This becomes easier with the right tools, integrated to meet your needs. Take Degreed and Workday. Together, Degreed and Workday create a unified skills ecosystem that turns insight into action. The integration helps you close skill gaps faster, adapt to change, and align development directly with business priorities.

Turn Skill Gaps into Growth Opportunities

In many organizations, skill data is scattered across multiple platforms. That slows workforce planning and creates a mismatch between talent and business needs. The Workday and Degreed integration solves that by connecting skill data in both directions, creating a single, reliable source of truth.

It also replaces generic, one-size-fits-all learning with highly personalized experiences. By combining Workday’s role and performance insights with Degreed’s AI-powered curation, personalized experiences, and 80+ content providers, employees get the right learning at the right time.

Whenever the market shifts, agility becomes a competitive advantage. Shared taxonomies, labor market intelligence, and real-time skill validation make it possible to pivot quickly and confidently. Most importantly, every learning activity can be tied directly to measurable outcomes—linking Degreed activity with business targets in Workday, like retention, productivity, and promotion rates—so you can prove ROI, not just report on activity.

Proof in Action: State Street

State Street uses Degreed to assess and grow skills, then syncs validated skills to Workday only when proficiency is met. The results:

• Employees who spend 5–10 hours/month learning in Degreed report higher engagement.
• 300K+ Validated Skill Ratings powering internal mobility
• 97% User Activation, driven by integration into internal mobility
• 72% Monthly Active Use (and growing)

Your Advantage

Our Skills and Learning integrations have a Workday Design Approved badge. That means they are reviewed and approved by Workday, built in close collaboration with the Workday Product team, and guided by real client use cases. Together, we deliver one source of truth for HR and L&D, a connected and personalized employee experience, and the agility to pivot quickly, measure impact, and invest in what works.

Don’t wait for skill gaps to slow your growth. Discover how Workday + Degreed can help you close them. Imagine the impact you could see in just 90 days.

The post Use Workday and Degreed Data to Fill Your Skill Gaps appeared first on Degreed.

What happens when one of the world’s most trusted financial institutions decides it’s time to realign its skill development strategy?

At State Street, the answer was clear: Build an enterprise-wide, data-driven, executive-backed foundation for workforce agility and internal mobility—embedded in the company’s annual business strategy and talent action plans.

With more than 50,000 employees globally and 11% of the world’s financial assets flowing through its systems daily, State Street needed a more strategic approach to skill development, one that could keep pace with evolving business demands and employee expectations.

“The business came to us and said, ‘We have no way of seeing what skills employees have. We have no way of understanding where our skill gaps are, where we need to upskill, where we need to reskill,’” said Laura Sullivan, Vice President, Talent Development.

That challenge sparked the launch of SkillsFIRST. More than an HR initiative, it’s a key lever putting skills at the core of performance, retention, and career advancement. Powered by Degreed and integrated into Workday, SkillsFIRST is helping leadership align talent supply with business critical needs—and empowering employees to take ownership of their skill development.

From Limited Insight to Connected Capability

Before launching SkillsFIRST, State Street lacked a unified view of its workforce capabilities, while employees sought greater clarity around growth paths and more targeted development support.

Rather than licensing costly inference tools, State Street used Degreed and Workday to build its own Skills Library, customized using a blend of industry benchmarks and internal expertise. With input from subject matter experts, learning teams defined seven core skills for each role and created tailored Role Plans in Degreed.

How the Degreed–Workday Integration Functions at State Street

At State Street, the integration between Degreed and Workday forms the backbone of the company’s skills-first strategy—bridging employee development with strategic talent planning.

The process begins in Degreed, when employees explore curated learning content and engage with the personalized Role Plans. Employees are encouraged to assess their proficiency using the Degreed eight-point scale, and then to initiate structured career development conversations by requesting manager input on their ratings.

Skills will ultimately be moved to Workday to power a range of critical HR capabilities including skills matching for open positions, internal job recommendations, and strategic workforce planning—all grounded in real-time evidence of capability from Degreed.

This integration ensures that career development isn’t just aspirational—it’s operational, measurable, and deeply connected to business outcomes.

Strategic Impact That Scales

In just the first year of implementation, State Street has seen meaningful results:

• Millions of dollars saved avoiding costly, third-party skill inference and talent marketplace tools.
• 50% of employees onboarded into SkillsFIRST
• 1,200 additional internal promotions in six months
• 11% increase in employee engagement scores tied to career development
• 34% of internal hires supported through SkillsFIRST data, avoiding costs of external hiring
• 21,000+ monthly skill ratings generating rich talent insights for planning and learning

These outcomes reflect more than a technology shift—they signal a cultural commitment to transparency, growth, and mobility.

Key Lessons for Talent Leaders

For HR, Talent, and L&D leaders looking to operationalize skills, State Street’s journey offers proven strategies:

• Begin with clear business objectives, not just system capabilities.
• Build shared language through a unified skills library and role plans.
• Integrate platforms to turn skills data into workforce intelligence.
• Empower employees to participate in—and benefit from—the process.

By positioning skills as the connective tissue across performance, planning, and development, State Street has redefined how a complex global organization can unlock potential and stay future-ready.

Learn more.

SkillsFIRST didn’t just transform learning at State Street—it improved retention, boosted engagement, enabled internal mobility, and delivered measurable cost savings.

Find out how a similar approach could accelerate outcomes at your organization. Let’s talk.

The post Skill Development at Scale: What State Street Is Doing Differently appeared first on Degreed.

While the Degreed partner ecosystem includes a wide range of innovators, eight stand out for how they bring a skills-first strategy to life. Each played a visible role as a Degreed LENS 2025 sponsor. And importantly, each addresses a distinct and urgent workforce challenge.

From labor market insights to learning infrastructure, these partners help us turn vision into execution. Collectively, they embody the power of an integrated ecosystem—accelerating impact, removing friction, and driving measurable outcomes for every Degreed client.

Pearson: Future-Proofing Learning with Market Intelligence

Pearson brings together the power of its Faethm workforce analytics and its Credly digital credentialing. Combined with Degreed, these tools help organizations move from insight to execution—pinpointing future skill needs, delivering targeted development, and validating results in measurable ways.

At LENS, the Pearson executive breakfast roundtable, the Pearson session Future-Proofing HR: The Impact of AI and Emerging Technology, and other discussions showed how organizations can align learning with business goals, predict and proactively solve for skill gaps, make workforce development an executive-level initiative, and more. And in conversation after conversation, Pearson demonstrated how our partnership benefits talent leaders looking to scale outcomes-driven strategies.

The upshot? Connecting predictive intelligence with learning programs and verified achievement is a roadmap for transformation backed by proof of impact.“We really do work in a ton of different ways, and also integrate in a ton of different ways, with the the talent ecosystem across the whole skilling journey, which really starts with, ‘How do you plan for the future and the talent that you want in your organization?’” Melissa Matlins, Global Head of Workforce Solutions at Pearson, told the LENS audience.

Workday: Empowering Smarter Skills Development

The bi-directional Workday integration with Degreed Skills+ turns static skill data into a dynamic asset. How? By providing a seamless way to exchange, enrich and act on skill data across systems. Skill profiles stay up to date automatically. Learning progress feeds directly into talent systems. And business leaders gain clearer visibility into workforce capabilities—without relying on disconnected reports.

For shared clients like Citi and BP, this interoperability supports faster talent mobility, smarter workforce planning, less manual work, and a more agile approach to managing change. For HR IT teams, the Workday-Degreed integration eliminates data silos and reduces manual upkeep—ensuring more accurate skill visibility across talent systems.

The joint mainstage LENS session Maximizing Impact Together, featuring Workday and SAP SuccessFactors, delivered a standout moment. Panelists encouraged attendees to focus on impactful skills, embrace open tech partnerships, experiment, and boldly take next steps with AI.

“Whatever problem it is you’re trying to solve, have a plan, put it in place, document it,” said Michael Goldberg, Principal Outbound Product Manager at Workday. “What are the outcomes? What are the metrics? How are you going to measure that value? … Make it very clear who owns what, who’s responsible for what, and who are ultimate decision makers.”

Michael Goldberg, Principal Outbound Product Manager at Workday (left), Josh Gosliner, VP Product Strategy at SAP SuccessFactors (middle), and Ashley Gammie, VP Partnerships at Degreed (right),on the Degreed LENS 2025 main stage

CredSpark: Embedding Assessments to Personalize Learning

CredSpark moves skill measurement beyond theory and into action. By embedding assessments directly into the Degreed platform, CredSpark enables learning teams to continuously measure skill growth, personalize learning based on real-time performance, and generate data that feeds seamlessly into BI tools and reporting systems.

Credspark came to LENS with a clear message: For business leaders tasked with demonstrating program effectiveness, the company delivers the skill-level data needed to prove impact and align learning with business goals. The LENS welcome reception Credspark co-hosted with Degreed Key Account Directors drove the message home—providing an energizing kickoff.

Lightcast: Grounding Strategy in Labor Market Data

Lightcast brings real-time labor market intelligence into the heart of workforce strategy. Through its integration with Degreed, Lightcast helps organizations understand which skills are emerging, which are in demand, and how internal capabilities stack up against fast-changing industry needs.

At LENS, one question in particular from Lightcast resonated: If nearly half your industry’s skill requirements are about to change, wouldn’t you want to know how?

Ethena: Reinventing Compliance With Engaging Content

Ethena is proving that compliance training doesn’t have to feel like a checkbox exercise. Built on behavioral science and designed for meaningful employee engagement, Ethena content helps companies drive lasting behavior change, not just completions. 

Fully integrated with Degreed, Ethena makes it easy to deliver mandatory training in a way that makes it relevant to broader learning goals. 

At LENS, Ethena Chief People Officer Melanie Naranjo joined leaders from Ericsson and Truist for a dynamic panel on The AI & Skills-Powered Shift: Redefining Leadership. 

People respond to learning that’s approachable, Naranjo said. “Make it something empowering instead of something terrifying.”

LearnUpon: Connecting Formal Learning to Growth

LearnUpon brings structure and scalability to learning—especially in industries where compliance, certification, and audit readiness are non-negotiable. Through the LearnUpon LMS integration with Degreed, organizations can manage formal training requirements while still supporting personalized development. 

For learning teams, the unified approach reduces administrative burden while improving visibility into both regulatory and strategic learning goals. The result? A smarter, more balanced approach to compliance—one that drives accountability and growth.

Learnexus: Scaling Learning With On-Demand Talent

Learnexus gives organizations fast and flexible access to learning expertise they need—without the typical hiring delays or resource constraints. Whether it’s instructional designers, learning consultants, or project managers, Learnexus connects companies with vetted talent on demand, so critical initiatives don’t stall due to internal bandwidth.

The Learnexus message at LENS was clear: When you need support at scale, access to expert talent shouldn’t be a barrier.Ideal for HR and learning leaders facing headcount or bandwidth limits, Learnexus offers rapid access to vetted talent—accelerating program launches and transformation initiatives.

SPA: Benchmarking Progress With a Skills-First Lens

SPA (the Skill Professionals Association) is helping organizations navigate the shift to a skills-first strategy with clarity and confidence. Its newly introduced skills-first maturity framework gives organizations a structured way to benchmark capabilities, identify gaps, and prioritize what comes next.

At LENS 2025, the SPA executive track session Setting a New Workforce Standard: How Skills-First Certification Can Drive Results and Competitive Advantage challenged attendees to lead change, not just react to it—and framed skills as a strategic advantage.

Collaboration is a catalyst for change.

The message from our Degreed LENS sponsors was clear:

Workforce transformation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It isn’t about one tool, one vendor, or one idea. It’s about an ecosystem.

At LENS, these eight partners stood shoulder to shoulder with Degreed—to help organizations everywhere turn the talent they have into the talent they need. We’re proud to work alongside them and excited for what’s ahead!

The post Why Everyone’s Talking About These 8 Degreed Partners appeared first on Degreed.

The most innovative L&D teams use skill data to create personalized learning experiences, because understanding what skills people have and want makes for better, more relevant content recommendations, mentorships and on-the-job experiential learning. At a more macro level, learning teams use skill data to understand the supply and demand for skills across their organizations.

The more skill data your open ecosystem generates, the more opportunity there is to make smart, informed talent decisions.

And this is why we’re so excited about our new partnership with Workday. Degreed is now a Select Partner in the Workday Software Alliance Program — enabling people to have more relevant learning opportunities and deeper skill profiles and learning teams to understand workforce skill supply and demand better.

Via a bi-directional information exchange, skill data from Workday HCM, Workday Learning and Workday Skills Cloud will be pulled into the Degreed platform (and vice versa), complementing the Degreed skills data and taxonomy. More specifically, the two-way data exchange will influence Degreed user profiles, recommendations, opportunity matching, Skill Coach, reporting and every other Degreed function that uses skills natively. Profiles will be the most noticeably impacted area, with user skills being added and updated.

The ultimate goal is to make the lives of learning and people leaders easier.

“The Workday and Degreed partnership will bring richer skills insights to the market with customers getting the best of Workday data plus Degreed,” said Tiffany LaBare, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Degreed. “Given that over 7 million individuals rely on the Degreed learning platform to continuously improve, there is a constant stream of skills data being generated that complements the data collected by Workday. This ensures that learning and people leaders can capture all forms of skill data and make it actionable in areas like learning, productivity, performance management, and talent planning.”

Meeting and Exceeding Business Goals

Senior executives and CEOs want their teams to lead with advanced analytics, according to Deloitte. “The amount of data available to organizations every day continues to proliferate at a staggering volume… But not every organization is optimizing the opportunities available.”

In that same study, organizations that reported having the strongest cultural orientation to data-driven insights and decision-making were twice as likely to have reported exceeding business goals in the prior 12 months. Findings from the Degreed report State of Skills 2021 show advanced data analytics rank among the top ten in-demand skills among HR professionals.

More Really Is Better

This means more data points, and it also means a more diverse set of data points. Diverse data sets can ensure you’re getting the most accurate and comprehensive view of the skills your organization has and those it needs.

Companies that take a wide-angle approach to data collection — looking at inputs from a diverse range of sources and systems — cultivate what’s called a “signal advantage.” The result is a more expansive view of patterns, risks and opportunities to act on. A signal advantage allows you to build alerts around big shifts in your skill data to keep you ahead of change.

Skill Data Doesn’t Have to be Overwhelming

If you want your organization to create real business value by connecting workforce learning to more holistic — and more helpful — information, it’s time to embrace an advanced skill data strategy. Whether you take it fast or slow, understanding what skill data is, where it comes from, and how to get it in abundance can open up a world of new information to your organization. Our new partnership with Workday is designed to help open up that world too. 

To further understand skill data, download The Ultimate Skill Data Handbook from Degreed. Or contact Degreed to discuss skill data with us in more detail. We’d love to answer your questions.

With skill data, you can make informed decisions and support dynamic talent initiatives that personalize learning, engage your people, provide new career opportunities and help meet your most important business goals.

The post New Degreed & Workday Partnership: More Skill Data for Smarter L&D appeared first on Degreed.