That’s the missed opportunity facing many organizations. But it doesn’t have to be.

“The future of higher education is one of pluralism. It’s one of many actors, many organizations contributing powerfully, dynamically, and compellingly to a world where you as a learner are able to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve,” said Michele Spires, Assistant Vice President at the American Council on Education (ACE). “It’s about a network of organizations that collectively work together… and you get a new framework for lifelong higher education.”

Lifelong learning resonates at the core of the Degreed mission. And it’s why we’re introducing the Degreed College Accreditation Service, powered by our new partnership with ACE and Credly by Pearson. It means your people’s internal learning can go further—earning college credit, formal credentials, and long-term value.

Workplace Learning That Counts Beyond the Workplace

Let’s be clear: This is more than a new feature. It’s a strategic lever for workforce transformation, designed to help you build, validate, and mobilize skills that matter to your business.

And make no mistake: This isn’t just a benefit for employees. It’s a strategy for organizations that want to attract, grow, and retain top talent in a skills-first world.

With Degreed College Accreditation Service, your learning programs in Degreed Academies can be evaluated for college credit. The Degreed Professional Services team works with you to align content to ACE standards and issue formally recognized, transferable credits via Credly.

Your people get more than just a course completion. They get:

• Credentialed learning programs that support internal mobility and reduce attrition
• Verified, portable credentials that boost talent visibility across and beyond your organization
• Frictionless access to continuing education, with no extra time, testing, or tuition costs

“We need a future where everyone gets recognition for all lifelong learning and skills,” said David Blake, Degreed Co-CEO and Cofounder. “This partnership with ACE represents a significant stepping stone in that journey—enabling workers to gain verifiable, transferable credentials that follow them throughout their careers.”

The Business Case for Recognized Learning

Organizations already invest millions in learning and development—but without formal recognition, those investments often fall short.

Today’s savvy learning leaders seek to provide their people with verifiable credentials to boost employee engagement, strengthen the employee value proposition, and reduce attrition. They aim to transform L&D from a support function into a strategic growth engine, delivering measurable ROI across the talent lifecycle.

Skills That Stick. Credits That Count

When skills are the currency of work, credentials are a key way that currency is verified. Formal recognition gives your workforce the power to advance—whether it’s into a new role, a different industry, or a formal degree.

With ACE and Credly, you gain not only credibility but also measurable proof of performance.

And with Degreed, these credentials don’t exist in isolation. They’re fully integrated into your skill data ecosystem—making it easier to benchmark learning progress, analyze workforce capabilities, and report ROI across the enterprise.

Giving Learning the Recognition It Deserves

Your people put in the work. It’s time that work works harder for them. Let’s discuss how your company can turn internal learning into accredited pathways that drive business results and lifelong impact.

Learn more.

Let’s discuss skill building at your organization. Schedule a personalized, one-on-one call with a Degreed expert today.

The post Say Goodbye to Siloed Learning. Hello, Accredited Skills appeared first on Degreed.

How can L&D professionals give employees enough time to learn at work?

Everyone wants to win. To achieve success, you must demonstrate to executives, employees, and managers that investing more time to learn at work is crucial. They all want to know how learning helps them complete their leg of the race, and that answer is different for all three. Executives need business alignment, employees need growth and managers need clear strategies to develop team members. 

Getting buy-in at all levels can feel as daunting as running a marathon. But if you first reframe how people typically think of time to learn at work, it’ll be an easier sell all around.

For more ways to win learning and influence the C-suite, download our free workbook to secure stakeholder buy-in.

Reframing Time to Learn at Work

How do we carve out more learning time without slowing the pace toward company goals? That is the question L&D professionals get on repeat from executives, managers, and employees. However, the question is problematic because it assumes that learning at work always deters productivity. 

Currently, business leaders and managers often think of learning hours as time dedicated to formal training. But if C-suite and managers (and even employees) only think of learning time as separate from work, they miss out on other critical forms of learning. 

If companies also invest in other kinds of learning like experiential learning and learning in the flow of work, you’ll boost learning without pulling employees away from productivity. And that makes getting buy-in from everyone easier. 

Experiential Learning

When a runner completes a 5k while training for a marathon, they get real-world race experience and earn a medal. Similarly, L&D programs that include experiential learning give employees contextualized learning while producing deliverables for the business. Experiential learning might include:

• Special projects
• Shadowing assignments
• Internal apprenticeships
• Trial periods

“Learning doesn’t always mean that you’re consuming content and taking a full time-out from work hours,” notes Stephanie Lyras, Director of Change Management, Engagement and Adoption at Degreed. The team of experts she belongs to helps organizations align learning to business strategy and measure learning impact. “When we see and can prove learning is an integrated part of delivering business outcomes, we can shift mindsets at the executive level to truly understand the value of learning.”

Learning in the Flow of Work

If experiential learning is like finishing a 5k, learning in the flow of work is like setting up cups of Gatorade along the route. Employees can get the juice they need to keep speeding along on their current tasks. Many employees learn in the flow of work as they run into and resolve on-the-job challenges by themselves, but L&D can invest in these moments to foster learning while boosting productivity.

Learning in the flow of work can look like:

• Googling a tutorial: Many employees do this on their own without L&D intervention.
• Asking a colleague: Foster these conversations by developing a mentoring and coaching program.
• Microlearning at the point of need: Bite-size content that employees can find in seconds and devour in minutes.
• Nudges: Brief reminders (usually push notifications or emails) about how to use knowledge on the job.

Buy-in from Executives

While it’s an important step to reframe learning time in terms of work productivity, for executives, the value of employees having more time to learn at work also comes from driving meaningful business outcomes. If you can walk the C-suite through a clear connection between learning on the job and business objectives, it’s much easier to get them onboard.

Many L&D pros struggle with speaking C-suite, but they also know that aligning learning programs to business goals is critical. It’s their #1 L&D focus area in 2024, according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report. But you’ll also need a plan for tracking your program’s success.

“If you’re going to have employees spending time to learn, executives need metrics,” says Lyras. “Whether that’s tied to employee engagement, productivity, retention rate, or how quickly a new employee onboards. You need a solid measurement strategy to track regularly so you can respond to the insights.”

The KPIs of Learning on the Job

Employee Retention

According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, companies that prioritize learning see a 27% boost in employee retention. Those with a strong commitment see a 57% boost. 

If learning increases retention by half, then it saves your company money. It saves you money because it costs six times more to replace someone than train them internally. Get a pulse on current employee retention rates, and start doing the math for the future of retention.

Changes in Employee Productivity

While engagement has been a staple L&D metric for years, the C-suite won’t see a clear connection to their bottom line. So translate engagement into a metric they already know and love: productivity. A Gallup study shows that companies with the highest engagement are 17% more productive—and 21% more profitable—than those with low engagement.

Measuring productivity is unique to each role, and could look different depending on how your company tracks work. If you’ve implemented Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or Scrum story points, you have built-in productivity metrics. Or you can focus on specific deliverables—like completed projects or finished products. Whatever the metric, consider both the quantity and quality of work.

Business Impacts for Specific Roles

Business impact will vary by department. For customer service, it might be a boost in customer satisfaction or fewer escalations. For sales, there might be more deals closed. Find out which metrics executives want to see, and make sure you’re designing learning experiences that drive them.

Buy-in from Employees

Business outcomes get executives on board, but what gets employees learning? Learning that answers the question: “What’s in it for me?” If employees don’t see the value of learning in your organization — or don’t feel supported — you’ll struggle to get them on board like a couch potato struggles to hit the track.

Showing the value of learning time

The top two reasons employees spend more time learning are to progress toward career goals and stay up-to-date in their field. 

Connect Career Paths, Skills, and Learning

Document and share clear career pathing so employees can see exactly what the possibilities are. Then document the skills they need to progress to each level—and the learning activities that will get them there.

Communicate Relevance

Share how you see your company responding to industry advancements like AI and robotics—and how their roles will change as a result. Emphasize the skills employees will need—and that you’re committed to helping them gain them.

Signaling Support

When I train for a race, the support of my friends, family, and trainer keeps me motivated to keep putting in the miles. Similarly, employees need regular reminders that the organization values learning. You can support company learning culture in several ways:

• Nudges: emails and push notifications that remind employees to learn signal that the organization values learning time.
• Microlearning: building easier-to-fit small lessons throughout the day empowers employees to dedicate the time to learn.
• Coaching and mentoring programs: colleagues who dedicate time to an employee’s growth show that coworkers also buy into learning.
• Reflecting and sharing: setting aside time to reflect on training or experiences gives employees the time to solidify their learning.
• Make it part of the conversation: managers who discuss learning in learning in everyday conversations signal leadership buy-in and support.

Buy-in from Managers

Building support at the manager level begins at the C-suite and then trickles down to managers and employees. Executives can praise learning success, hold managers accountable for learning successes, and push for investing in learning technology. And these are all signals to managers that they should climb aboard the learning train.

But you can’t stop at the boardroom. You have to show managers themselves how more learning time will earn them their own medals—AKA, meet their team and department goals and land their bonuses. If you can do that, then you’ve got allies.

Often, your head of people is a great place to start because effective training solves so many HR challenges—like less need to hire talent amid the current skills gap, employee retention and attracting high performers. But you can’t stop at HR, either. You need all managers onboard, and for that you’ll need to switch up your tactics.

Speak Management

When you approach managers about the benefits of providing more learning time, tailor your message. How you do that depends on your company structure, but here’s what managers will want to know:

• Sales: How will more time to learn help employees hit their targets?
• Customer support: How will it boost NPS, customer retention, resolution times, and conversation abandonment rates?
• Marketing: How will it help employees keep up with new trends, channels, and technologies?
• Production: How will it decrease waste, errors, quality issues, and production costs?

The ROI of More Time to Learn at Work

It’s all too easy to get into a stalemate around learning. The old way of thinking pits learning against productivity goals, and it’s the same mindset that views L&D as a cost center, not a value center. But if you reframe learning as complementary to productivity, you’re well on your way to boosting learning time on the job. More importantly, you’re helping your company view L&D as a business-critical initiative—and that’s the key to winning the skills race.

Want to learn more ways to win learning and influence the C-suite? Download, “A Workbook to Secure Stakeholder Buy-In.”

The post Time to Learn at Work: Getting Buy-in is a Company Relay appeared first on Degreed.

Like a delicious jus, hollandaise or demi-glace, learning can be your “secret sauce” to employee engagement.

Employee engagement has played a big role in recruiting and retention throughout the pandemic. To increase engagement, companies have enhanced benefits and perks, embraced flexible work schedules, expanded paid time off, focused on mental health programs and held events that cultivate workplace relationships.

And they’ve embraced learning. When you create a positive learning culture and invest in your people’s ongoing development, they feel greater ownership of their careers and increased alignment with your company. In other words, when you put effort into developing your employees, they invest back.

“Learning creates opportunities to obtain and enhance skill sets, knowledge and capabilities,” said Ben Cardenas, Sr. Manager of Enterprise Learning & Talent at Harbor Freight Tools. I contacted several learning leaders to get their views on engagement and the role learning can play.

“Developing these components in a learning environment enables the employee (learner) to practice in a safe space what they have acquired and or enhanced,” Cardnesa added. “When the employee applies the learning experience back into the workplace, it enables them to contribute to work that is meaningful to them, which in turn helps the employee feel included in the organization and the process.”

So how can you use learning to keep your people engaged?

1. Create a meaningful onboarding plan.

Consider what information you would want to know during your first day, week, month and 90 days. Then think through the best ways to build learning experiences that deliver that key information. What stakeholders would you want to include to share that information in a new-hire welcome series? What items would be on your critical learning agenda? What information should be self-paced and online versus instructor-led, whether it’s presented in person or virtually?

• Prior to onboarding, curate a learning pathway employees can use to familiarize themselves with your company’s vision, mission, values and organizational structure. It’s a great way to showcase your positive learning culture.
• During onboarding, fuse online asynchronous learning with face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) learning. Include job aids or quick reference videos.
• After onboarding, continue providing learning opportunities for new-hires to build their skills and acquaint themselves with their job responsibilities. 

Throughout the onboarding process, encourage new hires to build relationships, ask questions to gather information and set up time with their managers to align and calibrate on key priorities.

2. Infuse learning into your one-on-ones. 

People managers are a key population in your company and can make sure learning is a priority. Managers are your front line for making sure employees have opportunities to talk about learning on a regular basis; managers can build learning opportunities into day-to-day conversations. 

One-on-ones can also be an opportunity for managers to help your people  learn and reflect, because they can ask guiding questions and create a psychologically safe environment where employees can fail forward. 

What went well? What didn’t go well? What might you want to change next time? Asking some basic guiding questions can turn your managers into coaches.

3. Include learning goals in performance reviews and your company’s talent management process.

Performance conversations are a powerful moment in an employee’s journey and an opportunity to check in and evaluate progress. What better moment to build in goals related to learning that reinforce your company’s commitment to learning?

Learning goals can vary depending on the resources at your disposal. Are there stretch assignments your employees can work on? Are there key skills and capabilities your employees can build? Are there-in-house or external courses they can take to get those skills? Engaged employees will appreciate opportunities to learn and grow.

These strategies can set your employees up for success, especially if you make them available from Day One.

“The link between learning and engagement isn’t a foregone conclusion,” said Kristen Fyfe-Mills, Director of Employee Development and Engagement at Farmer Focus. “The learning experiences need to be well-designed and relevant to work and growth — for the learner and the organization.”

Onboarding provides a first impression of your company to new-hires now on the payroll and a great opportunity to build a positive learning culture. Include content that shows how committed your company is to talent development. 

“Learning helps create space for curiosity and conversation,” said Lisa Dubler, a career coach at General Assembly. “This can often lead to breaking down silos and having people more engaged and invested in their work.”

A recent LinkedIn Learning report suggests extending engagement across the entire employee journey. When you emphasize learning in performance reviews and get managers “bought in” to your learning culture, you can make learning fun and relevant, ensure their experiences at your company are meaningful and generate real return on your L&D investments. 

Like a great chef, your company can mix up a great combination of flavors that make your employee engagement strategy sweet, savory and delectable. 

The post Cooked to Perfection: Learning Elevates the Employee Engagement Recipe appeared first on Degreed.

We know because we asked. When we released our Upskilling Strategy Audit, the goal was to help you see what’s working, assess your biggest challenges, and figure out solutions. In turn, we learned a lot and created a personalized pathway of content and tools to help you succeed. Sounds great, right? If you haven’t already, you can still take the quiz! 

The results of the audit to date are telling, providing a window into what’s lacking, working, and wanted at companies large and small. And that’s where this new three-part blog series comes in — to help you understand the L&D landscape so you can increase participation, maximize insights, and provide your people with real-life learning opportunities. In this first part, let’s focus on understanding how a culture of continuous learning that’s unique to your organization (yes, they’re all different) can help you make worker engagement a standard part of your learning culture. 

Curating Learning: What’s Relevant?

A majority of respondents to our audit have some sort of process in place for learning teams and workers to curate content, and many are also able to create and discover content. But it’s a slim majority: 48% of respondents said that their people are expected to source their own learning opportunities, and worker engagement is threatened. Similarly, another 45% of respondents rely on managers to curate learning experiences. This comes amid a separate study that found 85% of global employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work. And a Gartner survey found 45% of managers lack the confidence to help employees develop the skills they need today.

How can you fill that gap between individual worker engagement and manager-curated learning? It differs from one organization to another. And while a range of approaches can all contribute to a successful culture of continuous learning, only 23% of respondents to our audit are utilizing smart technology.

A smart technology platform can provide insights into what your people are learning in and beyond the flow of work, as well as provide relevant learning recommendations. Why is this important? Because every organization, team, and person is different. And in traditional models of manually curating learning, it’s clear that keeping up with ever-changing trends and finding content that works for everyone is unfeasible. To be more effective, L&D is moving on to more personalized ways of learning. 

Shifting to a culture of continuous learning driven by a digital learning ecosystem is not an easy task, but Visa was up for it. Through APIs and technical integrations, the learning team at the payments processing powerhouse minimized duplicating content. 

With the power of technology, your people can easily access, track and control their learning. This eases the burden on your L&D team and managers and empowers your workers to take control of their learning in personalized ways.

So, what can you do? Help your workers see the larger value in building new skills and investing in themselves. Encourage your people to focus their development around the specific skills necessary for their current and future roles. When workers understand how skill development can benefit them in tangible ways, it provides an incentive to prioritize learning in the flow of work. 

Understanding Impact: What Works? 

With L&D, limited data insights traditionally haven’t assessed value and impact, so figuring out what’s working hasn’t been easy. Most respondents to our audit use a combination of workforce feedback and content completion rates. But you can do more.

What’s key to determining impact is having clear outcomes that provide visibility into your people’s learning. This includes counting active users, ranking new skills developed, and comparing learning measures with hard business metrics. With these new insights, you can improve business and talent strategies, assess workers’ skills, and be clear about what your people and business really need. 

How do you know what works for your organization? Consider Degreed client Cargill. Learning leaders there appeared at our recent Degreed VIEW webinar on creating a learning culture, describing how the global energy company uses a benchmark for measuring impact. They track first-time, return, and repeat visitors as well as adoption. Next, they account for active learner metrics. After that, they benchmark these metrics against similar companies in industry, size, and more. 

Use technology to make learning personalized and meaningful. Content completions and feedback can be useful, but they miss out on the bigger picture of progress that can be painted with the help of technology. Unite your learning systems to your workers’ professional goals. That requires shifting from admin-focused to user-focused technology.

Looking Forward: What’s Helpful? 

The rise of digital automation and the need for agility in our pandemic-affected world has put more pressure on businesses to identify future and emerging skills. When you create a culture of continuous learning, a big goal is to make development insightful, helpful and, most of all, relevant to your people. 

A majority of respondents to our audit (62%) rely on managers to determine workers’ skill growth or don’t have a formal system in place. Among those that do, 27% use a competency model, which can become outdated before it’s even put to use. Compared to these methods, only 11% are taking advantage of a smart system that intuitively recommends upskilling and learning opportunities to prepare for the future.

According to our research report State of Skills, nearly half of workers globally believe their core job skills will be obsolete within five years. When we take into consideration all the learning required across teams to learn new skills at an organization, it’s simply impossible to expect your L&D team to stay on top of every discipline and emerging skill. Instead, account for the different ways people learn, the amount of time each person has to dedicate to learning, and what skills are important to each role.

More than half of business leaders say a lack of visibility into skills is their top barrier to workforce transformation. But data shows that — from books and online forums to podcasts and more — people are already accessing learning across different platforms. Your people already know where they need to be skilled, so why not give them insights and technology to build the capabilities they need? Focus on creating a centralized technical environment that is easily accessible so your people can continue discovering the content they need, aggregate it, organize it, and share it.

It’s no longer enough to encourage learning at work. You must create the right conditions for learning. People need more set-in-place processes and curated content to achieve transformation, and building a culture of continuous learning is just the start. Our recent research report found that workers need and more importantly want guidance, diverse experiences, feedback and insights, and experiential learning opportunities. 

In our fast-changing world, agility is vital for business success. It’s expected that skills and priorities will evolve as time goes on, but having resources for your people to turn to during this shift will prove essential for progress. 

Want to Learn More?

Take our Upskilling Strategy Audit to gain insights on what you can do to help your L&D strategy thrive. And download our latest research report How the Workforce Learns for 15 actions you can take to create a positive learning culture at your organization.

The post Upskilling Survival Guide, Part 1: Engage With Continuous Learning appeared first on Degreed.

That’s why we sought to provide as many insightful perspectives as possible at Degreed VIEW: Creating a Learning Culture. The first in our new on-demand series meant to bring insights to L&D professionals at all stages of the upskilling journey, was hosted by Kelly Palmer, Chief Learning and Talent Officer at Degreed. She was also joined by leaders from Cargill.

From its unexpected start at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the upskilling journey at Cargill has been wildly successful. Julie Dervin, Head of Global Learning and Development at the global energy company, and Shawn Stavseth, Digital Learning Experience Lead, shared how Degreed has surpassed goals and provided learning leaders with an abundance of useful skill data. 

With all this expertise in one place, attendees were bound to have good questions. Lots of ‘em. These are 12 of our favorites (and the ones we thought you’d like too):

1. What are some ways to assess how learners are feeling when moving to a different learning culture? 

Degreed: Employee satisfaction surveys can be helpful to establish a baseline of how people perceive current learning opportunities. Ask your learners what they want and need.

2. What can we do to encourage people to reskill and upskill when many of them feel like they don’t have the time, resources, or just the overall interest and motivation to engage in learning?

Degreed: A key to that is providing a “What’s in it for me?” for upskilling. One way to do that is to provide opportunities for people to move up in their careers using the new skills they’ve learned. This can be with stretch assignments or even full-time roles. Connect upskilling to career mobility.

3. In a digital learning space, how do we close the gap between content and experience?

Degreed: Content should be part of the experience. We know that users want a few core things: guidance, diverse experiences, feedback, insights, and content. It’s about finding balance and the right combination. 

The above information was taken from our recent research report, How the Workforce Learns. Download the full report for more!

4. What are your thoughts on upskilling vs. job opportunities?

Degreed: Job opportunities are key to successful upskilling. Similarly, application and practice are important parts of learning and perfecting new skills.

If you’re interested in learning more about developing on-the-job opportunities across your organization, our Vice President of Degreed Opportunities, Oli Meager, addresses this during his Degreed VIEW session: How to Create an Opportunity Marketplace.

It’s also important to think about “job opportunities” differently. A new job opportunity isn’t necessarily a full-time job. It helps to put short-term projects, mentorships, coaching, and more into the mix. For more information, check out our blog on the differences between a talent marketplace and opportunity marketplace.

5. How does one develop a learning culture in an organization with people from very diverse and unequal backgrounds where some cohorts have not had access to technology?

Degreed: Creating a learning culture starts with the culture itself and the example set by leadership. Technology is secondary to that. You can start by meeting your people where they are and creating an environment for social learning and peer mentoring using whatever communication tools you have in place.

6. Aside from gaining buy-in from employees, how do you gain executive stakeholder buy-in for building a learning culture?

Degreed: Demonstrate the connection between having a strong learning culture and the benefits to your business’s bottom line. When your people are proactively upskilling themselves, they then channel those improved skills toward contributions to the business.

7. What role does “demand generation” play? Or how do you get people to care enough to come and participate in your learning programs?

Degreed: It’s incredibly important. Marketing and end-user adoption are key to the success of any upskilling program. We encourage ongoing campaigns that tie back to the purpose and the “What’s in it for me” idea.

8. How do you address soft or human skills?

Cargill: In our skills work, we’re differentiating between human skills and specialized skills. We continue to explore the best ways to go about gathering meaningful skill data on each, as we believe both are important for the success of our businesses and functions. We have several learning experiences, both collaborative (cohort-based) and self-guided (curated), that people can engage in to improve their human skills.

9. With your leaders being strong enablers, did you have to prep or train them?

Cargill: Our L&D lead partnered with leaders who were ready and willing to engage in our newly developed learning strategy and vision. We also engaged these leaders in creating learning personas and conducting hackathons to make them part of the process.

In addition, we launched a new senior leadership development experience using the new digital learning technology to help them quickly realize the benefits of learning in this new way. With each of these engagements, they became more assured that our efforts were in the best interest of Cargill and its employees, and they became champions on our behalf with other leaders.

10. When moving from spoon-fed to self-led, do you just rip the bandage off, or is “going slow” and transitioning employees to a new learning culture better?

Cargill: No matter how quickly you want to go, creating a learning culture takes time. Some people embrace it right away, and others hold tight to the old ways of doing things. To help late adopters, we created several assets that illustrate the benefits of switching to a new way of learning, such as video success stories, written case studies, and participant testimonials. Each of these resources shares a different aspect of how the person or team leveraged the new technology to build their skills or solve a business challenge.

11. What’s the benchmark for exact data? Are you successful if you have 15% active learners? Is 50% returning users average, good, excellent?

Cargill: We track first-time, return, and repeat visitors as well as adoption and active learner metrics. We benchmark these metrics against similar companies in industry, size, and more. But the true benchmark will be when we’ve built an invisible L&D program — where businesses and functions are equipped to design, develop, and deliver their own learning experiences and employees drive their own skill-building to remain relevant and competitive in their careers.

12. Was language an issue for Cargill trainings across the globe? How did you manage it?

Cargill: We value people and thus meet them where they’re at to ensure they feel included. Having content available in multiple languages and learning modes is critically important. Therefore, translation isn’t an afterthought. Rather, we begin our content build with translation in mind to ensure it can be easily translated or applied in different learning modes. 

One of our most successful learning experiences included creating interactive overviews, short courses, job aids, and learner and facilitator guides in HTML. The HTML design has the clean look and feel of web pages, and learners can easily navigate through the content. A key benefit of HTML is that all content can be auto-translated using the Microsoft Edge Translate Tool. This feature makes the content instantly accessible in over 50 languages.

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Creating a learning culture can be a huge undertaking, but the time and effort can reward your organization with improved employee engagement, a growing inventory of skill data, and a more experienced workforce. 

The post How To Build a Learning Culture: You Asked, We Answered appeared first on Degreed.

So what is that? What is that X factor that makes someone else’s words stick to your brain and alter the way you think? How can you present ideas in ways that really truly engage your teams? I realize I’m biased (I’m a speaker coach and speechwriter), but from my perspective, that X factor is really more like a communication superpower. And lucky for all of us, it’s a superpower we can learn to wield.  

There are many tried-and-true (and heavily researched) tools that can help make your next speech, presentation, 1:1, board meeting, sales call — or any other communication — engaging, persuasive, and memorable. Here are some of my favorites and, not coincidentally, many of the same tools that make TED Talks so sticky.  

Audience before content. Always.

Most of us actually communicate in the wrong direction. By wrong direction, I mean we draft our talking points, we build our Powerpoint slides, and fire off emails before we stop and ask ourselves, “What does my audience expect out of this communication? Why are they taking time out of their busy days to listen to me?” Here’s the deal: If your audience doesn’t see themselves in your presentation, or doesn’t care about your meeting or, worse yet, if they don’t understand how your pitch applies to them, then there’s no point to opening your mouth! That’s why the best communicators always think about their audiences before their content.  

Here at TED, we always ask our speakers to identify the ‘gift’ they want to give to the audience. If you want to knock your next communication out of the park, ask yourself that same question.  

Frame your communication around a unique idea.

I’ll never forget the moment I realized everyone in business was saying the same thing. I was reviewing draft talking points for three different CEOs from three different companies and each one was planning to talk about how culture eats strategy for breakfast. I remember thinking this was so funny at the time.  But it’s no laughing matter.  

There’s so much content out there and as a result, everyone’s attention spans are practically below zero. So, if your audience thinks they’ve already heard what you have to say, they’ll move on. Or let’s say you’re on a sales call with a potential new vendor, and they don’t articulate why their offering is unique or helpful to your specific needs. Would you buy? 

So, to identify your unique idea, it’s helpful to think about the difference between an idea and a topic:

• A topic is the general guidance you’re given before a presentation, meeting etc.  Topics are high level.  But, if you create your communication around a topic, you’ll end up with too much information.
  • Example Topic: “Could you give us a presentation on the future of work?”
• An idea is a unique angle of your topic. When you share your idea, your goal is to make your audience see your topic in a new or nuanced way.
  • Example Idea: “When robots take over our jobs, we’re going to be happier and more creative. Today, I’m going to tell you why.” 

It’s time to ditch the jargon.

No one probably thought twice when the first person said “we need to shift the paradigm.” But when catchphrases are used too often, they lose their meaning. This means, when too many of them sneak into your communication, your entire idea can lose its meaning. Yikes!

The best way to avoid jargon is to ask yourself how you would articulate your message if you were having coffee with a friend. Would you really say “we need to shift the paradigm”? Or would you say “we need to make some changes”? 

Use data – but put it in context.

Data can be a great way to add credibility to any communication.  But, too many stats can actually diminish the weight of the really important ones.  So if you’re going to use data, force yourself to edit! Then, try to put each number in context. For example, what does $10M in annual sales really mean?

I find TED’s astrophysicists do this really well. I remember one speaker helped us understand light year distances by explaining that if someone lived 4.4 light years away, they wouldn’t get their Amazon delivery for 50,000 years!  

And finally, stories are great, but only if they’re apropos.

I’m sure you’ve heard the story about storytelling.  

Our ancestors sat around the campfire telling stories. As a result, we’re “hardwired” to connect with each other through stories, so you must tell stories in order to connect with your audience.  

Yes, stories help us connect. But I’ve met so many speakers who feel they must tell very personal stories in order to create that connection.  But you don’t need me to tell you that sharing a story about your grandmother during a strategy meeting is more distracting than helpful, right?   

The real reason we’re “hardwired” for stories is because it’s easier for our brains to understand information in narrative format vs. a list of facts. Which means effective stories don’t always have to be deeply personal, but they do have to be apropos to your idea. And, they must always follow the correct narrative structure: Setting → Characters → Conflict → Climax → Resolution.  

Let me leave you with one last thought. You don’t have to wait for a turn on TED’s big red carpet to test your new superpowers. Try them tomorrow at your daily stand-up, try them in your next meeting! Opportunities to turn mundane words into delightful, persuasive and memorable communications are all around us. And I, for one, hope you use your powers to do so.  

Learning teams! Want to share inspiring and sticky TED ideas with your learners? Visit get.degreed.com/tedatwork to learn more about TED@Work for Degreed!

About the Author

Briar Goldberg is TED’s Director of Speaker Coaching and is a public speaking and strategic communications expert. In addition to coaching hundreds of TED speakers, she’s worked with leaders from some of the world’s largest companies including the CEOs of Facebook, Ford and Levi’s. She’s also coached and written speeches for Grammy winners, Nobel Prize winners and several government officials. She also conducts training for companies on behalf of TED. Briar formally taught communications at Stanford University and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Her advice on public speaking and effective communication has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Muse, The Huffington Post, Fortune, CNN and ABC News. 

The post Tips from TED: Presenting ideas to engage your teams appeared first on Degreed.

In our fast-moving world, we rarely sit down, eat some Cheetos, drink a Pepsi, and think, “What if this ‘wisdom’ isn’t true anymore? Do we need to think about things differently? Who’s going to bust the myths?”

But that’s exactly what we had to do to turn our learning culture around.

A New Promise

At PepsiCo, our thinking changed when we got Degreed. We started to re-examine our internal catalog of learning myths and we re-defined our L&D promise to employees. Our new promise looks like this:

• We will obsess over employees the way PepsiCo obsesses over consumers.​ 
• We will make learning available in the flow of work.​ 
• We will help you excel in your current job and prepare for your next one.​ 
• We will prepare you for the future of work.​

You might think this sounds like a Frito Lay Variety Pack — something for everyone. But actually, it’s a promise that’s centered around a decision to inspire, not mandate, learning. We wanted our global associates to initiate their own career growth by choosing how, where, and when to grow their own skills because employees didn’t want us to select learning for them or give them a “shopping list.” At the same time, our learning ecosystem was evolving.

A New Kind of Curation

Our new “front door to learning,” Degreed inspired change and new thinking because it felt more like a playground than a running track. So we reached out to our partners on the Degreed team to figure out how we could make magic.   

Our learning center of excellence, PepsiCo University, or PEP U, connected with our best content curators, encouraging them to build in Degreed to create a great content ecosystem that makes it easy for employees to find what they need when they need it. The curators started learning how Degreed works and then brainstormed the most effective ways to help employees discover new learning content. 

Next, we shared these possibilities and processes with an even wider audience, allowing all employees to be experts. Our new model achieved an important milestone: By creating and sharing great content, all employees could be leaders regardless of their title or location. But we didn’t stop there. We put together a monthly forum to share curation successes and enlightening failures. Our curators now have the power to choose internal and external content with multi-modalities to engage employees. 

And we no longer worry about counting completions, because we know our employees have embraced a new way of doing things, one in which they’re free to pop in and out of Degreed to quickly find an answer or explore an idea, not sit through hours-long e-learning modules. 

Busted: 4 Learning Myths

Myth No. 1: We should have only one “version of the truth” on a subject, otherwise employees will get confused. 

Truth: It’s ok to have a different view from each region or business unit. We should enable employees to curate their own content and share it. This reinforces autonomy, inspires curiosity, and accommodates regional and cultural nuances. One version of truth is like one book in the library. It might be a great and important read, but it won’t help employees explore a topic from all angles. To keep content organized and helpful, we teach our curators to title, tag, and write a clear description — so employees can decide if they want to dive in. 

Myth No. 2: Focusing solely on creating great learning content is enough. “If you build it, they will come.” 

Truth: Nope. While great content is a crucial part of our learning strategy, it’s the quality of the experience that drives the best learning behaviors and habits. Start with why and communicate across multiple channels creatively, and try to engage internal marketing or comms partners when possible. We also try to demonstrate how learning directly helps our associates become future-ready, build skills, and grow their careers because that’s a worthy goal. At PepsiCo, we have innovative product marketing teams to build customer experiences. Why should learning not have the same?  

Myth No. 3: Professional Learning and Development is primarily about formal workplace courses or sessions. 

Truth: Amid COVID-19, we can’t do as much formal workplace learning. Working from home has helped us become smarter and realize that we all play a role in creating an engaging learning culture. With Degreed, we can now share books, videos, articles, and podcasts we love with others at the click of a button. And we can find answers to questions that pop up during the day: For example, what’s a Lean Six Sigma black belt? How can I use data to make better decisions?

If one of our employees is a subject matter expert in a particular skill, it’s easy for that person to curate a content Pathway for others to follow. Employees can also build a community around a topic, by creating and joining a Group about it and sharing content.  

Myth No. 4: Reskilling and upskilling employees is 1) not my responsibility, 2) not a priority, or 3) not possible. 

Truth: Now we know, due to a growing field of research, that skill-building is the best way to future-proof our organization for everything and anything coming our way. We even launched a Skill Plan called “Future Ready Workforce” with the now, next, and new skills that our research indicates employees will need to be effective in their roles, regardless of title, level, or function. To that end, Degreed allows employees to inventory and measure their skills, identify priority skills to develop, and connect to the content they need to build in those areas. The Degreed artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning component is built upon skills data; It becomes the foundation of a personalized experience for each learner.  

A New Culture

At PepsiCo, we’re building a new learning culture focused on a key principle: Always question the status quo. We’ve dumped the old myths and we’re inviting many partners to help us create a new learning experience. We have new ways of thinking about learning, and we’ve got a big adventure ahead! 

About the Author:

Alison started her career in human performance consulting, working with large clients to make organizational change transitions smooth. There, she learned why communication and learning programs are important and what makes them effective. She spent 10 years at a global consumer goods company in learning, recognition, and global marketing roles. 

For the past five years, she’s been a director in the PepsiCo global learning center of excellence, Pep U. Her team focuses on improving the global learner experience at PepsiCo, ensuring associates have engaging learning experiences in every format and delivery mechanism. Her team provides learning program consulting to the rest of the organization and curates high priority content to prepare associates for current and future roles. In addition, her team maintains a clear view of its content ecosystem and collaborates closely with external partners to deliver learning that’s fun, engaging, and impactful.  

The post PepsiCo Pops the Top on a New Learning Mindset appeared first on Degreed.

Today’s workforce demands more flexibility. In 2018, the US Census indicated 5.2% of the US workforce works entirely from home. According to a 2017 Gallup Poll, 43% of workers have spent at least some time working remotely. The best companies need the best talent and that talent is no longer confined to major cities. 

Remote work has a unique set of challenges, especially when it comes to navigating the benefits and challenges of a remote workforce. To help your organization create a successful remote work culture, here are six tips, including some that have been tried and tested here at Degreed.   

1) Hire for Culture

Hiring for culture has become more important than ever. With remote workers, businesses rely on individuals who embody cultural principles without the daily traditions and rituals reinforced in a physical office. Each employee is an evangelist and remote workers need to emulate those principles. Reinforcing culture creates a sense of community and a shared vision among coworkers, even if they don’t share the same office.

2) Always Overcommunicate 

In a remote workforce, employees rely substantially more on written communication, which means they can’t take advantage of visual cues to understand the intended meaning. Companies need to overinvest in internal communications and training employees to communicate effectively. Important news and communicating goals should be repeatedly enforced in multi-channel communication.

As an example of this practice at Degreed, we strive to make sure that critical messages are reinforced three times in three different communication channels.

3) Utilize the Right Tools

Tools, especially those that facilitate collaboration, communication, and organization, are critical for a remote workforce. Think about a typical whiteboarding session: with a remote workforce, you can’t pull everyone in a room and sketch on the wall together. However, tools are becoming better and better at simplifying and emulating this collaboration.

One of our recent favorites at Degreed is a free Slack plug-in. Donut is a Slackbot that randomly pairs you with a coworker for a virtual coffee date. These types of tools can promote cross-team collaboration. 

We also use Degreed extensively to develop employee skills and keep the workforce engaged in career development. Many of our clients are using Degreed to engage a global workforce with consistent training on the most critical skills for the business.

Both Degreed and Donut help to create a sense of community, collaboration, and social learning, which help to keep employees from feeling isolated or unmotivated. 

4) Use Video for Meetings

Requiring video in meetings is one of the simplest yet most important rules for successful remote work. Seeing the facial expressions of your colleagues creates more effective communication and cohesion. Video conferencing has matured to the point where it often feels as though the person is in the room with you, and that helps to cut down on multitasking. In fact, 82% of employees are less likely to multitask if they’re on a video call as opposed to an audio call. Participation in calls increases drastically when employees have to appear frequently on camera.

5) Establish a Performance-Based Culture

Remote workforces are not for a command and control environment. You won’t be able to force people to sit at their desks during work hours. Instead, you must place the emphasis on the results. It shouldn’t matter what hours employees work if their output remains the same. What we’ve seen is that giving people the trust and flexibility to work when and where they want gives them the ability to produce their best work. Employees should be held to a higher standard when it comes to their work outcomes.

But not being able to constantly watch employees means you must have an objective structure in place for monitoring their progression, both for the sake of promotions and to ensure they are still delivering high-quality work. Performance review software and learning experience platforms can track upskilling, development, certifications, progress, and accomplishments.

6) Host the Occasional Onsite

For company alignment, significant changes, or rallying the team for new goals, an onsite can accelerate understanding and collaboration. For remote workers, onsites can be rare but we’ve found that Degreed employees fully embrace the time together to reload on company culture and alignment. Staying Power

Enabling remote work is not only possible — it’s becoming essential. Remote workers say they are likely to stay in their current job for the next 4 years, that’s 13% more than onsite workers. Aside from employee retention, remote work is also a competitive work benefit that will attract top talent away from even the most prestigious competitors. The world is moving towards better supporting a global workforce. Will your company be a remote work trailblazer, or will it be left stuck at the office?

The post Six Tips to Keep Your Remote Workforce Engaged appeared first on Degreed.

Based on data from our recent How the Workforce Learns Report, 43% of contributors said they didn’t have the time to learn. Additionally, 30% reported that they lacked proper guidance and that their companies didn’t recognize or reward learning. This is on top of the 22% who said their managers don’t enable learning and the 20% who said they were overwhelmed with too many choices. The majority of these challenges can be traced back to the learning culture and environment of the organization, along with a lack of acknowledgment or reward system.

When Options Become Overwhelming

When thinking about how we could work toward solving these learning barriers, we considered the leaders in online shopping. While this may seem like a leap from online learning, both can cause people to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options. For example, my latest online purchase was a Wi-Fi signal booster, which yielded over 1,000 results on Amazon. How can I sift through all of these options and feel confident enough in my choice to make the right purchase? 

In looking for resources on developing a particular skill, the results can be overwhelming and offer little guidance as to which ones to choose. Learning, like shopping, requires an investment, in both attention and effort. Just like we don’t want to waste money on something that doesn’t work, we don’t want to waste time on something that’s not effective. 

Amazon, like most e-commerce sites, has pulled together a variety of indicators to help narrow the results and assist in the decision-making process. With features like product reviews, buyers can find guidance from reputable sources to help narrow the selection.

How Reputation Indicators Can Help Employees Find the Right Content

The parallels between e-commerce and e-learning have not escaped experts in learning technology. In fact, the concept of “badges” in learning platforms has been largely influenced by the behavioral science behind reputation systems across the web. Look no further than eBay’s Top Rated Seller Badge. 

Similarly, Degreed has developed a reputation system, starting with the new “Active Learner” status. The status pulls together a combination of actions and behaviors into one simple indicator to both Active Learners and the other users who come across them on Degreed. The Active Learner status requires users to have completed at least five items, shared at least one item, have at least three skills, and log in monthly in order to be awarded a colorful circle around their avatar. This combination of actions provides a visible reward for the user to complete key engagement activities and it also gives recognition to those who are the most active. Immediately, you can see what the most productive users are learning on Degreed, making them much more likely to follow and consume similar content, and helping to increase employee engagement.

Another reputation indicator on the organization level comes in the form of endorsed Pathways, Plans, and Skills. Back to the Amazon example, there’s typically a filter to narrow results to Amazon Prime products only. From there, the shopper’s attention can be drawn to products with flags like “Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice” based on feedback such as customer reviews.

Similarly, Degreed offers visual cues to filter the best options, which also help the algorithms that power Search and Recommendations. Leaders and managers can leverage this feature to elevate their Pathways above other options, offering both guidance and support.

Seeking Guidance  

This emphasis on guidance also aligns with the research in our How the Workforce Learns Report, which shows that employees prefer to learn independently and socially. This means a combination of visiting websites and following the guidance of a mentor, team, professional network, or social platform. 62% of survey contributors said they consulted their professional network for guidance or recommendations when they needed to learn something for their job in the last year.

Narrowing down these options and offering guidance from Active Learners creates more social, personal, and curated learning experiences for your workforce. Our Endorsed and Active Learner status features are just the beginning. In the future, we plan to expand on these as we continue to track the impact of user behavior on additional statuses and ways to indicate preferred learning content in order to increase employee engagement with learning technology. Features that leverage and highlight the expertise of leaders and subject matter experts within a company not only take some of the burden of content curation off busy L&D leaders, they also tie the learning platform into what people naturally do when seeking advice or coaching.

Connecting employees with these tools and opportunities to pursue learning and upskilling is the first step to motivating them to do so independently. With an overabundance of online content, bringing the experience of a trusted social network into the LXP will help motivate users, increase employee engagement with learning and development, and keep them from feeling overwhelmed by choices.

For more information on how to leverage Degreed to motivate your people and increase engagement, contact your CX Rep or request a demo today. 

The post Use Your LXP to Motivate Learning and Increase Employee Engagement appeared first on Degreed.

66% of enterprise L&D leaders have trouble getting employees to engage with their training programs [Bersin by Deloitte].

Here’s the good news.

Degreed has a team dedicated to helping drive engagement and we have some proven tactics we can share that have improved the metrics at client organizations.

But first, the right mindset.

As the old saying goes, “takes one to know one.” So, let’s think about your personal online habits. You might notice there are certain things that drive you back to the same websites and apps day after day. In many cases, this repeated behavior is encouraged by way of a reminder in the form of an email or pop-up. These notifications provide a one-click option to visiting the site like you have probably received from sites like Amazon and Facebook.

Without having to think twice, a habit is born.

As it turns out, this notification tactic works for learning too. You can get in front of your audience on a regular basis by Degreed’s system generated engagement emails.

Degreed’s emails notifications notify your team of important learning events and suggested learning, making it easy to create a daily habit of learning.

*MailChimp 2017

Need more than just metrics? Degreed client, Xilinx, has driven much of their adoption success through email communication.

Here’s a play by play of their strategy.

1. The Xilinx team made marketing and communicating to their learners a top priority from day one of their launch in November 2016.
2. They implemented a cascading communication roll out approach – beginning with executives and their staff, then introducing it to the rest of the organization with live briefings, demos, and videos.
3. The communications strategy also included a message from the CEO prior to the official launch.
4. These were followed by an email from the Senior Vice President of HR, and supporting collateral materials including posters, table tents, demos, videos and several webinars to ensure employees understood their new strategy, Learn to the Power of X (LearnX) and what it would mean for each employee’s professional and technical development.
5. Based on pilot user feedback, they enabled daily reminders at launch, automatically generated by Degreed to provide a reminder to their team to encourage learning daily – and it’s working.  Over 43% of employees have logged in more than 5 times and 88% have visited. 

Even though their metrics say a lot, feedback from the Xilinx team says even more:

“For us, the Daily Email has been a key part of our implementation success. Employees appreciate the personalized preview and the daily nudge to engage in learning.”

Start driving learner engagement today with Degreed!

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