30. Guild

Founders: Rachel Romer (CEO), Brittany Stich
Launched: 2015
Headquarters: Denver
Funding: $643 million
Valuation: $4.4 billion
Key technologies: N/A
Industry: Education
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 3 (No. 5 in 2022)

For many workers in lower-wage industries, such as retail and food service, getting a good education and turning it into a better career has long been a challenge. That led to the rise of education as a benefit, with companies including Chipotle and Walmart among those offering debt-free college degree financial support. Expanding wages and benefits has become even more important given the labor market conditions which in recent years tipped in favor of workers over management.

The move to partially or fully pay for college degrees was a major development, but the job to help workers towards better jobs remains incomplete. Even with much more financial assistance for degree programs — in the case of some of the biggest companies, college costs are 100% covered — workers want more than money, and in particular, a degree to be linked to greater career mobility.

At the 2022 CNBC Work Summit, Guild CEO Rachel Romer said that it's time for companies to build into budgets employee career advancement that will create a return on investment for both sides of the labor equation across a much wider demographic of workers. She said 73% of the Fortune 1000 already have this budget, but "they've been spending it really ineffectively and most of the dollars have been going to their white-collar, white, male workforce."

Guild, formerly known as Guild Education, rebranded this April to emphasize how it is moving beyond traditional tuition reimbursement programs and its original focus on college degrees to a broader goal of career mobility for all employees. 

Lack of advancement options should be of as much importance to management as workers because it is one of the top reasons employees resign, according to Guild. Retail workers on Guild's platform were 1.6 times less likely to leave their employer over the last year than employees who didn't use Guild's platform.

Education still matters a great deal: employees who took education courses had an 87% passage rate and proved more than two times more likely to achieve an internal role change at an employer than those who did not enroll. But it isn't limited to the classroom, with real-world education, training programs, and one-on-one coaching also critical.

Guild has started to offer career coaching, and through its new Career Accelerator, support for job search, resumes and cover letters, networking, and interviews. And Guild says it should be just as helpful to employers, helping them identify the in-house talent for important, in-demand roles.

In its inaugural American Workforce Survey last October, Guild reported that two of every three workers say they hope to be in a new job in the next two to five years, with 60 million American employees actively looking for new opportunities. The economy may be uncertain right now and the labor market is showing signs of cooling, but there are still millions of open positions, and the data from sentiment surveys shows that workers still believe, rightly, that jobs are plentiful.

In addition to big names like Walmart, Chipotle, Disney, and health-care systems like UCHealth, newer Guild client companies added last year included PepsiCo, Kohl's, and PNC Bank. In June of last year, Guild closed a $175 million Series F funding round from investors including the Citi Impact Fund and Oprah Winfrey.