For more than 20 years, Berghauser Pont’s knowledge portals, books, and courses have served professionals across multiple disciplines – from environmental law to healthcare – with timely and vital access to the latest developments.

Today, their Learning Management System (LMS) – the PONT Academy – provides professionals in the Netherlands with flexible learning solutions. We spoke with Founder and CEO, Ruben Berghauser Pont, to learn more about the changing landscape of publishing in professional education.

The beginnings of Berghauser Pont

“We make life easier for legal professionals to get the news fast, on the topics that are relevant for them.”

-Ruben Berghauser Pont

In 2003, the Government of the Netherlands began publishing large volumes of legal documentation online, including court cases. This was part of a broader initiative to digitize government information and make it available to the public.

The problem for legal professionals was that the documents were distributed across a range of government websites. Keeping up with the latest developments was a time-consuming and challenging task. So Ruben’s company developed software to organize all these documents by theme. This made it much faster and easier to find relevant content.

Alongside content management, Berghauser Pont published physical books – mainly in the field of environmental law. By 2010, the company moved into the professional education market, producing content for lawyers, paralegals, public institutions, and government. Today, around two-thirds of the company’s turnover is in education, including e-learning.

A flexible solution for professional education

“We started with books, and then we added news articles. All our content lives inside PublishOne. All our editors work inside PublishOne.”

– Ruben Berghauser Pont

Every year, lawyers and other professionals complete courses as part of mandatory professional development. This can be done through traditional in-person training sessions, or via e-learning modules, such as those offered by Berghauser Pont. Publishing in fields such as law involves regular updates of information across multiple channels. These updates need to be made to the same content in different locations.

Doing updates manually takes time and is wide open to human errors. Berghauser Pont first used the PublishOne platform to create, manage, and publish digital and paper books.

But PublishOne also enables edits to be made once and published everywhere. That’s important for areas such as case law because it ensures that news articles and books have the most up-to-date content. It also provides much-needed consistency.

With an ever-growing portfolio of e-learning courses, Berghauser Pont is increasingly integrating course content with the information from its vast repository inside PublishOne. That means when professionals complete e-learning courses through the Pont Academy, they’re given access to additional study materials to support and extend their learning.

The future of professional learning

Ongoing professional education is evolving. These days, many professionals choose a combination of in-person and online learning events.

E-learning packages from Berghauser Pont enable legal professionals to complete training around their day-to-day activities at a time that suits them. But there’s still a place for face-to-face learning. In-person events are great for interactivity and discussion, whereas online learning is better suited to basic training activities.

Right now, professional education is seeing more and more integrations with different kinds of visual media, including video and podcasts. The professional market is slowly moving towards more personalized training solutions, giving learners a one-stop shop for in-person and online learning packages that they can mix and match to suit their needs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also playing a larger role in information and knowledge gathering. Aggregating content from multiple sources, AI will almost certainly become the new content integrator. It can also be used to extract specific snippets of information, from lengthy books or even whole content libraries, in seconds.

AI is going to revolutionize the information business. That means publishing platforms such as PublishOne will need to integrate new forms of AI functionality to accelerate workflows, enhance content, and enable educators to create content once and publish it anywhere.

To learn more about e-learning at Pont Academy, visit their websites:

• https://pont.media/
• https://www.berghauserpontacademy.nl/