In new layoffs, Utah tech company Pluralsight won’t say how many are losing jobs

Prominent Utah tech company Pluralsight cut more employees Tuesday, with less transparency than its layoff of 400 people in December.

CEO Aaron Skonnard confirmed the staff reduction in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune and said the move was “part of a strategic alignment of resources to strengthen our company and more profitably meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

A spokesperson for Pluralsight, an online training and software company headquartered in Draper, did not say how many employees were cut. An undisclosed number of workers also were laid off in April.

Skonnard, recently confirmed as a new member of the Utah Board of Higher Education, added in his statement: “All of our employees are incredibly valuable to us, and this was a difficult decision that was not made lightly.”

Several recently laid-off employees posted about the new cuts, some calling it a “restructuring,” on Linkedin Tuesday.

Employees saying on Linkedin that they had been affected included developers, video creators and sales specialists. One engineer said their entire team had been laid off, though they did not say how big that team was.

It’s the third round of layoffs in seven months. When the company laid off laid off 400 employees in December, it said it moved some of those jobs to India. It also said it would pay course authors less money.

At the time, it was one of at least four local “unicorn” companies — private start-ups valued at more than $1 billion — to lay off workers.

Pluralsight, which offers Cloud-based learning software, sells subscriptions to libraries of video courses, skills assessments and certifications in software development, technology and business development. It became a publicly traded company in 2018 but was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2021 for $3.8 billion.

According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents, the company incurred net losses of $163.5 million in 2019 and $164 million in 2020.

The company has 48 job openings currently posted on its website. Thirty-two are based in India.