Changes happening at BT Group mirror this trend perfectly. The London-based giant is transitioning away from its roots as the well-known British Telecom into a technology company with a reimagined name and a broader scope.

But a business can’t change unless its people change. And now, Degreed Automations is making workforce development at BT Group simpler for L&D—and more personalized for employees.

Driving Change at the Speed of Technology

BT Group employs 100,000 workers globally, including customer-facing units, network maintenance employees, and infrastructure support staff members. The company needed a way to upskill its massive, diverse workforce without overwhelming its L&D and admin teams.

Echoing the experience of many Degreed customers, the BT Group L&D transformation began with the launch of a skills taxonomy mapped to 600 core roles across the company. Still, the L&D team needed a way to ensure employees in any role could evaluate their current skill sets—and stay motivated to upskill at the speed of technology.

Degreed Automations power upskilling at every opportunity.

BT Group used Degreed Automations to surface the right learning to the right workers at the right time. Using this tool, Degreed administrators can build a variety of automations—like nudges and reminders—that lead employees down personalized learning journeys. Degreed clients can use Automations to power learning during onboarding, to support learning journeys (for example training prior to a new product launch), drive career growth, and more. 

At BT Group, learning leaders deployed nudges and reminders that helped the company launch its growth into a full-fledged technology company —while supporting each employee in the process.

“We know that self-led learning can sometimes be a bit of a lonely place,” said Andrew Seddon, Learning Experience Platform Specialist at BT Group. “We want to be able to provide a journey for colleagues as they go through some of that learning.”

Onboarding Every New Employee

BT Group uses Degreed automations to ensure every new employee had the guidance and training they needed from their very first day. As soon as users log in, they see auto-pushed content designed to get them started at the company.

Because Degreed integrates with so many other systems easily, the L&D team pulls in HR data automatically. This data continually indicates who needs onboarding content, triggering Degreed Automations to deliver it at the right time.

“That’s a massive win for our admins…  who don’t have to manually find who the right people are,” Seddon said. “You can set and forget. And that’s been brilliant.”

Nudging Learners Along a Comprehensive Experience

Employees at every company at times face critical learning needs—like a new product launch, compliance deadlines, or upskilling for a role change or promotion. Degreed Automations empower admins to easily package and promote content, then deliver it to individual employees at exactly the right time. 

BT Group used Automations to keep pushing and pulling employees down tailored journeys with a reminder to finish a Pathway they’d started or take a skill assessment. Seddon likened his strategy to reminding online shoppers to complete the checkout process after abandoning their carts, all without feeling clunky or pushy. “Because the emails and the notifications and everything are from the same platform, users feel that the journey is connected from start to finish,” Seddon said.

BT Group L&D also used the tool to recommend next steps, such as content recommendations, assignments, and follow-up suggestions—creating long, self-led journeys tailored to each employee. “That’s where I think this gets exciting,” Seddon said. 

Less Effort for L&D—and IT

On the administrative side, automating learning journeys requires no coding, so Seddon’s team didn’t have to wait on IT to custom build any automations.

The Dawn of a Simplified Learning Tech Stack

“We’re really looking forward to working with Degreed in the future,” said Seddon, whose team—thanks to Degreed Automations—sunset a separate tool it had used for L&D admin.

Now, all nudges and content suggestions come from Degreed automatically with minimal management from staff. 

In addition, the BT Group IT department now has more time to focus on other important tasks.

Learn more.

We’ve been busy writing posts like this one—exploring how you can orchestrate workforce development with Degreed Automations. See the rest.

Let’s chat. Contact us to request a demo today.

The post BT Group Delivers Personalized Learning with Degreed Automations appeared first on Degreed.

You don’t have to choose between connectivity and functionality. 

You don’t have to choose between efficiency and impact. 

And you definitely don’t have to choose between what’s good for the employee and what’s good for the business. 

Today at Degreed Vision, we demonstrated this new reality—centered around skills, automations, and AI. Personalized learning that’s fast and at scale is more possible than ever with:

• Better workforce skill data that powers business decisions 
• Easy-to-use automations that deliver learning to the right people at the right time
• AI coaching that makes career development accessible for every employee

Join us for a look at the highlights…

Let’s start with some visuals to get you in the right headspace. Made entirely using AI, this video illustrates the potential of new technology to change the way we work, learn, and operate—in the best ways:

We’re adding new product features to develop your workforce.

To transform your workforce to meet the changing needs of your industry, you need the latest and greatest ways to pinpoint skill needs, personalize development, and measure growth. 

Our innovations in skills, automations, and AI are uniquely positioned to deliver on those needs:

• Degreed Skills+
  • What it is: New functionality that helps you better manage and infer skills, then connect skills to content to ensure the most valuable and impactful skill data.
  • Status: Pre-releasing to clients in December.
• Degreed Automations:
  • What it is: A tool to create customized set-it-and-forget-it learning reminders and nudges to boost engagement and better tailor learning.
  • Status: Live now!
• Degreed Maestro
  • What it is: An AI-driven virtual voice and text coach for personalized skill assessments, executive coaching, learning application, and reflection.
  • Status: Limited access coming soon in our Oct. 22 product release.

We’re adding more partnerships to our ecosystem.

Today, Degreed is connected to more than 3,500 sources of learning content, providing access to 39 million learning resources in 35 languages. 

We’ve always been committed to an open technology ecosystem that connects your organization with all the best content, assessment tools, and skill data, no matter the operating system or platform. It’s why we set up Degreed the way we did. Learners—and businesses—benefit when we take an open approach. It fosters innovation for L&D, tech stack interoperability, and better learning outcomes for every worker. 

In the spirit of further pushing the industry forward, we’re launching a new “AI-Ready” partner category to our ecosystem with Simplilearn, Pluralsight, TED@Work, and edX being the first partners to join. These will be the first partners to co-innovate with Degreed to improve the data feeds that inform search and learning pathway curation, so it’s easier for users to discover the content they need.

We’re also welcoming new and enhanced Skill Validation Partners to bring the assessment data you rely on to the learning environment you leverage to drive change. These include HackerEarth, iMocha, Skillable, and Workera. (You’ll want to watch a 10-minute interview with the Workera Founder and CEO, starting at the 56-minute mark of the Vision event, which is available on demand. Thank me later!)

Finally, we also have an enhanced partnership for industry skill data: Degreed + Pearson.

You might already be using the Degreed + Pearson integration to issue digital credentials through the Pearson Credly platform. Now, this partnership will bring Pearson market intelligence data directly into Degreed, so you can get an unparalleled view of industry skill data.

Our Vision for the future of learning wasn’t created in isolation, and it won’t be achieved in isolation either. That’s why we continue to grow our partnerships—to benefit you, our users.

That’s also why, when it came to our core pillars of skills, automation, and AI, we gathered input from all kinds of industry experts—especially practitioners, leaders, and researchers.

The experts at Vision had great things to say…

… About Skills

“If you don’t understand your skills then you can’t make the right talent decisions. You’re essentially shooting in the dark. You can’t develop your people effectively. You can’t match them to the right projects. You can’t identify opportunities internally for them.” – Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and Founder at Workera

… About Automations

“We know who our users are. We know where they are. We know what they’re interested in, and Automations can deliver that personal experience that promotes the content that’s right for them at the right time.” – Andrew Seddon, Learning Experience Platform Specialist at BT

… About AI

“I do think that AI will enable us to have more time to think more critically about what we’re doing, to ask better questions, to connect with other people more and better, and to hopefully be able to meet other people where they are because we’re not so distracted by some of these other things around us.” – Stacia Garr, Co-Founder & Principal Analyst at RedThread

Learn more.

Read our press release for more information about all our announcements, and follow Degreed on LinkedIn to see more great highlights and join the conversation.

If your appetite for innovation is growing, then good news! You can watch Degreed Vision 2024 on demand. You’ll see real product demos and prototypes, hear real-world client stories, and get a firsthand look at some of our recent AI experiments.

The post Making Your Skills, Automation, and AI Vision a Reality appeared first on Degreed.

This is the third post in a series on orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations. See the first and the second.

Who doesn’t love announcing a well-deserved promotion?

Helping people advance their careers is a top reason L&D pros do what they do—a passion that benefits the individual employee as well as the business.

Yet the career growth path from A to Z isn’t always clear, which is why your people need targeted skill-building opportunities. 

As you engage employees with their career mobility in mind, Degreed Automations can help you easily deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time. How? By automating personalized messages and reminders that drive employees onto the Degreed platform, and by automating suggested content and experiences based on people’s skills.*

Reach employees—quickly.

We recently explored how an employee—a Sales Director we call Kelly—can receive relevant onboarding resources and also prepare for the launch of a new product with the help of Degreed Automations. We automatically delivered learning plans as well as reminders to keep learning—scaling personalized development and saving time on day-to-day administrative tasks.

Let’s look now at another facet of Kelly’s development—the advancement of her career.

Building Skills to Grow Careers

After two years as a Sales Director, Kelly is interested in a management role. She speaks to her supervisor about her current skill gaps and identifies leadership and negotiation as two skills she needs to grow to be considered for a promotion. 

Kelly updates her Degreed skill profile with her two new focus skills and gives herself a skill rating of 3/8 for each. 

The next day, Kelly receives an email with recommendations for her two focus skills—including content, mentorships, and stretch assignments. Kelly signs up for a mentorship program and volunteers for a stretch assignment.

One month after starting the stretch assignment, Kelly receives an email reminding her to update her skill self-ratings. And after completing the mentorship, she receives another message reminding her to update her skill ratings. Once Kelly advances to a skill level of 4, she again receives recommendations for learning content and experiences, but this time on more advanced topics.*

Through these relevant learning experiences, Kelly has filled her personal skill gap and can advance her career. 

Career Growth Behind the Scenes—the L&D Perspective

Instead of automating learning recommendations based on job titles, L&D automated them based on individual skills and skill levels. In this case, L&D delivered content and development recommendations to Kelly based on her focus skills (leadership and negotiation) and skill level for each (3/8). 

Because leadership is a top focus skill at your company, L&D has already identified recommended learning for employees. And because negotiation is a critical skill your organization needs in order to develop a high-performing sales team, L&D again had specific content and experiences mapped to this skill.

L&D used Degreed Automations every step of the way:

• When your employees added a focus skill, they got an email encouraging them to sign up for stretch assignments and mentorships.
• When Kelly added leadership as a focus skill, for example, she got an email linking her to your company-endorsed leadership training.

L&D delivered the right learning based on skill and skill level. And thanks to this process, the learning team obtained up-to-date skill data that better reflects your organization’s current strengths. L&D can use this skill data to power even more personalized development, improving its ability to scale the impact of learning.

Degreed Automations help you help your employees.

Automations power improvements in productivity, performance, and career growth—at scale, and without repeated manual effort — across the entire employee lifecycle.

For career growth, Automations enable a seamless experience that helps your people to build the skills that they—and your organization—need.

Get a Degreed Automations demo.

Ready to start orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations? Contact us to request a demo today.

*This functionality is on the Degreed product roadmap and coming soon.

The post Degreed Automations: Career Growth for Your People & Company appeared first on Degreed.

This is the second post in a series on orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations. See the first and the third.

A product launch is an important and complex time at any business—and L&D can play a critical role, helping to ensure your organization’s investment in innovation leads to success.

Employees across your company need to know new information specific to their roles as they execute different tasks, and more often than not that takes training. From pitching prospects on the new offering to implementing it for buyers, enablement boosts the odds of success.

As a launch date races closer, Degreed Automations can help you deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time. How? By automating personalized messages and reminders that drive employees onto the Degreed platform, and by automating admin tasks in Degreed like adding people to groups or changing permissions.

Get time back for high-impact work.

We recently looked at how an employee—a Sales Director we call Kelly—can receive relevant onboarding resources with the help of Degreed Automations. It automatically delivered standardized onboarding directions and a four-week personalized learning plan as well as reminders to keep learning. And in doing so, it enabled L&D to easily scale personalized onboarding and save time on day-to-day administrative tasks.

Let’s look now at another step in Kelly’s development journey, a product launch.

Preparing for a New Product Launch

With the launch of your company’s new AI-powered product, every employee needs to understand what the product does and why it matters to your clients and business. That means some learning needs to be delivered to everyone.

Kelly receives this overview information through a Microsoft Teams notification, which directs her toward a Learning Plan that documents the basics of what the product does and why it matters. She completes all this learning material before an organization-wide enablement session. Because she’s prepared with this foundational knowledge, Kelly comes to the session ready to ask meaningful questions. 

Following the first enablement session, Kelly receives an automated email notification that she’s been assigned additional learning to help her prepare for a sales-specific training. The content in this Pathway is set up to help Kelly successfully pitch the new AI-powered product, and to learn a talk track for the product’s core pitch deck.

Kelly gets sidetracked on other high priority work, and two days before the training she still hasn’t completed the assigned learning. Fortunately, she gets an automated email reminder. Once she finishes the Pathway, she receives suggested follow-up learning: a demo on how to use the new product for a common use case.

At the training, Sales leaders look for volunteers to practice pitching in front of the group. Because Kelly finished the learning materials ahead of the training and watched the product demo, she volunteers. She gets helpful feedback that she later implements to successfully pitch the product and close a deal.

Product Launch Behind the Scenes—the L&D Perspective

L&D used Degreed Automations to deliver the right learning to Kelly at the right time. 

In this case, L&D used Automations to run an internal marketing campaign focused on workforce development, delivering a series of required learning resources in a specific order to help the Sales team play its role in successfully launching the new product. To accomplish this, L&D created certain triggers to deliver the right learning to Kelly based on her role—and on actions she took. 

L&D used Degreed Automations every step of the way:

• Everyone in your organization received a notification in Microsoft Teams with a link to the core learning pathway.
• Because Kelly is on your Sales team, she was also assigned content to help her use the pitch deck.
• Because Kelly did not mark the content as complete, she received a reminder.*
• Once Kelly completed the content, she received the product demo.

To help prepare for the product launch, L&D could create even more automations targeting other teams beyond Sales. 

For example, L&D could create a campaign with a series of recommendations for Customer Support, starting with basic how-to’s all the way to technical implementation.

L&D could also create a campaign for the Marketing team, including key messaging and insights on the product’s ideal customer profile (ICP) as well as personas. The campaign could close with an email recap that includes key resources and a call-to-action encouraging employees to work with their managers on how to implement product messaging into new and existing content.

Degreed Automations makes L&D tasks easier.

Automations power improvements in productivity, performance, and career growth—at scale, and without repeated manual effort — across the entire employee lifecycle.

For a product launch, Automations enable a seamless experience that helps employees quickly get ready to capitalize on the promise of your new product.

Next Time: A Look at Career Growth

In our next post about Degreed Automations, we’ll explore how L&D helps Kelly and the rest of the workforce grow careers.

Get a Degreed Automations demo.

Ready to start orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations? Contact us to request a demo today.

*This functionality is on the Degreed product roadmap and coming soon.

The post Degreed Automations: L&D Campaigns That Boost Performance appeared first on Degreed.

This is the first post in a series on orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations. See the second and the third.

“Personalize development for more people—at less cost.”

“And do it faster!”

Sound familiar? Driving workforce change is incredibly demanding—and complex—which means the time and energy of L&D teams are more valuable than ever.

So how can your company scale the impact of L&D and grow critical skills, in less time?

Introducing Degreed Automations

With Degreed Automations, you can orchestrate workforce development, delivering the right learning to the right people at the right time. How? By automating personalized messages and nudges that remind employees to return to the Degreed platform. And by automating admin tasks like adding people to groups or changing permissions, you can free up valuable time to focus on high-impact work. 

Using Automations is a no-code process, which means you can deliver more impactful learning experiences without consulting IT, which translates to more free time for your learning and IT teams to drive the business forward.

Let’s look at how one employee receives development opportunities she needs with the help of Degreed Automations—from the moment she begins onboarding. In future posts, we’ll explore the benefits of Automations applied to later stages of the employee lifecycle.

Automated Onboarding: Seamless Preparation

Let’s say you have a new Sales Director named Kelly. It’s Kelly’s first day on the job, and she needs to get familiar with a lot of foundational information. 

Kelly signs in on Day One and immediately receives an email welcoming her to your company. She clicks a link to an Onboarding Pathway chock full of important information about your organization’s mission and vision, employee resources, policies, and more.  

The next day Kelly receives another email, this time with a link to a Learning Plan in Degreed. It’s specifically designed to guide Sales Directors like Kelly through their first four weeks on the job. In the Plan, she gets visibility into which skills she’s expected to have in her new role as well as individual Learning Pathways for each of her first four weeks.

Kelly clicks the link for Week No. 1 and finds valuable resources that help her get up to speed on your company’s products and ICP (ideal customer profile). When Kelly has a meeting with her supervisor later that week, she feels prepared to have meaningful conversations about the target accounts she will own. 

The next week, Kelly receives a notification inside Degreed reminding her to start making progress on the Week No. 2 Pathway for Sales Directors. Inside she finds resources to help her sell your company’s core product, including a pitch deck with training videos, FAQs from prospects, and guidance on how to handle objections. 

These personalized onboarding recommendations continue for Kelly’s first four weeks on the job. At the end, she feels confident and well-prepared. 

Onboarding Behind the Scenes—the L&D Perspective

All those personalized learning recommendations and communications must have required a lot of manual work from L&D, right?

Actually, they were all automated in Degreed. 

By employing user conditions (for example, user location = the United States), L&D delivered the right onboarding material to the right individual automatically. 

For example, every employee regardless of title or seniority level needs to access foundational information on Day One. So L&D created an automation to email this material to every employee on their first day at your company.

L&D automatically assigned learning relevant to each employee’s role. In our example, L&D aimed specific learning content about improving speed-to-productivity at Sales Directors.

Degreed Automations create an L&D advantage.

Automations power improvements in productivity, performance, and career growth—at scale, and without repeated manual effort — across the entire employee lifecycle.

For onboarding, Automations enable a hiccup-free experience that helps employees quickly get ready for the challenges ahead.

And there’s more to come.

In our next post about Degreed Automations, we’ll explore how L&D helps Kelly and the rest of the organization prepare for successfully launching a new product.

Get a Degreed Automations demo.

Ready to start orchestrating workforce development with Degreed Automations? Contact us to request a demo today. 

The post Degreed Automations: Easily Personalize Learning from Day 1 appeared first on Degreed.

More automation. New AI tools. Better outcomes.

It’s clear that the future of learning promises to be equally impactful and disruptive to the status quo. I hear it day after day in conversations with customers. Every week, a new capability is released that causes leaders to rethink how they build content, deliver training experiences, and plan to fill critical skill gaps. With things changing weekly on the innovation front, we can only imagine what the world will look like five years from now.

But that uncertainty is also exciting. The future of learning is like a blank piece of paper. Expectations are high but also undefined. And that means that learning tech providers like Degreed have a massive opportunity to impact business outcomes for clients at scale in new ways. And with that opportunity comes an obligation to take our role as a valued partner more seriously than ever before.

At Degreed, we know what we’re working on matters. 

We’re experimenting with voice agents that can help guide learning through real-time, life-like conversations. You can explore our experimental AI executive coach, which is designed to provide people with faster, more authentic interactions for practice and reflection. In just a few weeks more than 350 people have already signed up—and the feedback we’ve received has been appreciative and positive. You can also try our experimental AI-enabled Skill Review, which is designed to help employees better understand their core skills and uncover transferable skills. “Smooth, professional, and engaging” is how one early adopter described it.

We’re also working to enrich the Degreed Assistant to bring these new ways of engaging with AI directly into the flow of our learning solutions. Every individual can have an instructional designer to put together personal pathways.

Each aspiring learner can have a dedicated career coach to explore opportunities and plan to tackle critical skill gaps. And every manager can have perfect recall against millions of pieces of educational content, as the Degreed Assistant helps prepare learning plans for development conversations. For content designers at some Degreed clients, we estimate that this new functionality will translate to months of time saved every year.

And we’re just getting started. We’re combining AI with work we’re doing on fundamental modules, to build segment aware tiles and provide Degreed users with new types of screens. Combined with the rich skill data Degreed already has and the AI we’ve built securely into the product, our new UI framework will add an unparalleled level of personalization for Degreed learners.

Degreed Automations is another new feature that’s enhancing the Degreed LXP. It provides admins and learning leaders with tools they can use to automate communications and repetitive administrative tasks on the platform—to boost efficiency and save time for critical, high-impact work.

Vision, Effort, Innovation

All of these building blocks are the types of new tools that learning teams are looking for—for efficiency, for better outcomes, and for a more personalized employee development experience. And it’s all part of our vision for the future.

The nature of learning will change, and Degreed will be at the forefront of how it changes. This belief is driving everybody at this organization—from our Client Experience team to our developers to our people in HR. We’re all pushing to build new value across our incredible platform, and we’re ecstatic to show you our newest product innovations, coming soon to a screen near you.

Find out more.

Get a clear Vision for the future of L&D, your business, and Degreed. Register for Degreed Vision 2024 today.

The post Skills, Automation, & AI: The New Building Blocks of L&D appeared first on Degreed.

Just kidding. It’s not that simple. But sometimes it can feel very all-or-nothing when you’re exploring skills-first principles, or focusing on the skills people have and gain rather than their job titles or the auspiciousness of their college degrees. 

With many businesses committed to becoming skills-based organizations—43% already consider it a guiding principle, according to our recent LinkedIn poll—there’s a lot of enthusiasm around this revolutionary idea. And for good reason. The data backs up its effectiveness. 

Today, we shared our long-term plan and product strategy with more than 1,500 L&D professionals at Degreed Vision 2023. With the state of L&D and what it takes to build a modern and effective workforce in mind, we’re introducing a wide range of enhancements to our platform—tools for automation, AI content searching and curation, deep skill development, and skills data analysis. 

Frankly, there’s never been a better time to join the skills-first revolution and advocate for skills and learning across your organization. But to do it right, you need the right tools, capabilities, and insights. 

Note: The images in this post are for demonstration purposes only; Degreed product enhancements remain works in progress and subject to change.

The State of L&D

Your workforce isn’t the same as it was a few decades ago, or even a few years ago, no matter how good your employee retention is.

Over the years, the way people think about employee learning has evolved. Employees no longer see learning as strictly humdrum mandatory training requirements but instead see it as a desirable (and arguably vital) employee benefit. With the global skills gap growing by the day, companies need learning in order to keep pace with the fast-changing world and retain great workers.

“Thirty years ago, healthcare was that benefit you needed to attract and retain the best people,” said Micheal Moe, Founder and CEO at Global Silicon Valley (GSV), who spoke at Vision. “Increasingly, education is a benefit that the workforce is looking for… Lack of development is the number one reason why people leave their jobs.”

With learning and upskilling rising in business value, skills are increasingly important, and companies that aren’t recognizing and preparing for this will soon be left behind. According to David Blake, CEO and Co-founder of Degreed, skills-first learning is no longer just a dream; it’s “something companies are mobilizing to. And the companies that are, are seeing huge improvements in their retention, in their innovation, efficiency, and talent. Business outcomes are improving for the organizations that are shifting to this skills-first mode of operating.”

Four years ago, digital learning was projected to be a $1 trillion market by 2034, Moe noted. However, due to technological advancements and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, that timeline was cut in half. The new projection? Digital learning is estimated to reach that milestone by 2027—less than four years from now, Moe said.  

With all this in mind, we at Degreed aren’t slowing down. On the contrary, we’re ramping up! The enhancements we expect to roll out will ensure you’re prepared to launch into the future.

Automated Learning Communications

Time is one of the most valuable assets in any organization, and new automated learning communications and reminders on the Degreed platform will help you maximize the efficiency of your learning program with minimal administrative effort. After an admin creates an automation—for a specific group, team, job role, or individual, for example—they’ll be able to automatically send Degreed platform notifications or emails from within Degreed. 

Regular learning nudges, invitations, and communication workflows powered by Degreed will ensure your employees are encouraged and reminded of the importance of their development without the manual admin work to make it happen.

Want to invite all new team members to explore a Pathway? Create an automation. Want to set subsequent and regular reminders to complete that Pathway? Create an automation. Want to encourage less engaged learners to get back into the platform? Create an… Well, you get the idea. It’s easy and intuitive; you can build and schedule them in just a few minutes.

AI-Assisted Learning & Actions

We simply can’t discuss advancements without talking about AI. Going forward, AI will be woven into several key Degreed functions to enhance the user experience and increase efficiency. Why? Because AI is infiltrating our world at lightning speed, and it’s quickly becoming the key to a more personalized, customizable, interactive, modern, and efficient learning experience. In the words of Michael Moe: “AI is like air. It’s invisible. It’s ubiquitous.”

The rate of technological advancement has surpassed the rate at which humans can learn, noted Blake, who suggested AI might be the bridge needed to overcome the gap. “This moment is bringing a shift that’s unlocking our ability—for the first time—to deal with skills at scale and to unlock the future.”

You’ll see the fingerprints of AI on many of our upcoming features, including our new Learning Hub landing page and content personalization tool. But the most obvious place will be in our new Degreed Assistant. 

Degreed Assistant will be an AI chat tool designed to have interactive conversations about learning content and development goals. It’s designed to help your people find niche content they’re interested in and to curate content and Pathways in a fraction of the time it takes today. It’ll be useful to support employees on the go, like deskless workers, who can use voice-to-text or send photos to the AI chat thread from a mobile device. Degreed Assistant will act as a personal, real-time learning coach. 

Degreed Academies & Degreed Content Marketplace

In 2023, we added Degreed Academies and Degreed Content Marketplace to our product suite. These new additions promote deep skill-building to quickly and effectively close critical skills gaps. How? Filling many of the emerging skill gaps requires expert guidance. It means giving employees more time to learn. It means supporting a collaborative, practice-based learning environment that values feedback. These products provide all that and more. They unlock more collaborative, customizable, and in-depth learning experiences ranging from curated content and group projects to learning stipends and full-length courses.

Right now on Degreed, you can already access all of our products from one another. Our next big move will be to make that transition even more seamless by displaying learning, opportunities, and data from all your Degreed products in one place.

Your people will be able to view holistic, valuable data points on the new Learning Hub, which will replace the current Degreed LXP home page. With its updated interface, employees will be able to use the hub to easily track their skill development progress, see dynamic personalized content, view assigned learning, and explore relevant Pathways and academies—all in one place.

Skills Ingestion & Taxonomies

Right now, skills data is both a massive opportunity at most organizations and, for many, a roadblock to embracing skills-first strategies. That’s because many organizations track skills in disparate systems with mismatched rating scales. That’ll change with our upcoming skill normalization capabilities, which will allow system managers to centralize skills data from multiple sources and “translate” skill ratings from various systems into one common skill rating “language,” or rating scale, so all data can be seamlessly combined, effortlessly read, and collectively assessed.

This level of visibility will be a game-changer for learning professionals otherwise limited by siloed development data that, even if centralized, gets lost in translation. It’s much easier to act on data when it’s all in the same language.

And speaking of more skill insights, we’re enhancing skills taxonomy creation capabilities in Degreed. Soon, you’ll be able to build AI-assisted, full-scale taxonomies on our platform.

We’re also creating new skill inference tools. You’ll be able to use them to analyze your organization’s job descriptions then add mentioned and inferred skills from those descriptions to applicable user profiles as well as organization-wide taxonomies. Our goal is to make skills-first business strategies easier and free you of the cumbersome manual work.

What’s the timeline?

You might be wondering “When will I get to try all these features?” You can expect many of our skills-related features to be available in the 2024 calendar year. In addition, some of these updates such as skills normalization, taxonomies, and Academies, are separate products and won’t be included in a standard LXP or LXP+ subscription. Keep an eye on our Major Product Release webinars and notes for more detailed timelines and other feature release dates. We’re excited to share more as features get closer to release. 

Watch Degreed Vision 2023 on demand—for a deep dive into more details and to see prototypes in action.

The post The Degreed Vision: Automation, AI, and a Skills-first Future appeared first on Degreed.