking ahead, what excites you most about Axcel’s future? Could we potentially see another vertical added (a “fourth leg of the stool”)?

We’re just getting started. I’m really excited about the next phase of growth—we’ve been in the build phase, and now we’re ready to take off. We’ve done the hard work of creating the platform from scratch, taking it from zero to one. We’ve built a differentiated platform, we’re in the right end markets with the best brands, and we’ll continue to see strong organic growth in our existing business. Even more exciting is the consolidation opportunity in front of us.

There are thousands of stand-alone professional education companies to partner with, but only actionable once the right platform is built. So, what excites me most is that we have proven the platform works: leading brands, shared playbooks, and centralized functions. The opportunity now is to scale our model and execute on acquiring the many professional education companies out there that are weighed down by the complexity of a growing business.

The vision is clear, the platform has been built, and now, it is just down to execution—which I am really excited about and confident in.

View all C-Suite Confidential—Professional Learning Market Insights