Perpetual Learning
Family of Companies
Does this sound familiar? Anyone with a professional work history can relate, I'm sure… Working at a company with few and unclear paths toward professional development and advancement. Unclear guidelines to execute work. Chaos from massive workloads and attentional demands that never let up long enough to find smarter ways to work. Lack of cohesion and alignment with coworkers. Ringing any bells?
I'm Zach Rubin, Co-Founder and CEO of Perpetual Learning. My co-founder Chris and I worked together at a civil engineering company with the same problems described above.
It wasn't all bad. We had great peers, as I'm sure you do: knowledgeable, successful, hard-working people. We connected with each other over these same qualities and an intense desire to learn and grow. We regularly shared recommendations for business books with each other. Both in our early 20's, we found that the ideas we were getting from books were having a very positive impact on our career, helping us contribute and advance more quickly than many of our peers. Often, we would suggest something in a client meeting that we read in a book and coworkers and clients alike would be impressed with how perfectly the idea helped solve a key challenge. And saying something was from a book made it more credible than if we had just had the idea on our own. It seemed like we were accelerating in our careers so much faster than our peers… Often just by just listening to audiobooks on our drive to work!
We wanted others to benefit from reading—and to cultivate peers who could accelerate our growth—so we launched an office book club. People loved it. But we realized that if we ever stopped organizing the group it would likely end. There were many people who enjoyed participating in a book club, but very few who wanted to manage one. That gave us our big idea—to create a business that manages book club programs for other organizations. We've been testing and refining that basic idea ever since and have grown new lines of lifelong learning programs beyond book clubs based on feedback on unmet customer needs from the segments we served.
Since then, we've created a business that has helped hundreds of organizations surmount the same challenges we faced and fulfilled the same goals we held all those years ago. But it wasn't always an easy journey...
Perpetual Learning's second company, Alumni Learning Consortium, launched in October 2019 with a dozen university alumni associations as founding partners. The idea for the program came from the alumni office at University of Maryland who we had been working with for several years. They were having success with creating engaging webinar events for alumni on career and professional development topics but it was staff intensive to create each online event. They also realized in talking with their colleagues at other university alumni associations, that there was a huge amount of overlap in what alumni were looking to learn about, regardless of their alma mater.
This led to the idea of a consortium of alumni associations that would share online events from experts for the benefit of all of their alumni. The model for the Alumni Learning Consortium was so well received by our university partners and their alumni that the program quickly grew to more than 100 member schools. The success of this model directly led to our next three companies…
Seeing the success of the Alumni Learning Consortium to help connect bestselling professional development and career authors with university alumni was exciting, but we wanted to find ways to expand our impact to learners who didn't already have a college degree. We worked with many public libraries on book club programs for their communities and sought feedback from them about how we could create an events program that would be valuable for patrons. This ultimately led to our third company, Library Speakers Consortium or LSC.
LSC launched in 2022 with more than 200 member library systems, and we have been blown away by the impact. We've been able to bring a wide range of author events to library patrons, especially those whose libraries wouldn't have otherwise been able to provide access to bestselling authors. Developing LSC also led directly to many of our public library clients asking us to create author talk programs for schools to provide author events for students. This ultimately led to the creation of our fourth company, BookBreak, which works directly with K-12 schools.
BookBreak launched at the start of the 2023-2024 school year with a focus on bringing inspiring bestselling author talks to schools virtually. We began working with elementary schools and have since expanded to serve middle and high schools. Creating BookBreak continues to be an exciting journey for Perpetual Learning as we had previously only created learning programs for adults. It's also extremely rewarding to receive messages from educators across the country about how inspired students are after hearing live from a beloved author.
Authors365 is our fifth company and newest endeavor to bring bestselling business author talks to companies. The program is slated to kick off in January 2026 and will combine all of our experience working with authors, companies, universities, libraries and schools into a high impact employee development program.
We'll continue to spend our days working to scale the impact of our programs and looking for new ways to help people on their journey of lifelong learning. Feel free to reach out if we can support you in any way and happy learning.
For us, learning isn't transactional, it's a way of life. Reach out today to see how we can support your organization's learning goals.
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