When people ask how NextWork will make money, the answer starts with how the business began. Before NextWork, my services business earned revenue from training, recruitment and consulting. People paid to develop skills, companies paid to hire them, and some of our strongest learners joined the consulting team to put those skills to work. Seeing that value from all three sides gives us confidence in the business we’re building now.
With NextWork, we will make those connections at a much greater scale. Someone will come here to learn, build a body of work that showcases what they can do, and keep adding to it as their skills develop. That work becomes useful to the learner, to someone looking to hire them, and to a team that wants to learn how they work. Our job is to build the paid offerings around that value in the right order:
Paid learner features
Recruitment tools
Enterprise/team offering
#1: Paid features
Learners paying for more ways to build and showcase their skills
We’re building NextWork for people to use throughout their lives. Someone might arrive because they’re looking for a job, but getting hired doesn’t mean they’ve finished learning. As their work changes, they have new tools to understand and problems to solve. Each project adds to a portfolio that shows how their skills are developing, giving them something to share with employers and others learning similar things.
We’ve already seen people pay for NextWork through our previous Pro plan, which offered portfolio customisation and advanced projects. The plan was growing when we chose to switch off monetisa tion and make the entire product free in late 2025, so we could focus on reaching more learners.
Since then, NextWork has grown from offering a collection of projects to becoming a platform where people are generating entire projects around what they want to build. Our next paid offering will reflect that change, giving learners more project generation and AI usage as they take on more of their own ideas. We’re also planning much richer ways to showcase the skills behind that work, so someone looking at your portfolio will understand how you approached a problem, the decisions you made and what you’re capable of doing next.
#2: Recruitment tools
Paid tools for employers finding people with proven skills
Someone might have a job title that says very little about the AI workflows they’ve been building or the problems they’ve learnt to solve. Their work gives an employer a way to see that ability and consider someone they might otherwise have overlooked.
I saw the value of this in my previous business, where I helped companies recruit people I had trained. Knowing what someone could do made it much easier to connect them with the right opportunity, and NextWork will bring that understanding to far more people by making their work searchable.
A recruiter looking for a particular skill could find people who have demonstrated it, look through their projects and understand how they approached the work. As we develop ways for learners to capture what they build in their everyday tools, employers will have a fuller picture of skills that might never appear on a résumé.
That is what employers would pay for: a better way to find and get to know people who could do the job. We’re building the learner community first because those connections depend on people choosing to learn, build and share their work here.
#3: Enterprise/team offering
Companies paying to help teams learn from each other’s work
The work someone shares on NextWork will also help the people they already work with. Someone on a team might find a better way to complete a task, build a useful automation or work out how to use a new tool. Their colleagues could benefit from knowing how they did it, but sharing that knowledge usually becomes another job: writing instructions, recording a walkthrough or making time to teach it.
Our roadmap includes a way for someone to capture that work as they do it, then turn it into a project a colleague can follow. The colleague gets to learn by doing, and their completed work shows how well they’ve understood the process.
For a new teammate, that could mean learning directly from how experienced colleagues do the job. For an existing team, it could mean putting a better method into practice without waiting for someone to organise a training session.
Companies would pay to make that easier across their teams. The learning experience we’re developing for individuals gives us the foundation: helping one person develop a skill, then making it easier for them to pass it on.
Building each part on the strength of the last
Our current roadmap puts paid learner features within the next year, followed by recruitment tools and a broader enterprise offering over roughly the next two years.
For now, the most valuable thing we can do is give people more reasons to use NextWork and share what they’re building. That gives us a community to develop paid features with, a body of work for employers to search and practical knowledge that teams learn from. The work we’re doing today supports all three.
I want NextWork to be useful a hundred years from now. We’ll serve people using tools we haven’t imagined yet, doing jobs that don’t exist today. Helping them learn, show what they can do and pass that knowledge on gives us plenty of room to build a lasting business.
Happy learning,
