Cybrary Cuts Presentation and Production Time by 50% With Content and Brand Controls

In any business, there’s a need to keep up with the speed at which the industry moves. This is especially true for Cybrary, a cybersecurity and IT workforce development platform. With over 2 million users worldwide, Cybrary is a multi-sided platform helping cybersecurity and IT professionals prepare for the next threat or step in their career. The team works to provide users with world-class training and career development materials and enable them to connect with each other, instructors, and mentors. Due to the fast-paced nature and high volume of their work, Cybrary requires a system that allows them to build content to keep up with the pace of the industry. When you’re creating 1,000 slides a week, presentation management and efficiency is important.

We caught up with Cybrary’s Chief Product Officer, Trevor Halstead, and Head of Creative Services, Tommy Horlacher to talk about how Beautiful.ai has helped them improve both the quality and quantity of their content. 

Increasing efficiency by 50% with content management 

In the beginning, each course expert was creating their own material themselves and slapping a Cybrary logo on it. This resulted in a lot of inconsistencies. The older decks from instructors were all over the place and Cybrary’s design team spent a lot of time cleaning up the mess. In order to help scale the presentation design process, while keeping the content professional, Cybrary adopted a templated format in Google Slides. However the end-designs were still missing the mark. They were still spending weeks cleaning up decks and the time to production was too long. The long production cycles were hurting the business and really expensive to produce. That’s when they found Beautiful.ai. “It allowed us to put a ton of structure in place to ensure that the visual look and feel that we want is going to be consistent for all future presentations that are being built off of it,” Trevor Halstead explained. 

With Beautiful.ai the Cybrary design team had less editing and cleaning up to do once the instructor had finished their presentation. Having creative control over the instructors’ decks— setting themes, fonts, and adding branding— has been a game changer. 

Trevor says, “Part of being a series B company, it's really important for us to ensure that we're maintaining a steady brand as we're growing the business. Not just from our website and social media, but in ensuring proper brand management across the entire life cycle of the users’ experience, too.” Beautiful.ai helps guarantee that those brand guidelines and standards are put in place across all content.

Centralized content is king

The Cybrary content team had been struggling with centralizing training materials for their product. Maintaining version control, centralizing materials, and building templates for their instructors was too difficult in Google Slides and PowerPoint, and it became a time-suck. Centralized content enables companies to push out new content and keep it organized and easily accessible. Ultimately, it helps Cybrary’s overall efficiency to get quality content created and out the door faster.

Brand consistency is key

In addition to centralized content, Beautiful.ai also enables brand management, which is important to maintain a steady brand while companies grow the business. In Cybrary’s case, it helps in ensuring proper brand management across the entire experience from instructors to people taking the courses. Branding consistency protects Cybrary’s brand as a whole, and insures that there are no frankendecks out in the wild. 

Presentation management for top-notch quality

Beyond basic content management, presentation management has been a big element for Cybrary. The ability to have oversight of content while it’s being worked on in real time ensures the final output is top-notch quality and on-brand. While it’s beneficial for the team at Cybrary to be able to oversee the presentation process, it’s also helpful for the instructors to tap into other decks for inspiration. They can see what other instructors are creating which helps to spark some of their own creativity if they’re stumped about how to format their content or where to take their slide. Tommy adds, “We always tell instructors, ‘Feel free to open somebody else's presentation that's been working on it for a month. Take a look at their slides, get some ideas on what you like.’" The fact that they can open someone else’s presentation, find the name of the particular slide templates they’re using, and then recreate it in their own presentation is really helpful.

Animations bring virtual courses to life

In order to keep a virtual audience engaged, Cybrary’s courses need to pack a punch, and Beautiful.ai helps them to do so. “A lot of the features that you guys provided took the burden off of us,” Tommy said. Trevor adds that an “aha” moment for Cybrary was the fact that Beautiful.ai knows how to wow the audience with animations— that little extra design element helps your presentation really pop. 

Cutting design time in half with Beautiful.ai

Cybrary has anywhere from 80 to 100 instructors building a deck in Beautiful.ai at any given time. In addition to that, the Cybrary team is onboarding 30 to 40 new instructors each week. With that many people creating presentations, efficiency is key. Each Cybrary course ranges anywhere from 20 minutes to 20 hours, so there are a lot of slides to build out and a lot of presentations to manage. By using Beautiful.ai, Cybrary is able to save 50% design time. Tommy adds, “I would say Beautiful.ai increased our efficiency. I mean, 50% sounds crazy, but it's probably pretty close to accurate when you consider all of the manual stuff that we used to have to do.” This translates into enormous savings in both time and the expense of operating production at scale. With Beautiful.ai, Cybrary doesn’t have to choose quantity over quality— they can easily achieve both by reducing content revisions, branded edits, and time spent on various versions.