StackOverflow and Pluralsight’s partnership is a bid to be the provider of choice for coders

Pluralsight, the technology training platform and Stack Overflow, the developer community platform, have partnered to allow Stack Overflow users to display Pluralsight language ‘IQ’ badges on their profiles. Users can take Pluralsight tests (typically 20 questions) in any language and get a score — IQ — and a timestamp and then display this on their profile.

Stack Overflow is often used as part of the recruitment for developers and this will help users showcase their skills but the real winner here is Pluralsight. They are currently the first and only third party to be integrated into Stack Overflow, giving them a prime audience for their platform. However the true value of this deal lies not in accessing the audience but in capturing this audience for Pluralsight’s brand.

To understand why, one has to understand that all Edtech platforms have one common problem, the credibility of their offerings. Employers, employees and job seekers alike don’t know of provider or course and don’t know how to value it, compared with say a degree (the usual metric where the subject, grade and university act as clear metrics). Why would a job seeker fork out for Pluralsight training if an employer hasn’t heard of Pluralsight? Pluralsight’s workforce diagnostic tool was in part an attempt to get their brand exposed at the employer/B2B end, this deal with Stack Overflow is about attacking the B2C end.

MOOC platforms are also trying to tackle this problem and their Microcredentials (Specializations, MicroMasters etc) are an attempt to create a new currency unit for professional education. MOOC platforms have used a few approaches such as brand (The University), increasing the size of learning (bundling MOOCs into Microcredentials), corporate endorsement/engagement of the content and academic frameworks (the MicroMasters) but until employers can recognise and assign a value to the credential, job seekers will not be as forthcoming with their money. Pluralsight’s move is a bold one and the right one — by placing itself at the heart of the developer community it’s giving itself every chance to obtain that Holy Grail of Edtech — to be the new currency of professional education — here