When days are filled with meetings and planning sometimes dates go unnoticed. It was only when LinkedIn sent me a notification that I realised Veri was 6 years old. 6 years striving for change and driving data in the business of training program management.  I’m always looking to the future, potential clients, industry trends and streams of revenue but this milestone is worthy of some reflection on our journey so far.

The idea for Veri came to me after experience huge frustration in the inefficiency of the processes involved in collating data for quality training contracts. The endless paper trail was time consuming and fruitless. Paired with the inability to aggregate valuable data intelligence that sat idle in endless excel worksheets or in a dusty filing cabinet somewhere was deflating. 

Through encouragement from mentors, Enterprise Ireland and most importantly colleagues and potential clients, Fiorú (Verification in Irish) was registered and from here our software Veri was created. I was confident that I could help training providers save time and money and improve the efficiency and quality of their training delivery.

When I took my concept to prospects the response was so positive, the early adopters were great but slow. What developed was that a ‘like to have’  in 2017 is now a ‘must have’ in the era of a global pandemic. If companies want to move forward with quality, compliant training delivery, data is the new currency.

The milestones along the way were winning  Google’s Adopt a Start Up – from over 100 participants nationally. Our acceleration as a high potential start up was aided when the following year we won Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund for Women Entrepreneurship  another accolade to validate the potential of our concept. 

This brought real players in contracted training onboard. Companies like Impact Training that delivered  22,000 training days in 2019. That partnership prompted us to enter our work into the IITD’s National Training Awards. The results being that we won for the Best Consultancy Partnership.

The real evidence of how effective we are as a company has been our consistent growth in our client base. We span across the public and private sector. Veri software is the Unique Selling Point for our  Employability Programmes which have huge uptake, supporting soft skills and distance travelled data for SICAP & Pobal. We are leading the way in Biodiversity training nationwide with the Department of Rural and Community Development funding data driven blended programmes. This training delivery utilises learning online and in the field for well over a thousand volunteers in every corner of our island. Another facet is that 1000 companies across every industry currently benefit from being supported by our clients through Veri as a dashboard for SME mentoring programmes such as Mentors Work. 

Such is the demand for our services that I now have 14 people employed in 6 short years. We are seeing ideas that we discussed in 2016 now come to fruition. The move to digital and blended support for skills based training from traditional methods of delivery can be daunting. We have struck a balance with a blended approach that our clients are very receptive to and this is the way forward. 

The way to think of the software is like another team member. This team member works hard and is efficient and provides you with a plethora of valuable data that allows you to make decisions on how best to move forward in your company. A sea change in data was what we wanted to make happen in the training industry, and we are so grateful to all our clients to date and I’m excited to lead the way for the next 6.