Education and training is the key to unlocking our global potential. It’s the ultimate equalizer in a world scarred by disparity and it’s one tool, above all others, that can change just about everything. It can alleviate poverty. It can solve labour shortages. It can stimulate scientific and medical breakthroughs. But despite everything the force of education and training can do, there have always been  towering, formidable  barriers holding back a potential tide of widespread, positive change. Those barriers are access and delivery. Or at least, they were until recently. 

To tackle these barriers head-on, Illumia Labs was created in 2020 to bring training to every corner of the globe, thereby influencing some of the most prominent economic and social issues of our time. Founders Alan Tay and Mike Bogaars began their careers as pilots and instructors who cherished the opportunity to use the ground-breaking technology that’s synonymous with aviation. But, even in such an advanced field, Alan and Mike lived the training bottleneck first-hand. They were not able to reach or advance the talent pool the industry so desperately needed. Right there, the aforementioned barriers asserted themselves yet again. But, reasoned Alan and Mike – what if education and training could reach more people? What if you could teach or train people faster, more efficiently and more effectively? And, what if you could do these things for less money, not more? Provocative questions. And, as is so often the case when attempting to answer such provocative questions, some innovative changes would have to be involved. Alan and Mike were immediately excited at the possibilities, but at the same time they knew that making change had to start with change.

They knew that to make this work required taking the current technology  and reimagining it in a way that made it  much more efficient, urgently necessary, and – always – accessible. To that end, they created Illumia Labs, embracing modern-day technology to deliver virtual training experiences. From the get-go, this was  not online learning as we’d all come to know it. It was truly much more: it was creating and adapting an online world to better suit how the world learns. A platform that navigates seamlessly through teaching, training and technology, while being delivered with global connectivity – all without sacrificing personal connection.

Alan and Mike had a good feeling that their enthusiasm for this tool would be contagious. They could easily imagine their prospects wanting very much to replicate their best instructors to deliver training faster than ever before. It made perfect sense to them how companies could benefit from onboarding new staff just as easily in a different hemisphere as it could for people next door. And finally, it seemed obvious how much employees would gain from custom-designed and fully immersive virtual reality environments providing safe simulations to gain experience. 

These applications, and so much more, were and remain the heart and soul of Illumia Labs. People have seen the future of training and are getting on board with us daily. 

Which brings us to right now. As we implied at the outset, education and training is the most valuable commodity the global community has to offer, because it represents something tangible that can help us achieve just about everything we can imagine. Illumia Labs is a platform to enable those changes. It reimagines training as a renewable resource that exists in a perpetual state of abundance – made available within a virtual environment bringing both information and people together.

Illumia Labs provides a platform for the training of the future, now – built with purpose, and without limitations.