Learning industry veteran Larry Israelite will be bringing his skills to Boston-based skills assessment company Smarterer. The startup announced Monday the former vice president of corporate learning and development for Liberty Mutual Insurance will be joining Smarterer's executive team as the senior vice president of learning and assessments.
Israelite's more than 30 years of enterprise experience will be used to shape Smarterer's employee capability platform.
"Never before has it been so critical to manage the shifting gap between the skills your business needs and the skills it has right now," said Smarterer CEO Dave Balter in a statement. "Larry has personally experienced this challenge inside Fortune 1,000 companies."
Israelite joined Liberty Mutual in 2006, and became responsible for the design and implementation of company-wide talent management processes and tools. Prior to Liberty Mutual, Israelite held learning management positions in a variety of other industries, including healthcare, high tech and financial services, at the likes of Pitney Bowes, the Forum Corporation and John Hancock Financial Services.
A recognized expert in the field of learning and talent management, Israelite is the editor of Talent Management: Strategies for Success from Six Leading Companies and Lies About Learning, the latter of which will feature a 2.0 version in early 2015.
"I’ve been impressed by his passion for helping companies better leverage their talent," Balter added, "and his unique insight will help accelerate our goal of enabling teams to change as fast as their businesses.”
Israelite pointed to his past when explaining why he wanted Smarterer to be in his future:
I joined Smarterer because the team has figured out a way to solve a problem that has vexed learning and development and business leaders for as long as I can remember — quickly, efficiently and reliably quantifying employee knowledge skills. Smarterer has found a way to completely disrupt traditional approaches to test development and delivery, and, simply put, that’s too good of an opportunity to pass up.
Smarterer raised $1.6 million in February, bringing the South End startup's total amount raised to $4.6 million.
