Learning Never Stops: How Scott Burgess's Continu Bridges the Corporate Training Gap

“Learning never stops,” said Scott Burgess, CEO and Founder of Continu, a learning management system for companies to use to train their employees. Prior to founding Continu, Burgess noticed a problem with integrating employees in fast-moving companies. He said that “a lot of companies just didn't have the right tools, engagement, and right resources” to help people go into and adapt to a company’s work needs. The question, for him, became: How do we fill in that gap and do it at scale? The answer was with technology, leading to the development of Continu. Since its founding in 2012, Continu has become a catalyst for providing a “consistent level of training and development.” 

Burgess highlighted his well-rounded education in his career trajectory. His undergraduate degree in computer science, majoring in network engineering, and his master's in marketing gave him the technical understanding as well as the business and marketing skills to apply to founding his three companies. He highlighted that undergraduate students must not be hung up on a specific major that they think will be beneficial for their prospective career. 

“I think it's good to do things that you're passionate about and do things that will serve you in your career, of course, but our careers will ebb and flow into different directions. They always take a different path than we anticipate a lot of times, so not getting too hung up on that, I think, is important,” he said. In terms of advice for undergraduate students, he believes that in a smaller company, someone starting their career can learn what they like. Burgess emphasizes, “I would always encourage someone to maybe join a small company where you can work closely with the founding team, or you can work closely with your leaders and learn from them and their mistakes, challenges, successes.”

Traversing through a career that entailed a lot of leadership, Burgess recognizes that it is important for leaders to foster culture. In the early days of Continu, he highlighted that hiring people who were generalists was important for collaboration. He also believes that creating a culture of collaboration where people are free to ask questions is important. “You don't want to have too much hierarchy. Yes, you have titles and have people that specialize within the company, but at the same time, you want to make sure that you're fostering an environment that anyone on any level can ask a question or can challenge you,” he stated. 

Burgess also emphasized the importance of giving back. “I would really like to have an impact on developing future leaders, which I think we need more of around the world,” he said. “I would love to find ways to give back, whether that's hiring underprivileged people that may not have the opportunities they have in their communities to work remotely for us, whether that's providing our software and no charge to different communities to allow people to create learning and provide access to people that might not have access to career training.” At Continu, for example, he loves to encourage people to do volunteer work, allowing them to have paid time off to do volunteer work.