Richard Alberg is flying high, and not just because his company, Aptem, is catapulting apprenticeships into the AI age via its software. He’s flying in a literal sense with his commute to work, piloting his small plane from his Channel Islands home – where he can “wake up and see the sea” – to board meetings in London. 

Alberg says he has always sought to capitalise on the latest technological advances in his entrepreneurial endeavours. He co-founded Corndel in 2017 as a means of providing Aptem with its first training provider customer – not knowing it would become one of the highest-earning providers in the apprenticeships levy market.

Jaw-dropping moment

He glimpsed a vision of the future shaped by AI two years ago during a demonstration of how ChatGPT could be used in Microsoft Office, which made Alberg realise what a game-changer generative AI could be for the apprenticeships market.

Until then, ChatGPT had been just a “party trick” for Alberg who would enjoy impressing friends by prompting it to create lyrics in Shakespearean style. But Microsoft’s demonstration revealed the potential for large language models to be embedded into third-party apps handling their own databases, opening the drawbridge for technology companies such as Aptem.

Alberg says he is “not someone who gets shocked that easily”. But his “jaw dropped to the ground” as he realised that “everything would change” with this development. The next day he set about reimagining his company.

Aptem’s commercial projects, which involved creating compliance solutions for training providers, were shelved as teams were redeployed onto new generative AI work.

Alberg suffered kickback from colleagues for the sudden direction change but remained convinced the technology would “profoundly change apprenticeship training”.

The economic argument for this is “compelling”, he says. Alberg believes many of his clients pay tutors around £50,000 a year but 20 per cent of tutor time “could be better utilised” by enabling a chatbot to answer generic questions from learners or help with marking assignments.

Alberg claims this saving could represent a 12 per cent extra margin for a provider with 100 tutors just by using AI moderately” for “mundane” tasks.

Meanwhile, tutors can focus on what they can do “far better than computers – pastoral care”.

Entrepreneurial spark

Alberg was determined to strike his own path in life from a young age. His Italian mother taught languages to opera singers as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music, but Alberg did not share her musical talents. The most creative he got with his guitar was “hitting my sister with it”, he tells me. He confesses to loving opera but “pretends not to” when talking to his mother. 

Alberg’s lawyer father died when he was 12 after a four-year illness which resulted in him becoming “quite rebellious”.

He was already writing computer software to do his maths homework (to get “one up on the system”) and was moved up a school year to reflect his capabilities. But he then stubbornly chose not to go to university, a decision he came to regret when carving a career in the education and skills sector.

Alberg’s impressive self-confidence meant he bagged a graduate trainee job at an advertising agency where he came to love the buzz of the 1980s London advertising world. Although work days were long, so too were the lunches – and the parties.

At the tender age of 21 he set up his own agency, RDA Marketing Services, which clinched an “unglamorous” contract with Alan Sugar’s pioneering computer company Amstrad to expand its dealer marketing.

But Alberg admits he “wasn’t very good at working” with his two business partners, and sold out to them after getting “bored” and wanting something “new and different”.

‘Living on ether’

He found that opportunity after seeing a feature about computerised psychometric testing on BBC TV show Tomorrow’s World. He contacted the person behind the concept and set up a new company, Psychometric Services Ltd, with distribution rights for what became known as the ‘Eysenck Personality Profiler’ (EPP).

Alberg quickly realised it “wasn’t a great product”, but because his firm was merely the distributor he had “very little control” to improve it.

So he hired his own psychometricians and technologists and repositioned his company to develop its own psychometric profiling tools instead. It became one of the country’s biggest psychometric testing firms and sold its services to employers including UBS, Cadbury, BP and Royal Mail to use for recruitment and staff development.

But with success came “challenging” times too when the company was “living on ether”, as much of the income was tied up in the business. While everyone around him assured Alberg the company would “do brilliantly”, he was worried about meeting the next staff payroll.

Alberg had around 45 employees and could only grow his operation further by expanding internationally, which he was reluctant to do. Instead he sold up in 2006 to an American company, Kenexa, for “not so much money” – around £7 million – enough to pay off his mortgage. This brought “some security” to Alberg’s family, which he says “mattered a lot”.

With the 2008 financial crisis came job losses, which provided Alberg’s next opportunity – establishing an online job-seeking platform for the unemployed. His new company, My Work Search, did “exceptionally well commercially” while unemployment was “high and increasing”. It evolved to support the organisations providing assistance to the unemployed which opened Alberg’s eyes to the skills sector.

Whim of civil servants

In 2015 he became a governor at North Hertfordshire College, which gave Alberg an insight into how colleges operated.

He tells me that within a fortnight “some shenanigans emerged” involving significant misreporting. It led to the rest of the board being “encouraged to step down” amid “quite significant financial challenges”. Alberg was compelled to become the new chair, which was “so not the plan” for the busy entrepreneur.

Funding needed to be returned to the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and Alberg’s board “had to use every favour we could pull to try to have the ESFA allow us a certain amount of time before the money came back… you’re at the whim of a civil servant who can make life very difficult.”

The college’s 2017-18 accounts later revealed a £5 million deficit, 20 times higher than was budgeted for at the beginning of the year. It included a £4.3 million overspend compared to income and a £713,000 loss on the sale of a property.

Alberg blames some of the college’s woes on its decision to open a college in Saudi Arabia. North Herts was part of the College of Excellence programme, founded in 2013, to boost technical and vocational training in the kingdom through partnerships with international providers.

Alberg tells me the college’s contract with the Saudis was “so one-sided” and claims it “could have brought the college down”.

“Naive colleges go into sectors they’re ill equipped to be effective in and we could have gone bust on the back of our exposure to Saudi,” he says.

North Herts became one of many colleges to exit the Saudi market. FE Week analysis in June found that only seven colleges still had an overseas campus in 2022-23.

But despite all these challenges, Alberg “really got a kick” out of his two years as chair and says the experience he gleaned helped him in his own business endeavours.

“We were on the side of the angels who were doing good work.”

Becoming Aptem

As the economy bounced back and unemployment fell, Alberg again re-pivoted his company into Aptem, providing an end-to-end platform for the vocational training market. But there was a snag. Although providers expressed enthusiasm for the concept of a platform integrating learning management systems, e-portfolios, funding systems and CRM systems in one place, they were reluctant to be the first to pilot the endeavour.

Alberg’s solution was to set up a training company, Corndel (along with Sean Williams, a non-executive on his board) to act as Aptem’s first customer – just in time for the launch of the apprenticeships levy. Within three years Corndel had a revenue of £20 million and 250 staff.

Alberg puts its success down to having “no legacy”, enabling him to “design a company around what we felt the customer, the employer and the learner would find most valuable”.

Corndel decided to woo employers by spending “a fortune – hundreds of thousands” on curriculums, whereas their competitors would often rely on “the free stuff that an awarding body was willing to give them”.

They also paid “almost double” the going rate for tutors (£65,000 a year compared to £30,000 elsewhere), who they branded “professional development executives”.

They placed an “absolute focus on quality learner experience… treating the service as though it was an expensive, paid learning journey”. The fact it was paid for via the levy was “just incidental and a bonus”.

Alberg exited Corndel in 2020 when it was sold to investment group THI, but still regards it as his “baby, even if it feels fully grown up”. He remains “so proud of everything Corndel has achieved and is achieving”.

King Canute

Nowadays, Alberg works as a consultant for the education and training recruitment agency Protocol and behavioural finance firm Oxford Risk, having been a non-executive director for the firms prior to his move to Guernsey last year.

Aptem is now, he says, the largest technology vendor to the apprenticeships sector with 120 staff and 200 customers, the biggest being Lifetime Training. Alberg believes a “wonderful characteristic” of AI is that if Aptem makes an improvement next week, then every one of its 130,000 learners can benefit from it at the same time.

But he is also not blind to the downsides of the technology – how AI will erode the “entry-level skills” required for employees to become more accomplished at their work.

He draws parallels between the potential predicament of tech experts like himself and that of King Canute, who tried to show his courtiers he could not command the tides but whose message was misinterpreted by future generations. Like the tide, he sees AI technology as “inexorable”, and to think otherwise is “naïve”.

But in raising the potential downsides, “people in my position don’t want to get shot as a messenger. I have a commercial hat on… so you sometimes feel you have to sit on your hands a little bit”.

On the more positive side, Alberg says Aptem has “done a lot of testing” and found that  ‘hallucinations’ (where chatbots create false information) have not yet emerged when data from the training sector is being interpreted by the chatbot.

Controversially, he believes that AI offers advantages over human support in terms of its reliability, because AI “doesn’t get bored of you” or “say, ‘I’ve got another call in five minutes, I’ve got to get off the line”.

He says: “Like Canute, I can’t change the tide. What I can do is say, ‘we’ll make this tool work as well as we can’.