On June 30, ETS agreed to acquire ACT. For anyone building in workforce skills assessment and credentialing, this completes a stack that has been assembling in plain sight for two years. ETS bought PSI in January 2024, has been partnering its way toward the employer layer since, and has now added ACT’s WorkKeys. The result is a competitor positioned across your entire value chain rather than in one segment of it.
The financial posture behind the move is worth naming, because it cuts both ways. ETS is buying from weakness, with five years of layoffs, revenue at a 15-year low, the SAT lost, and the GRE and TOEFL up for sale for around $500 million. A distressed acquirer assembling an ambitious stack is formidable on paper and stretched in practice, and the gap between those two is where your next 18 months of positioning lives.
One competitor now spans all four layers
The market you operate in divides into four layers: foundational skills assessment, certification and licensure delivery, digital credentialing and badging, and the labor-market skills data that sits upstream of all of it. Until this deal,
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