Acorn Acquires B Online Learning to Strengthen Workforce Skills Development

According to the 2026 State of Learning for AI Fluency Report, 77% of organizations still use course completion as the main measure of whether employees have gained new skills.

However, research from Mercer found that 79% of executives believe that having better visibility into employee skills and capabilities is critical for improving business performance.

As companies face increasing pressure to prove workforce readiness, simply completing training courses is no longer enough. True workforce readiness means understanding the gap between the skills a business needs and the skills its employees can clearly demonstrate today.

B Online Learning adds an important capability to Acorn’s business. For more than 20 years, the company has created custom eLearning programs for government agencies, regulated industries, and large organizations in sectors such as healthcare, energy, and agriculture across Australia and New Zealand. It delivers these programs through its Birch Learning Platform.

Since 2012, B Online Learning has also been the exclusive Articulate Certified Training Partner in the region, helping train more than 10,000 learning designers and learning & development professionals. By combining B Online Learning’s expertise with Acorn’s skills framework, which includes over 1,600 capabilities and 4,800 proficiency levels, organizations can create training linked to specific job roles, measure skill development more accurately, and verify what employees are actually able to do.

“Organizations aren't struggling to find content. They are struggling to show that content is building the capabilities their workforce needs. Acorn treats the development plan as the engine: career goal to skills gap to learning action to proof of capability.” said Blake Proberts, CEO and Co-Founder of Acorn. “B Online Learning builds content for organizations that can't afford to guess whether learning worked. Put that inside a platform designed to measure exactly that and proof it's working stops being the hardest part."

“For 20 years, B Online Learning has designed eLearning content, trained Australia and New Zealand’s L&D teams to build it themselves, and delivered learning solutions for some of the region’s most respected organizations,” said Beck Verity, Co-Founder of B Online Learning. “Acorn shares our belief in giving teams what they need to do the work themselves. Together we can offer customers the full stack: the training, the tools, and the platform to deliver learning that shows up in what people can actually do.”

Acorn is a skills development platform that helps organizations understand the gap between the skills employees need for their jobs and the skills they currently have. It also helps companies track how learning and training programs are improving those skills.

The platform connects skills to specific job roles and learning content, making employee development easier to measure and manage. Acorn is powered by a framework of more than 1,600 skills and 4,800 proficiency levels, and is used by organizations worldwide across HR, talent management, learning and development, government, customer education, and non-profit sectors.

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