Utah tech unicorn hosts inaugural conference, welcomes Michelle Obama

Utah tech unicorn hosts inaugural conference, welcomes Michelle Obama

(Liesl Nielsen, KSL.com)


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SALT LAKE CITY — It was a remarkable moment for Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard when his father brought home one of the first Apple 2 computers.

Growing up in inner-city Portland, the tech CEO’s family wasn’t necessarily in a financial position to be buying computers, but Skonnard’s father had found a way.

“I still remember the day that we took that computer and we walked down to our basement and created a makeshift workspace on our cold, concrete floor,” Skonnard said, choking up in the moment. “We plugged it in and learned how to code for the first time. This was a magical moment for me. It was the moment that I fell in love with learning and with technology.”

That love has carried Skonnard to where he is today. It was in 2004 that Skonnard founded Pluralsight, an online education company offering tech training courses for professionals around the world.

Thirteen years later, Pluralsight hosted its inaugural two-day user conference at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, which began early Wednesday. The conference will host big names, highlighted by former first lady Michelle Obama.

“If you look around at what you created, dad, it’s really incredible,” Skonnard told his father, who was in the audience during the CEO’s opening keynote Wednesday morning.

Skonnard also addressed the growing tech skills gap that affects, not only tech companies in Utah but those around the globe.

“They’re thousands of tech-related and especially computer science-related jobs that can’t be filled,” Skonnard said in a previous exclusive interview with KSL. “The number of new jobs that need to be filled are outpacing the number of new people universities are producing with those skills. So fundamentally, the issue is grounded in the fact that the technology landscape and the demand to learn new things is moving faster than our ability to learn them.”

Pluralsight hopes to help close this gap and announced a new “machine learning” aspect to its platform, called IRIS, that they hope will address the issue.

According to Skonnard, IRIS can help companies quantify and develop skills across technologies and understand which skills or collection of skills their employees have. A company leader can map the strengths and weaknesses of their teams in order to align the right people to the right projects and execute and move faster, Skonnard said.

“With IRIS, anyone, anywhere, regardless of income, location or opportunity can measure their tech skills and get a trusted result that they can use to propel themselves forward in this world,” he said.

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