Utah tech company Pluralsight is laying off more employees
About 400 were released in December. The company did not disclose how many were laid off this week.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Pluralsight headquarters in Draper on Wednesday, August 24, 2022.
Four months after Utah-based tech company Pluralsight laid off 20% of its workforce, the company has made further job cuts, according to an internal blog post made available to The Salt Lake Tribune.
The company didn’t respond to Tribune inquiries about how many people lost their jobs earlier this week, but according to the internal blog post, the layoffs included employees working in video content production, curriculum and engineering.
Pluralsight, which is headquartered in Draper, sells subscriptions to its training software and online courses aimed at government agencies, universities, colleges and trade schools.
Founded in 2004, the company went public in 2018 and had a net loss of $163.5 million in 2019 and $164 million in 2020, according to SEC filings. Pluralsight announced in 2021 that it would go private again, after the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $3.8 billion.
Last December 12, less than two weeks before Christmas, CEO Aaron Skonnard emailed employees “one of the hardest messages I’ve ever given” — that the company would lay off 400 employees, about one in five employees, because of “challenging economic environment in which we operate and how it has impacted our business performance.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Aaron Skonnard, CEO of Pluralsight, to speak at the Silicon Slopes Summit on Friday, September 30, 2022.
At the time, Skonnard apologized to his staff – “We let you down at a difficult time” – but also expressed optimism: “It is indeed a sad day. But as I look to the future, I am optimistic and a firm believer in Pluralsight’s mission and the value we will continue to bring to customers around the world.”
On Monday, Ben Henderson, senior vice president of domains, blogged to the company’s “authoring community” announcing that Pluralsight had “initiated a restructuring” that would include laying off staff in the areas of “curriculum management, content direction, project coordination and video and review content creation,” reads the internal blog post shared with The Tribune.
He wrote that “to better compete and win in a rapidly changing and challenging market landscape,” the company is restructuring its workforce and “reducing the overall size of manufacturing and operations teams where we have identified opportunities to consolidate functions as part.” of the new centralized model.”
Henderson, who works remotely from Australia, also announced his retirement to “optimize time with my young family”. Meghan Manfre, the current leader of the security and tech foundation teams, will be the interim content leader, Henderson wrote.
Chief Product Officer Gary Eimerman will also leave the company in June, the blog post said. In a video sent to the company’s writing community, Eimerman said the layoffs and reorganizations are “part of our effort to ultimately help create, design and deliver the best product … in the most efficient way.”
He went on to say that after 18 years with Pluralsight, I “made a decision to move on and spend more time and focus with my growing family.”
Ai-ling Chang, a longtime employee at Pluralsight, will replace him as interim chief product officer, the blog post said.
Pluralsight was offered a state tax incentive worth up to $21 million in 2017 if it met the terms of a contract with the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity to create 2,464 jobs over a 10-year period.
According to the Office of Economic Opportunity, layoffs reduce the tax incentives offered to companies and may bar them from receiving a tax credit.
