Vocational education is not equal to technical school. In the social concept for a long time, when it comes to vocational education, the public is often biased. It is generally believed that vocational education is a helpless way out for not being admitted to high schools and universities. "China, Shandong, looking for Lan Xiang, which excavator is the best" has become one of the well-known advertisements in China.

In fact, after 40 years of development, China's vocational education has become a multi-branch industry with a total market size of over one trillion. It includes vocational education with academic qualifications such as secondary school, junior college, vocational high school and technical school, as well as non-academic vocational education such as taking various certificates, taking civil servants, taking institutions and skills training.

The research report of Zhiyan Consulting Vocational Education Industry shows that the current vocational education market accounts for 27% of the whole education sector. By 2020, the total vocational education market in China will reach 1. 1.6 trillion yuan.

However, for a long time, vocational education has been a huge and scattered industry. There are a large number of companies that have been operating for more than ten years, with annual revenues of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan, but their scale can no longer grow, and they will die for a while.

With the penetration of the Internet into all walks of life, the workplace environment is becoming faster and faster, and the market demand for compound talents with medium and high skills is increasing. At the same time, the policy level has been vigorously promoting the development of vocational education. In February this year, the State Council issued the "National Vocational Education Reform Implementation Plan" to encourage all sectors of society to participate in vocational education construction, and the support for vocational education reform has reached an unprecedented height.

Under the dual impetus of demand and policy, vocational education has entered a fast-rising channel. According to the forecast of Zhiyan Consulting, vocational education will increase by 156% from 2065,438 to 2020, and the growth rate of non-academic vocational education will reach 2 17%.

The capital market has also begun to look for whether a blue ocean vocational education track can rise with investment value. In contrast, in 20 15, a number of online vocational education start-ups began to appear. They abandoned the traditional characteristics of "one-hammer sale" of vocational education and praised the concept of "lifelong learning" in an attempt to create a new vocational education model with a more benign financial model and easier scale expansion.

However, what is the new vocational education, how to build commercial barriers, and whether vocational education has structured industrial investment opportunities have become the questions that need to be answered before startups and capital markets respectively.

To this end, the small table interviewed:

On new vocational education. Main points of the full text:

Most of the new vocational education startups conduct business in the form of online recording and broadcasting courses, which is very similar to the knowledge payment in the previous two years, but several entrepreneurs interviewed at the small table all said that the new vocational education is not knowledge payment.

"Knowledge payment mainly solves the problem of knowing or not, and vocational education is the problem of solving it." Song Xuan, founder and CEO of spoon class, told the small table.

In essence, knowledge payment belongs to the category of general education, just like physical chemistry solves users' cognitive problems. Vocational education is to solve a specific operational problem of users, such as how to do PPT and how to do community operation. After learning, users can not only get intellectual inspiration, but also start to deal with a specific problem.

Huang Youzhen, co-founder of the three courses, further explained, "All our courses will eventually deliver a method to users. This method must be put into practice in a specific scene. This is the biggest difference between us and knowledge payment. "

In addition to the difference in delivery content, the product life cycle of the two is also very different. According to Huang Youzhen, knowledge payment often depends on the realization of large V traffic, so the sales window of general knowledge payment products is only 6 months, after which the sales volume will continue to decline, and the content of three classes is to solve the practical problems of users, so the courses launched three years ago still maintain sales growth every year.

Compared with the traditional vocational education, the new vocational education is also very different.

Traditional vocational education mostly focuses on civil service examination, career preparation examination, various certificate examinations, IT induction training and other fields. These requirements are generally rigid, and it is easier for enterprises to deliver standardized courses, but at the same time, once these requirements are met, they will not appear again. Therefore, most of the traditional vocational education institutions are doing "one-shot business".

Finally, many traditional vocational education enterprises have become pure traffic shopping mode, with one end getting traffic and the other end transforming. With the intensification of competition, the acquisition cost of the traffic end is getting higher and higher. In order to ensure profitability, there is only one way to raise the price. In the end, it became a vicious circle of "more expensive traffic-higher price-higher sales volume-worse user experience".

Moreover, in order to facilitate the acquisition of customers, many promises of "guaranteeing employment" and "guaranteeing exams" that can't be done at all began to appear in the words of publicity and promotion, which eventually brought bad reputation to the whole industry.

In addition, traditional vocational education mainly focuses on offline teaching, which has high labor cost. Marginal cost will not decrease with the expansion of scale, but there will be higher management cost.

Suntech and Dana, which mainly focus on textual research and IT training, have been falling all the way after listing. One of the important reasons is that the increasing customer acquisition costs and labor costs have delayed their profits, and there is also a trend of expanding losses. Moreover, the problem of poor reputation attached to the "one hammer" transaction has always followed, resulting in its delay in establishing a good brand image and its inability to obtain customers through natural traffic to reduce costs.

The new vocational education, in non-academic education, often focuses on skills training, focusing on the concept of lifelong learning, which is different from skills training for employment. Mainly meet the needs of users to improve their long-term professional ability, so there is room for users to buy again.

"As long as the ROI (return on investment) of the first customer is greater than 1, I can expand the scale at any time and then make a profit through cross-repurchase." Huang Youzhen analyzed.

Moreover, new vocational education enterprises generally choose online classes to do business, and the difficulty of large-scale replication is greatly reduced.

"Vocational education enterprises must have some businesses that can be completed online, so that there is a possibility of a short-term outbreak. Even if the pure offline mode can be enlarged, the general cycle will be longer. Relatively speaking, investors prefer the online model. " Meng Deyang, vice president of Song Qing Fund Investment, concluded with a small table.

In addition to the external characteristics such as tangency and repurchase, the emergence of new vocational education is actually the result of demand, policy and capital, which has obvious characteristics of the times.

1, two structural industry opportunities

Zhao Guang, founder and CEO of Tian Tian Xuenong, analyzed the small table. "The new vocational education is born out of two major trends, one is the skill upgrading demand of new professional groups brought about by the emergence of new technologies and new businesses, and the other is the talent upgrading demand in the process of industrial upgrading driven by new technologies in traditional industries."

Vocational education in China began to appear after the reform and opening up. 1978, Deng Xiaoping first proposed to vigorously develop secondary vocational education at the national conference on education.

The two great developments of vocational education depend on the urbanization process in China. There are two main channels for population migration from rural areas to cities. One is that migrant workers work in cities, and the other is that rural students are admitted to universities. The former promoted the great development of technical schools for training blue-collar workers represented by chef training in Lan Xiang and New Oriental in 1990s, while the latter gave birth to training institutions for solving the employment problem of college students represented by Zhonggong Education, Dana and Suntech after 2000.

The third opportunity of the industrial structure of vocational education appeared in 20 15, because the popularity of emerging technologies such as the internet, on the one hand, gave birth to a large number of new occupations, on the other hand, promoted the demand for talent upgrading driven by the upgrading of traditional industries.

Enterprises represented by "three courses" aim at the first opportunity, and their skills in product, operation, new media and digital marketing correspond to the needs of new professional groups for skill upgrading.

Huang Youcan told the small table that the three classes mainly focused on three types of opportunities, namely, the training needs corresponding to new technologies, new businesses and new management. The so-called new technology opportunities are skills training for new technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence and blockchain; The so-called new business opportunities are the training needs of new business talents such as products and operations brought by new technologies such as the Internet. The so-called new management is the management skills training demand of a large number of middle management positions brought by the flat management of these new enterprises.

The enterprises represented by Spoon Class and Everyday Learning Agriculture seized the second opportunity, and met the needs of professional farmers seeking skills upgrading to cope with the new industrial environment due to the upgrading of catering industry and land transfer.

"Consumption upgrading promotes industrial upgrading, and the most important thing in industrial upgrading is talent upgrading." Song Xuan believes that "the development of the catering industry in China today can be summarized in one sentence,' the front end needs the ultimate service and the back end needs the ultimate efficiency'."

Due to the rising cost of rent and the intensification of competition, restaurants are now trying to make the back kitchen smaller and smaller, and the front hall bigger and bigger, which can reduce the cost of production links and also have more sales space (for consumers to eat).

The improvement of kitchen production efficiency can be solved by a more efficient catering supply chain, while the quality service and refined operation of the front office require specialized skills training and professional talent supply.

"The state-promoted farmland transfer policy has spawned a group of professional farmers who will contract dozens of acres of cultivated land for cash crop cultivation. Professional farmers refer to entrepreneurs who are mainly engaged in modern agricultural production, agricultural management or agricultural services with the pursuit of maximizing interests as their motivation. " At the same time, Zhao Guang analyzed that "the upgrading of urban consumption has put forward higher requirements for the quality of agricultural products on the demand side, which has also prompted professional farmers to have stronger training needs for professional skills such as agricultural technology and agricultural management."

According to Zhao Guang, there are 260 million growers in China. With the acceleration of land circulation, a group of professional farmers gradually divided, reaching tens of millions. In addition, 7.4 million entrepreneurs who returned home last year returned to the countryside to join professional farmers and engage in specialized agricultural production.

In the past, farmers could only seek advice from township agronomists and fertilizer store owners if they wanted to acquire agricultural technology knowledge, but their knowledge was incomplete and outdated, so farmers' agricultural technology training needs were not well met. Learn agriculture every day and seize new vocational education opportunities in the agricultural field.

In recent years, the education market has developed rapidly, and a number of unicorn enterprises have emerged. However, the regulatory hurricane came unexpectedly on 20 18. Notice on Effectively Reducing the Extra-curricular Burden of Primary and Secondary School Students and Carrying out Special Rectification Activities of Extra-curricular Training Institutions, Regulations on the Implementation of the Law on the Promotion of Private Education (Draft for Review), Opinions on Standardizing the Development of Off-campus Training Institutions, and Opinions of the Central the State Council on Deepening the Reform and Standardizing the Development of Pre-school Education.

Popular tracks such as K 12 and preschool education have successively entered the strict supervision zone, but only adult vocational education is favored by the policy, and the tone of encouraging development is very clear.

After 40 years' development, the industrial structure of China's market economy has gradually bid farewell to the pattern of low-end industries in the past and transformed into high-end industries. In this process, a large number of high-end skilled talents are needed, but the gap in the direction of talent supply has been very large, which is also the fundamental reason why the policy encourages the development of vocational education.

"A lot of mid-to high-end skills can't be cultivated in universities today. These are often slowly explored by the most cutting-edge enterprises in business exploration and belong to the internal knowledge of enterprises or individuals. " Fan Li, the founding partner of Assembly Capital, analyzed the small dining table. "A new type of vocational education company like Sanban is to supply this experience and knowledge to the market and turn it into a standardized curriculum service. This model is more in line with the needs of enterprises, so vocational education will be an investment outlet for a long time to come. "

With the outbreak of demand and the promotion of policies, the capital market has begun to turn its attention to the field of vocational education. And with the strict supervision of 2065 438+08k 12, preschool education and other education tracks, investors who originally looked at education even ran into the vocational education track.

According to incomplete statistics, since 20 16, there have been as many as 26 events in which vocational education track has completed financing of more than 1 100 million yuan.

On the one hand, the rapid entry of capital can accelerate the development of the industry and give more startups more ammunition to spend the cold winter. On the other hand, education itself is a "slow job". In particular, new vocational education companies mainly rely on systematic and structured content instead of recruiting teachers to promote business growth, and especially rely on word-of-mouth accumulation.

Fan Li made it clear that "education itself is a matter that pays special attention to word of mouth and quality, and it takes time to precipitate." The excessive pursuit of speed and scale in the early stage runs counter to it. "

Song Xuan also said that vocational education and entrepreneurship is not a business that burns money. Compared with financial investment, it may be more meaningful to provide some strategic resources to help.

The new vocational education has seized the new opportunity of industrial structure change. In order to meet the new demand of talent upgrading, its business model and core competitiveness should also be changed.

1, online is king

Traditional vocational education often adopts offline teaching mode, and most of the courses it provides are relatively easy to standardize, such as textual research, civil service examination and entry-level IT training. This model focuses on human input, which is relatively difficult to replicate on a large scale and can only serve the surrounding people.

However, almost all new vocational education enterprises choose the online-based mode, which not only covers a wider range of people, but also has lower labor costs.

Compared with K 12, children's English and other popular live classes, the new vocational education is more inclined to record and broadcast classes. "Live broadcast depends on the teacher, and recording depends on the content." Huang Youcan explained to the small table.

Whether IT is K 12, children's English, textual research, civil service examination, entry-level IT training, etc. Such courses are relatively easy to standardize, and there is no shortage of teachers, and they can be scaled up through live classes.

The new vocational education often cultivates middle and high-end skills. Good product managers and operators, experienced catering practitioners and professional farmers are very scarce, and it is not easy to cultivate them. Enterprises can only combine the experience of these industry experts, make standardized and deliverable course content as much as possible, and provide teaching services in the form of recording and broadcasting courses.

In addition to supply constraints, there are also some constraints on demand. Generally, users with high-end vocational skills training needs are often adults with their own work rhythm, and the time is fragmented. It is impossible to guarantee a fixed time live class like children, and recording and broadcasting classes are more suitable for their self-study. Moreover, adults have more self-control than children and do not need the supervision and companionship functions provided by live classes.

However, recording and broadcasting courses lack interactive and answering functions, which can often be satisfied by new vocational education enterprises through community mutual assistance, supplementary teaching services and intelligent customer service.

The practice of the three classes is to build a service system of "class teacher+teaching assistant". The class teacher provides class service and the teaching assistant provides homework correction. Class teachers are full-time employees, and teaching assistants are recruited through part-time crowdsourcing platforms. These teaching assistants are often excellent students in the past. "Compared with traditional offline IT vocational education institutions, we can improve service efficiency by more than ten times." Huang Youcan said.

For some courses that really need manual demonstration, such as fruit tree pruning, farmers will give some offline lectures every day. But in the long run, it is still necessary to strengthen the daily teaching and research ability, so that such courses can be more easily accepted by online recording and broadcasting courses.

2. Building the core barrier of teaching and research ability

The three new vocational education enterprises interviewed all said that teaching and research ability is the core barrier of the company. Compared with live courses and online courses, recording and broadcasting courses pay special attention to teaching and research ability.

"Our teaching and research and teaching are separated. The teaching and research team will compile' teaching materials', and the teaching team will add teaching methods and combine them with the teacher's experience to eventually become a course. " Song Xuan further explained, "And we need to be independent of teachers. With courseware materials, any teacher with teaching ability will say that courseware materials are the key. "

Most vocational education teams use the "consulting partner system" to cooperate with lecturers, because over-reliance on lecturers will lead to rigid courses and lecturers will get high scores. This model is difficult to continue to expand, and it is difficult to meet the market demand for a long time from the content iteration.

In addition to online recording and broadcasting courses, spoon courses also include offline classes and expensive enterprise consulting courses, which will eventually become courseware materials for online recording and broadcasting courses after desensitization.

Three other companies have told Dining Table that in addition to adding new courses according to the rhythm, existing courses will be iterated regularly. Because high-end skills are always changing rapidly, enterprises must make timely adjustments to ensure that the course content is not outdated and can always help users solve practical problems in their work.

In terms of personnel composition, the number of teaching and research teams in the three companies is close to half of the total number of companies.

3. The capacity of Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province determines the upper limit of scale.

Huang Youcan told the small table that one of the important reasons why it is difficult for traditional vocational training institutions to break through the ceiling of scale is the lack of category expansion ability.

"Without the strong support of Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province, expanding the categories of educational enterprises, basically the teaching, scientific research, teaching and sales of new categories have to be re-done, which is no different from re-establishing a company."

The big business modules of an education enterprise are nothing more than three: teaching and research, teaching and marketing, and these three aspects must be able to sum up some basic abilities and precipitate them into the business center of the enterprise. In this way, there is no need to make wheels repeatedly when expanding the category, and the demand for labor costs will not increase significantly.

"In addition to teaching and research, we must also have some middle-level capabilities. In terms of marketing and customer acquisition, we also need a set of gameplay that can be used in various categories. "

Another big difference between new vocational education institutions and traditional vocational education institutions is that they do not rely on strong sales transformation to promote business growth, and often do not support a large number of sales teams like traditional institutions.

The three selected companies all said that their main channels to obtain customers are natural flow such as content drainage and recommendation brought by word of mouth, but the practice of advertising strong selling and transformation is not effective.

4. In the final analysis, it is the battle of brands.

It is a typical practice of new vocational education institutions to make excellent courses by strengthening teaching and research ability, and then promote word-of-mouth communication to achieve natural flow to obtain customers.

However, if we want to continuously expand the scale and get out of the word-of-mouth circle to cover more people, we must establish brand awareness. Once the brand is established, it can acquire customers through natural flow, thus reducing costs and expanding categories.

"Education is nothing more than content and service. The combination of the two can form a word of mouth. Word-of-mouth communication precipitates the most original brand, and then it is meaningfully spread and amplified to form a solid brand impression among the public. " Huang Youcan concluded, "But the premise is that the delivery of content and services can bring word of mouth continuously and steadily."

New Oriental in the field of overseas training, Learning and Thinking in the field of K 12, and Lan Xiang in the field of skills training for blue-collar workers have all formed a well-known brand impression. Therefore, these educational enterprises have established a good business and financial model, but the pursuers have fallen into a vicious circle of high customer acquisition costs.

Vocational education as a whole is a trillion-dollar market, which is still in a period of rapid growth. But this market is not a highly concentrated market, but a number of market segments separated by natural areas.

On the whole, vocational education can be divided into academic and non-academic types. Non-academic training can also be divided into 2B enterprise training and 2C personal training. In 2C training, there are typical qualification training, talent recruitment training and skill training, which can be further subdivided.

The new vocational education mainly focuses on the maximum skill training, and every more subdivided field has great imagination.

Huang Youcan estimates that the current total market size is about 200 billion yuan. With the change of user demand from one-time consumption to repurchase consumption, there is still 2-3 times room for expansion.

Song Xuan told the small dining table that in the catering industry with a market scale of 4 trillion yuan, catering bosses are willing to spend 2%-3% of their income on training themselves, store managers, supervisors and even waiters. It is estimated that the training market will be around 1000 billion, and the catering industry will still grow at the rate of 10% every year.

Spoon class focuses on talent promotion training in catering industry, and the core is to do two things well: talent promotion and talent supply. Song Xuan told the small dining table that in the catering industry with a market scale of 4 trillion yuan, catering bosses are willing to spend an average of 2%-3% of their income on the training of themselves, store managers, supervisors and even waiters, and introduce more professionals. It is estimated that the training market is about 1000 billion yuan, and the catering industry is still growing at the rate of 10% every year.

Zhao Guang told the small dining table that the total annual expenditure on education and other knowledge services in agriculture is 1000 billion yuan, and the demand for knowledge acquisition will be further released as the land transfer stimulates more professional farmers to contract land.

"Vocational education, a trillion-dollar industry, has a large number of sub-industries, with a scale of hundreds of billions and billions. If a company can quickly become the first in a sub-sector and has the ability to cross categories, then the imagination of valuation is relatively large. " Meng Deyang concluded.

By horizontal comparison, the market size of civil service examination and training in 20 19 is expected to be above1200 million yuan (data from the National Civil Service Bureau), and the current market value of public education, a leading enterprise in this field, is 86.7 billion yuan.

Compared with the civil service examination and training, the above-mentioned new vocational education subdivision track may impact the valuation of10 billion even if it can make a certain scale and market share without monopolizing leading enterprises.

In the new track of vocational education in N billion-level and 100 billion-level market segments, it may be possible to cultivate many unicorns intensively in the future.

This article is reproduced from Shi Fuyuan, the author of WeChat official account "Small Table". The article is the author's independent opinion, and does not represent the position of the mustard heap. Please contact the original author for reprinting.