Regis spinoff combines instructors, books, internet.

• Author: Schwab, Robert

Non-academic corporate education and training has grown as an industry to a $40 billion market, and at the same time shrunk, most recently, from about 400 companies to about 40, say the founders of Regis. Learning Solutions, a private, for profit spinoff of training programs developed by Denver's Regis University.

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Yet that business climate was fertile ground for RLS, which was a brand new company at the start of 2003, and has built a client list of about a dozen large companies that have jumped at the chance to use some of the firm's proprietary accelerated learning processes.

"We take everything that's non-credit," said RLS co founder Peggy K. Steele. "Corporations generally are more interested in the competencies and skills of their people rather than college credit," she said

Regis owns 64 percent of RLS, which is based in Golden. Steele was a former member of the Regis School of Professional Service's advisory board, an entrepreneur who had earlier sold her first successful teaching venture. International Learning Systems. When Regis administrators asked her to consider starting a company that would use the university's innovative learning programs, she recruited two former colleagues from ILS, J. Stephen kiikpatrick and technology whiz Mike Vaughn, to found the new company with the college.

Its products, for companies with from 250 to thousands of employees, blend instructorled classes, book study and online e-learning, and a proprietary technique they have trademarked and call "Documentary Learning," which uses videotapes of managers and workers to teach each other and to measure improved performance.

Kirkpatrick, who recently spent an evening and part of the midnight shift teaching machinists and other metal workers at...