That’s how Max Wessel, Co-CEO of Degreed, characterized today’s ever-changing—and exhilarating—business climate while speaking at Degreed LENS 2025.

So much has changed in the last two years. While the rise of AI isn’t the first technology to revolutionize business, nor will it be the last, the undeniably fast pace of change we’re witnessing does exemplify something new. 

Three major points kept coming up at LENS:

1. AI is here to stay, and it should replace tasks, not people.
2. Leaders must adapt and rise to the challenge by providing clarity and guidance.
3. Personalized learning at scale is easier to achieve than ever.

The Advantage of Learning AI

AI is here to stay, and it should replace tasks, not people.

In the same ways they embraced computers and smartphones, innovative business leaders looking to stay competitive are evolving to embrace AI. And just like those previous tech advancements, applying AI to workforce development can be a huge advantage.

“We are rewriting our jobs right now,” said Nikki Helmer, Chief Product Officer at Degreed. “We are rewriting what it means to work in an AI-first world.”

_{Nikki Helmer, Chief Product Officer at Degreed}

Your workforce needs to know how to use AI, and effective workforce learning can help ensure all your people are equipped to use AI to support day-to-day tasks.

“AI impacts the entire organization. It’s not just one functional area of the business,” said Lisa Tenorio, SVP Product and Innovation at Harvard Business Publishing. “Everyone at every level of the company needs some fluency with AI, and they need to be continuously learning to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the technology. So that means both learners and learning programs need to adapt and keep pace.”

_{Lisa Tenorio, SVP Product and Innovation at Harvard Business Publishing}

From an HR standpoint, though, it’s key that this transition to AI isn’t meant to replace humans, but to instead make them more effective at their jobs.

“Where are there opportunities where technologies like AI can actually make humans more efficient, more productive in the execution of tasks?” asked Melissa Matlins, Global Head of Workforce Solutions at Pearson. “This time that you save can then be applied to durable skills development like communication or collaboration that are always going to be really, really critical across functions.”

Leading for AI Learning 

Leaders must adapt and rise to the challenge by providing clarity and guidance.

Our upcoming How the Workforce Learns Gen AI 2025 report shows that a lack of guidance is one of the biggest things blocking people from developing skills and confidence in AI. This means that business leaders must give employees more clarity on how to use and experiment with AI.

“We need to hear more about AI as something that changes where leadership is going, that raises the bar for what it will mean to lead, and less about this magical alien technology,” said Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO at Kozyr and former first Chief Decision Scientist at Google.

_{Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO at Kozyr and former first Chief Decision Scientist at Google}

The world that AI is creating is an uncharted territory, and some leaders will struggle to make sense of it, let alone bring their people along. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Vidya Krishnan, CLO at Ericsson, reminded attendees that “leadership needs to be good at three things—creating clarity, developing people, delivering results.” That applies in any world—whether we’re talking about skills, AI, or tomorrow’s to-be-determined business challenge.

Indeed, with the right guidance, upskilling in AI can be easy for everyone, said Siya Raj Purohit, Education Go-To-Market Leader at OpenAI. “Just get everyone to start experimenting with AI. I don’t think everyone needs to be an AI expert. The sector is moving so quickly. So many new things are coming out. Don’t force them to understand all of those trends, because it’s not really relevant to their day-to-day. What matters is their ability to ask the right questions, provide the right information to AI, to get the output that they want. And everyone should be able to do that.”

Personalized Learning at Scale with AI

Personalized learning at scale is easier to achieve than ever.

With AI comes the ability to personalize learning at a scale that humanity has never seen before. AI is the challenge and the solution. 

“I think personalized tutoring was always the holy grail for the education sector. Like if we accomplish this, we’ve made it as an industry. And now we have,” Raj Purohit said.

Better yet, your workforce wants personalization. No one wants to waste time on irrelevant development, especially in a world where they’re already surrounded by other things curated just for them. 

“Hyper-personalization is a key thing,” said Ali Bebo, CHRO at Pearson. “People want to be known and seen.”

A New Era of Degreed Innovation

Degreed is enabling workforce transformation with new product functionality.

To help your business address the need for better AI learning, leadership, and personalization, we’ve announced several new product features:

1. Degreed Maestro Studio: Experiment with a powerful tool that helps you easily create and deploy custom AI-native learning experiences like coaches or simulations. 
2. Degreed Open Library (no additional cost): Access 500 pre-made, deeply curated pathways on the most in-demand learning topics to reduce reliance on expensive third-party content with training resources that are automatically kept up to date.
3. Degreed Maestro Services: Leverage a suite of services to maximize AI’s impact while reducing your costs.
4. Degreed partnerships with Pearson and American Council on Education (ACE): Get market intelligence data and validate learning academies so completions earn formal credit.

These product and partnership announcements mark the beginning of a new era of innovation—an era in which personalized learning and measuring skills at scale drive the positive business impacts your people and your company need in order to win.

Find out more.

Get a clear picture of what’s coming from Degreed. Check out our seven-part Degreed in Action webinar series and choose your sessions to find out more about our innovations in AI, skills reporting, automations, Degreed Professional Services, Degreed Academies, and more.

The post Leading in the AI Era with Personalized Learning at Scale 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.

The 2024 Degreed Visionary Awards recently returned for its second annual trophy ceremony, celebrating Degreed clients from around the world that are advancing skill building and workforce development in innovative, productive, and engaging ways.

“We had so many great submissions this year, and it’s a testament to the incredible forethought, planning, and sweat equity our clients put into their L&D programs week in and out all year long,” said ceremony co-host Michelle Vock Laboy, Vice President of Client Success for Degreed Academies and Content Marketplace. “We recognize that it takes a lot of work to submit these applications, but it takes a lot more work to build out these learning programs and really create a world-class system of learning, development, and skills. We’re inspired, grateful, and proud to recognize all this outstanding work.”

The submissions shared some common themes—including the notion that to get ahead, an L&D program needs to start where it’s at, learn from that experience, and then grow from there. Perhaps you’ve felt this at your organization? Here’s hoping the winners’ stories provide a little inspiration. 

The 2024 Degreed Visionary Awards were announced in early March in Houston at Degreed LENS, our annual flagship conference. Let’s take a closer look at the organizations that took Gold, Silver, and Bronze in each category. We’ll also introduce you to the 2024 David Blake Learner of the Year, an individual recognized for exceptional personal growth.

Learning Technology Launch of the Year

Visionary Awards in this category are presented for outstanding achievement in implementing a Degreed product. 

Gold: BNY Mellon

The New York-based bank needed to make it easy for learners to find the right learning and to assess their skills, to build skills needed for tomorrow. To launch Degreed LXP+, learning leaders prioritized the company’s engineering organization of 12,000 employees. Using agile practices, they conducted six early launch campaigns, and a full enterprise launch followed. In addition, the company launched Degreed Academies to more than 250 participants.

Judges awarded the Gold award based on BNY Mellon’s significant 38% cost savings through content optimization via Degreed and the 3,261 active learners the platform attracted in the 48 hours post-launch.

From kick off to launch, “We did it in less than a year,” said Judy Arruda, Vice President of Global Learning and Development. “And we took an agile approach. We had 10 work streams focused on this. It wasn’t just learning and development folks. We made sure we have the right partners from the business, technology, communications, et cetera.”

One of the reasons BNY Mellon implemented Degreed was employees didn’t know where to go to find learning materials, Arruda said. “It was confusing. One of the great things that’s already happened is Degreed is our front door to all learning for the organization. And that aligns with investing in talent . . . and having something to attract talent as well.”

Silver: bp

The talent team at the London-based oil and gas company aimed to align employee skills, passions, and purposes with the company’s vision. The team created its Workforce of the Future program to unlock employee potential, personalize learning, and provide more meaningful employee experiences through a culture of lifelong learning.

The Degreed implementation grew from a pilot aimed at 7,000 people to a full launch serving 42,000 employees three months later. Since then, 89% of workers have rated at least one skill, and more than 60% log in at least once a month.

Note: Bronze was not awarded in this category this year.

Learning Marketer of the Year

Awards in this category are presented for outstanding achievement in adopting and using Degreed.

Gold: Innovapost

Employees at the IT Services Management company based in Ottawa, Canada, operate with a guiding principle: No one gets left behind. For L&D, this means everyone has opportunities to learn and grow their skills, and the company invests in world class learning partners to support people’s learning needs.

To promote those initiatives, the learning team employed a number of tactics including completion and skill-rating challenges, scheduled learning hours, and a variety of communications. The upshot? In 2023, the company achieved 100% employee adoption of the Degreed platform. Leadership credits the activities it took to get there with contributing to the organization’s 2023 employee retention rate of 97%.

Silver: Regions Bank

Based in Birmingham, Alabama, the financial institution presented employees with a five-day challenge designed to promote the benefits and features of Degreed. Brief daily informational sessions lasting 10 minutes or less focused on upskilling, reskilling, career planning, and personal development. The campaign engaged employees through several communications channels, including daily podcasts.

Learning leaders exceeded their participation goal by 10 times, and Degreed usage increased by 50%.

Bronze: KPMG Brazil

People struggled to find learning across a multitude of access points at the South American professional services firm. After learning leaders implemented Degreed to help, they needed to promote it to 4,000 people in 25 offices across nine states.

Launch activities combined an online virtual event and in-person road shows featuring senior leadership, who helped to demo and champion the platform. The result? Employees rated thousands of skills. Nearly 75% of employees are active Degreed users, and nearly 400 new hires engaged with a fresh new-hire experience.

Business Performance Program of the Year

Visionary Awards in this category are presented for outstanding achievements in the use of Degreed to improve organizational strategic business outcomes.

Gold: TD Bank

TD Bank created its FutureNow program to help 95,000 employees build capabilities aligned to key business priorities, providing enterprise-wide learning content focused on the skills most important to the business through multiple modalities including Degreed. Learning leaders promoted the program through a variety of channels including people, managers, emails, lines of business, HR, and L&D.

Judges were impressed with the bank’s build-once-for-many approach to developing and deploying learning resources, which enabled the company to create a more scalable and cost-effective way to upskill its 103,000 employees.

“There is an enterprise learning framework that was designed that underpins the strategy for FutureNow,” said Dave Woeller, Associate Vice President, Human Resources, Enterprise Design and Digital Learning Technology.

Among the pillars of that framework, “Any topic or content that we build has to have relevance across the 25 business lines that we support and has to be aligned to bank strategy ,” Woeller said. 

“The FutureNow program has enabled us to actually start living and breathing the build-once-deploy-for-many philosophy, which has increased our efficiency, making sure our resources are tacked to the highest-priority work, and then also reduce content duplication and confusion for our learners.”

Silver: KPMG Global

Learning Leaders at the worldwide professional services organization empowered employees by providing them access to lifelong learning opportunities valued by leadership.

KPMG Global enabled access to globally developed learning pathways and plans that ensure expert guidance reaches local member firms. As a result, more than one million learning items were completed in 2023. In addition, more than 300,000 skills were rated by over 100,000 employees, with an average of 72% of users returning to the platform across 95 countries.

Bronze: Allianz

Headquartered in Munich, Germany, the financial services provider has reached 17,000 leaders through its lead learning program. The goal is to equip these employees with world class skills—in technology, change management, inclusive leadership, wellbeing-coaching and more—to help them navigate a constantly changing, digitized world.

In 2023, Allianz tracked attendee progress and found participants collectively clocked 1.2 million hours of learning.

Learning Innovator of the Year

Visionary Awards in this category are presented for outstanding achievements in using the Degreed platform in innovative, creative ways including specific learning initiatives, diversity and inclusion projects, skill development strategies, and manager or leadership learning programs.

Gold: Exness

The Cyprus-based fintech company significantly transformed its approach to employee development following the company’s introduction of the Degreed LXP. A year after implementation, Exness pivoted to a data-driven model for training that aligns with the company’s diverse employees’ professional aspirations.

Using skill matrices to map skills and proficiency levels, Exness effectively inventories staff competencies and then tailors training services to plug gaps and meet organizational objectives.

“Two years ago, Exness experienced significant growth. They almost doubled our headcount,” said Dmitry Shevchenko, Online L&D Manager. “As a result of this very fast organic growth, our structure became quite complex.”

Leaders realized a significant number of people in different positions with different titles were performing similar jobs and functions. “It was the first issue we wanted to address,” Shevchenko said. “Another thing was our approach to decision making in terms of L&D. It was quite classic and it was a reactive one. We wanted to change it, to make our decisions more meaningful.”

Silver: Bell Canada

At the nationwide telecommunications company, a virtual employee university provides opportunities for people to develop the skills needed to redirect their careers into new management roles. Dubbed Bell U Academy, it helps employees obtain professional designations and qualifications in high-demand, technology-focused areas. The Degreed platform is a key enabler of the program. 

After three years and with nearly 500 graduates, the program has increased female representation in high tech at Bell, improved retention and engagement, ensured high performance, promoted career mobility, and saved the company money on recruitment. Return on investment is estimated at an impressive $18 million.

Bronze: CI&T

The corporate CI&T University sought to strengthen CI&T as a skill-based organization where individual competencies are the foundation for collective growth and ongoing success. To accomplish this, learning leaders created communities of expertise with a focus on learning, training, and innovation, generating new vertical business offers. Learning leaders also identified skill gaps and provided clarity to managers for upskilling. Along the way, they’ve used the Degreed platform to help employees focus on cutting edge topics like generative AI. Degreed has become the center of the company’s skill development initiatives.

David Blake Learner of the Year

This award, named for the Degreed co-founder and CEO, recognizes outstanding achievements made by an individual in the use of Degreed to grow skills and advance a career.

Winner: Brandon Konecny, Checkr

Using an annual personal learning stipend managed through Degreed Content Marketplace, Brandon Konecny, a senior commercial and regulatory counsel, upskilled in compliance and advertising law and purchased a number of books that support his ongoing development. The company’s flexible approach to providing learning opportunities afforded Brandon autonomy over his learning. As a result, he’s applied new skills in his current role at Checkr, taking on more responsibilities.

Ready to learn more?

Watch the full 2024 Degreed Visionary Awards ceremony.

And watch A Visionary View: Ask Award-Winners Anything, a conversation with Visionary Awards Gold winners at Degreed LENS 2024, now available on demand.

The post L&D Teams Dazzle in Second Degreed Visionary Awards appeared first on Degreed.

That’s what Degreed CEO David Blake said at Degreed LENS 2024. And he’s right. Lifelong learning, as it stands today, is begging to be re-energized and innovated.

“Today, we lifelong learn like most of us exercise, which is ‘kinda-sorta.’ It isn’t good enough. Not anymore,” Blake said. The takeaway? It’s time to make lifelong learning a bigger priority through better opportunities and bolder innovations.

What does innovative lifelong learning look like? That future is still being shaped, but Blake said one way to picture it is in terms of the familiar university model, but for life—learners are always enrolled in a “semester,” have a transcript of what they’ve learned and how, can advance with cohorts or “study groups,” and so much more.

Similarly, Michelle Weise, Founder and Upskilling Advisor at Rise & Design, re-affirmed that organizations will have to change how they view workforce development in the years ahead. “All companies and organizations need to understand that the workplace is going to become the classroom of the future,” Weise said during her LENS keynote.

Transforming the workplace into a haven of growth and opportunities will take work. It will take buy-in, strategy, and collaboration. L&D professionals from around the world gathered March 5 and 6 at LENS to learn, share, innovate—and prepare for the coming transformation together. 

Three key ideas emerged that will light the path: skills, data and business alignment, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Skills

Just start experimenting with skills. Your path and goals will change, and that’s okay.

“Skills are hot, but they’re not new,” Barrett Evans, Head of Global Learning and Leadership Development at Ford, said from the LENS stage.

Skills have been around forever. What’s changing is how we measure and leverage them in business. So take what you do know about skills and apply it to what you still need to find out about your workforce and its capabilities.

The path to becoming a skills-based (or skills-first) organization is fluid. It’s not yet defined. But if you wait for certainty to act, your competitors are likely to master the art of leveraging skills before you’ve even tried. The work world is switching from an economy based on jobs to an economy based on skills. And if you aren’t skills-first, you’re essentially skills-last. 

Simplify your skills strategy. Make it dynamic.

Peter Sheppard, Head of Learning Ecosystem at Ericsson, and Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson, realized a need for automation that keeps their skills model modernized, agile, and ready for anything. The life of a skill can be short. So they created a digital job architecture, a dynamic skills taxonomy, a new catalog of skills, and more that made applying skills easy for employees and management alike.

And it’s not just skills that need to be dynamic. It’s employees too. With the right development opportunities in place, you can help them grow, innovate, and succeed. “The people we have must continually become the people we need,” Krishnan said. 

The Ericsson team relied on Degreed partners—like SAP SuccessFactors—to help employees understand the criteria for open internal opportunities, further propelling growth. Developing that kind of self-perpetuating skills cycle is the dream. It ensures your skills strategy consistently produces positive results.

With the right business alignment in place, that skills cycle can become integrated into the core of your organization.

Data & Business Alignment

Understand key company goals, and help stakeholders succeed.

“At the end of the day, we’re all in business to be able to drive competitive advantage, and it’s the people that do that, right?” said Brad Watt, CLO at Colgate-Palmolive.

Businesses need people to learn, grow, and develop because static people produce ineffective work. At the same time, different business units need to see different kinds of growth. The easiest way for L&D to illustrate its impact is to connect with stakeholders, uncover opportunities to help meet unique objectives, and then use resulting data to show how learning contributed.

At Colgate-Palmolive, for example, the L&D team implemented badging. The result? A whopping 3,500 people earned badges in 2022. The HR team benefitted from that because employees felt recognized for the work they were doing and shared their badges on social media. As a result, HR saw more employee satisfaction and more organic employer brand building. That’s alignment.

Tell the right story to the right people.

No business unit or stakeholder will appreciate the impact of learning if you don’t present that impact in a clear and engaging way. As part of an L&D team, it’s in your scope to translate learning and skills data to make it meaningful across teams. 

“If we don’t help them [stakeholders] with the context, they’re going to reach their own context, and we may not have the same interpretations of that data.” said Greg Smith, Director of Learning and Development at Associa.

That potential for misinterpretation further underscores the need for alignment, so when the data comes in, you know what the right story is and who to tell it to. And if you’re still not sure, maybe AI can help. 

AI

Take responsibility for shaping AI into what you want it to be.

New AI tools are like baby tigers, Noelle Russell, Chief AI Officer at the AI Leadership Institute, told LENS. People are filled with fascination and curiosity about the cute, seemingly harmless baby cat, and everyone wants to play with it. But if it’s not raised with guardrails, it has the potential to be lethal. And even if AI is raised responsibly? “We don’t let our guard down. Ever,” Russell urged. 

According to Weise, workers who used to be the most concerned about being replaced by machines were those without college degrees. Now, it’s people with college degrees.

In a direct nod to workforce worries about AI, Russell encouraged employees to ask how AI can help them do the parts of their jobs that they don’t like—rather than the ones they do.

Humans make AI, and humans decide how to use it. If it can help with menial, time-consuming tasks, it has the potential to help people enjoy work more. So ask your teams what parts of their jobs they’d love AI to help with. Ask yourself too, and then make it happen.

Build new skills to adapt to AI, but don’t discount the ones you already have.

With a technological leap as significant as AI, feeling the limits of your own skills is natural. But the need for new skills doesn’t suddenly make existing skills irrelevant. Gary J. Lutz, Learning Technology Manager at Intel Corporation, and Jim Hemgen, Talent Development Director at Booz Allen Hamilton, discussed this transition during their LENS session on AI experimentation.

“I, at this point, don’t see skills that necessarily become less important,” Lutz said. “I do see skills that we need to add. And it’s not just skills we need to add to the organization. Every individual needs to add these skills to their own repertoire.” 

The question is not which skills are now irrelevant; rather, it’s which skills are up-and-coming to tackle this new technological opportunity? As dietitians say about sustainable healthy eating, don’t look at what you can cut out, look at what you can add in.

Lutz and Hemgen named a few AI-critical skills, including:

• Cybersecurity
• AI prompt engineering
• Performance consulting
• Critical thinking
• AI literacy

Launching into the Future of Work

The value of upskilling can’t be overstated as the world continues to grow and change. Skills, data and business alignment, and AI—when done right—can help you forge your organization’s path to success. As the L&D industry works to shape lifelong learning into a pillar of the work world, the global insights from LENS 2024 will hopefully stay with you and help you blaze a clear path to a skills-first future.

Ready to learn more?

To find out more about Degreed, schedule a demo today.

The post From Global L&D Experts: Insights on Skills, Data, Business Alignment, and AI appeared first on Degreed.

It’s the kind of story L&D pros live for. And the kind of story any employee can use for inspiration—and as a roadmap for getting ahead.

“I’m very strategic, and I’m a lifelong learner,” Mattison told us when we first met her in 2023 at Degreed LENS, our annual flagship conference.

Mattison had just won our inaugural David Blake Learner of the Year Award, and we listened somewhat awestruck as she explained how using our platform propelled her from a Ford manufacturing IT role she’d held for years to a new job as a Product Owner in Connected Vehicle Enterprise Analytics. That new role focused on providing enhanced keyword search capabilities to Ford technicians poring through documentation they rely on to complete repairs.

As learning leaders at the auto giant noted, “the interviewing team was extremely impressed with the drive, determination, and passion she demonstrated in her efforts to prepare for the position. Her clear understanding of the role, responsibilities, and expectations, as well as the skills she developed through learning in Degreed, sealed the deal.”

Mattison’s skill-building journey even caught the attention of Ford CEO Jim Farley, who celebrated her on social media, linking to a video the company made about her determined investment in herself. “It’s never too late to learn something new, and I love seeing our employees hold themselves to the highest standard in the pursuit for excellence.”

Returning to LENS to Pass the Torch

Following last year’s LENS, Mattison earned yet another promotion—to Generative AI Specialist & Product Owner in the company’s Customer Service Division. In this new role, she’s developing even more advanced technology tools for repairing vehicles.

Join us to explore this and more with Mattison below in our new Q&A.

And join us for LENS on March 5 and 6 in Houston or online. We’re thrilled to be welcoming Mattison to the event once again as she presents this year’s Learner of the Year Award to a still-unannounced recipient. If our Q&A here is any indication, LENS attendees better get ready for some serious inspiration. 

Degreed: Your upskilling journey has been remarkable. How did it get started?

Mattison: I had worked for years at Ford in manufacturing IT, in a role that was largely focused on systems that support production processes—essentially getting vehicles built efficiently. I wanted to do something different. I had been in the same job for quite some time. 

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. I wanted to go someplace that took technology to the next level. I was fascinated with artificial intelligence, data insights, and analytics. I knew that I needed to make myself more marketable.

I set my sights on becoming a product owner in data analytics, a role in which I could oversee the development of new systems and processes for the larger business, beyond the manufacturing plant. But to get there, I needed to upskill. 

Degreed: What happened next? 

Mattison: I started researching roles in the Ford database, and I found a SharePoint site that outlined the product owner role. That site directed me to curated learning resources in Degreed. I found everything I could possibly need to learn all of the skills and proficiencies I needed to become a successful product owner.

One big element was I didn’t have much hands-on experience working with agile processes. I was familiar with the agile project management tool used by Ford, and I had some understanding of user stories, but I definitely needed to expand my knowledge of agile practices.

Using Degreed, I was able to gauge my current skills and identify gaps, which allowed me to prioritize my development to match what I needed for the role I was pursuing. I worked my way through each pathway in the plan, building a strong foundation in power skills needed by product owners at Ford. I also used the search function in Degreed to locate more content—on topics like artificial intelligence—to supplement my knowledge and explore other skills and principles that could boost my qualifications.

Degreed: Your efforts paid off. You got the product owner job. But the story doesn’t end there, does it?

Mattison: It doesn’t, I’m happy to say. Shortly after receiving the award from Degreed last year, I got promoted to my current role in AI. If a Ford vehicle technician can’t find what’s needed to fix a vehicle, the job goes up a level to a Ford field service engineer. These engineers have access to a broader database of information the technicians aren’t privy to. And they need to go through several disjointed systems to figure out how to repair vehicles. So, the question becomes, how can we use large language models to give those engineers search capability in one spot, so that they’re not going to different systems to look for what they need? It basically helps make processes faster. 

Degreed: You’ve obviously enjoyed using Degreed. What do you especially appreciate about it?

Mattison: Degreed met me where I was at. It was very accessible, and I could use it just about anywhere. I didn’t have to be at work to do it. I could use it on my phone. I even used it in my car, using the app on my phone to listen to recordings and content as I was traveling back and forth to work.

I love the assessments—to help me identify where I am, identify where I want to go, and then how I can get there.

Degreed is powerful. It is a powerful tool. When I went to school, I used to have to go to the library to find learning materials. I love that Degreed meets me where I’m at.

Degreed: Ford did more than connect you with the learning content you used to build new skills. What other ways does the company support learning?

Mattison: I’m very grateful to Ford. We’ve been trained by our L&D team on how to use Degreed. And Ford gives us Friday afternoons as a “power up” time. I use that opportunity specifically for learning.

Degreed: You’ll be presenting our 2024 David Blake Learner of the Year Award at LENS soon. What do you plan to say? Any thoughts for the next recipient?

Mattison: This year has been such an amazing journey. I want to stress how important it is to invest in yourself by upskilling.

I want to tell the person who’s going to be the new Learner of the Year that it’s going to be a whirlwind, so enjoy the ride. But then there’s also a responsibility on your part to share your story. It was nice to be recognized but, once I was, it opened the door for so many people to reach out to me. It was hard at first because, you know, I have work, but I still felt like I had a responsibility to talk to those people and share how I did it, because they wanted to know. It’s about who you can help.

People are going to want to know you. Be open to that. It’s part of the journey.

Degreed: What’s your advice to learners? What can they take away from your story?

Mattison: Reach out to Learning & Development to get help. And you have to have a passion. I have a passion for learning, and I say go for what motivates you. You have to have motivation. Try to put that motivation in front of you and just keep working toward it. Work towards it every single day.

In addition, I’ve embraced an ecosystem of people—HR, Learning & Development, my team—to help me through anything in my career.

Learning is a marathon. It really is a lifelong journey. You have to embrace that seriously. If you want to evolve, if you want to grow in your career, you have to embrace that lifelong learning mindset because things change. They change a lot, and if you want to grow, you’ve got to be willing to learn something new, come out of your comfort zone, and take the next step.

Degreed: What about L&D professionals? What can they take away from your story?

Mattison: Making time for your employees to invest in themselves is very important. It will benefit your company.

I’m a busy person. Being able to have learning at my fingertips was so important. It makes it a lot easier for people to want to learn and then do it. Give people the opportunity and make it flexible so that they can fit it into their lives. That’s most important. A lot of people want to learn but don’t have the time to do it. They don’t see how they can do it.

I’ve had a lot of questions about that. How did you do it? How were you able to do it?

Learning is not one-size-fits-all. Giving people the flexibility to learn at their own pace, to learn when they can, wherever they can, is helping them to be successful.

The post Insights on Upskilling: How Degreed Learner of the Year Landed Two Dream Jobs appeared first on Degreed.

What Blake described are characteristics of a skills-based organization. In its ideal execution, a skills-focused company values people’s skills and their proficiency in those skills over job titles and static role descriptions. A skills-based organization puts skills at the heart of work for increased agility, more efficiency and better employee retention.

This idea might sound daunting. Shifting your organization to a skills-based strategy would likely uproot many traditional job structures. But for many forward-thinking companies, the shift has already begun out of necessity. 

The rate at which technology is changing has become so rapid that many job roles and skillsets are becoming obsolete before people can gain more relevant skills to replace those lost.

“Technology can now scale faster than humanity can learn,” Blake said. “What that means is we’ve entered a new era in humanity, in which the skills gap gets bigger every day, week, month, year.”

Embracing skills is a new, innovative way to work — one you can use to keep up with technology, improve efficiency, respond quickly to change and innovation, and attract and retain top talent.

How can you and your organization get started? Let’s take a look at what the experts at LENS had to say:

1. Create purpose-driven upskilling and gain buy-in. 

Any large-scale change needs to be driven by something — a goal, a dream, a result perhaps — and employees and leaders alike need to understand and stand behind that reason so you have the engagement you need to push forward. 

Creating meaning behind learning can also be done at a company level when driven by a powerful mission. Brian Ciccotelli, Learning Experience Designer, told LENS his company HP created a company-wide goal “to be the most sustainable and just technology company in the world by 2030.” As such, all HP training ties into this core idea. 

“You need to have a why — a really good why… more than ‘It’s going to make us more profitable or reduce costs.’ Have something that’s really going to motivate and inspire,” Ciccotelli said.

Another way to demonstrate meaning is to outline how skills can connect different corners of your organization. Michael Griffiths, Principal at the management consulting firm Deloitte,  suggested, for example, that learning leaders “map learning and development to talent marketplaces as a way to start, especially from a workforce perspective. It shows the most value and the ‘What’s in it for me?’ is very clear and productive.” 

By showing how you can help the business meet its goals and objectives, you can also gain internal champions, from individual contributors to stakeholders, to further your cause. Annee Bayeux, Chief Learning Strategist at Degreed, likened these champions to positive social media influencers. They should have a following, act as role models, and spread the benefits of learning in ways that get other employees motivated to follow along.

“They don’t need to be the highest ranking in your organization, but they do need to have influence,” Bayeux said.

Employees aren’t the only ones wondering what they can get from learning. Stakeholders often ask ‘What’s in it for me?’ and L&D pros should be prepared to answer.

Rooted in that answer is an understanding that learning benefits your people and your company at the same time.“Learning is driving talent, and talent is driving the business,” said Jen Grubich, CLO from Cigna. That’s simple and true.

2. Start challenging traditional L&D approaches.

Ask yourself, “Am I seeing the results I want with what I’m doing now?” If the answer is yes, ask, “Could they be better?” Relying solely on what you already know could lead to missed opportunities in learning and upskilling efficiency. Moreover, it’s not lifelong-learner behavior. Think bigger, and find a way to achieve moonshot goals. That’s what Checkr, an employee background check company, did. 

“We wanted to be the best place to work,” said Jamal Smith, Senior Learning and Development Specialist. “We wanted to reach for the stars.”.

To make its employee experience stellar, Checkr took a hard look at its education reimbursement program. Traditionally, reimbursement is perceived as a great education benefit for employees. But at Checkr, as with many organizations, it actually wasn’t helpful; only 3.5% of education reimbursement funds were used.

The company’s L&D professionals decided to innovate, and they provided learning stipends and academies using Learn In, a Degreed company. Using Learn In, Checkr provided employees with funds on a prepaid credit card instead of asking them to be reimbursed after paying for courses and learning materials out of pocket. 

In turn, Checkr saw its utilization of learning benefit dollars jump from that 3.5% to more than 22% in one year, with 99% of its workforce logging in to the academy platform. 

“We’re quickly upskilling people,” Smith said. “And we’re making sure people are in the right seats to really drive business results.”

3. Get creative, keep it simple and experiment with skills-based strategies.

Embracing a skills-based learning strategy doesn’t have to be daunting.

Griffiths reminded L&D pros that it can be exciting to restructure work in ways that do a better job meeting your needs, and to just “Have fun with it.”

Remember to consider employee experience as you innovate. Your people are at the center of your shift to a skills-based organization and what works—or doesn’t work—for them can make or break your transformation. 

When working in the White House as Chief Information Officer, Theresa Payton discovered cybersecurity policies, procedures and briefings weren’t getting great feedback. Employees said they left training sessions bored and intimidated by long, complex policies. These briefings and policies were becoming blockers for better cybersecurity hygiene, like reporting when devices went missing.

Payton improved engagement and, in turn, cybersecurity — by simplifying processes and making the briefings fun. 

Instead of holding a long security meeting when an employee received an assigned work phone, Payton piloted a program to instead hold a five-minute security briefing, and she issued what she called a “Smartphone Happy Meal.” It included a phone, candy, branded pens and pencils, and a card with a phone number on it — all thoughtfully placed into a sealable plastic baggie. If employees lost their device, they could call the number any time.

The Smartphone Happy Meal was inexpensive. It was creative. It was simple. And most importantly, it was effective. Thanks to this new method, people reported missing technology 100% of the time (compared to 50% prior), and usually within an hour of an incident (compared to a full business day).

Sometimes the biggest innovations are simple, not large-scale or complex, ideas. The lesson for L&D? Don’t be intimidated by the task to make every policy and procedure skills-centric. Ask for feedback, find out where the opportunities for improvement are, then experiment with new ways to integrate skills-based practices into your organization in unique ways that work best for your team. 

4. Prioritize data to activate skills. 

You can’t make the shift to a skills-based organization, or even to a skills-based mindset, without learning and skills data. You need to know which skills are already in your organization and which you still need. This is your organization’s skills gap. When you understand it, you can grow and better leverage the talent in your workforce. And you can spend L&D dollars in more targeted ways.

“If you don’t get the data on all of your skills across all your systems, you’re going to be flying blind,” Blake said, noting Degreed is focusing more than ever on the collection and organization of experience data in our learning technology suite. (Right now, an excess of disorganized data is one of the biggest challenges for learning professionals. It’s also the biggest opportunity.)

Where can you start?

Decide what data to focus on. And do so with a future-centric mindset. Sonia Mooney, Consultant at Sonia Mooney Signature Solutions, reminded LENS attendees that by the time data-driven decisions need to be made, they can’t retroactively go back and collect the data needed.

“Don’t only think about the data you need now. Think about what you want in the future, because you’ve got to get those data sources in place,” Mooney said.

Gathering and understanding data is one piece of the puzzle, but Derek Mitchell, Analytics Lead at Novo Nordisk, said unlocking the power of data comes from what L&D professionals do with it. 

“It’s one thing [to be] looking at data, but it needs to be actionable. We have to not just look at charts and say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ We have to do something with it in order to help our learners,” Mitchell said.

Skills-based organizations are the future because skills are a better gauge of true workforce potential and capabilities than university degrees or high-caliber job titles ever will be. 

You have plenty of time to make the shift to a skills-based approach. And you have plenty of time to do it well. Take a breath, review the steps above, pick somewhere to start, and get excited about the bright future ahead. It’ll be worth it.

Ready to find out more?

Let’s talk about how upskilling can help your company thrive. Got questions? Contact a Degreed representative today.

The post <strong>The Decade Ahead: Evolving Your Company into a Skills-Based Organization</strong> appeared first on Degreed.

Perhaps your organization celebrates tenacity like “Rocky.” Maybe “Speed” is the blockbuster comparison, because this ain’t no regular bus ride, right? Or it could be any James Bond flick, owing to all those clever inventions that help save the day.

Like many teams, yours is probably tasked with scripting a more innovative approach to L&D in 2022 — to improve remote learning, optimize platforms, increase adoption and more. And it all might be feeling a bit like “Moneyball,” the true story of a major league baseball club that embraced its own brand of innovation by analyzing data to boost performance.

Why innovation? And why now? In a world where forces like the Great Resignation continue to disrupt the economy, pressure to continually develop workers, fill skill gaps and make your company more resilient can seem relentless. It’s imperative to think strategically about how you can do more to support key business initiatives and grow revenue like a box office sensation.

Degreed LENS 2021 was a chance to explain our latest product innovations, announce the launch of Degreed Intelligence, and hold our annual flagship conference in person for the first time in two years. As we gathered this week in Los Angeles with Tinseltown as a backdrop, learning pros were challenged to greenlight their next big production. 

With presenter after presenter focused on a common theme — how to make L&D the hero of a meaningful adventure — Degreed CEO Dan Levin set the scene: “We live in a world of change. We live in a world of evolution. We live in a world where we all have to be lifetime learners if we’re going to succeed. And we live in a world where the classic education… will never be enough to sustain us through our careers.”

And with that, let’s roll. In this close-up, we’ll take a look at how to:

Make Learning a Business Imperative

Elevating the importance of L&D as a business enabler starts with understanding your company’s business objectives and asking a key question: what workforce skill gaps are getting in the way of success?

“And then, in those gaps, ‘Where is learning a solution?’” said Molly Nagler, CLO at PepsiCo. “I think learning professionals will increase their own credibility if they admit that learning is not an answer to every problem. Maybe you need to hire people. Maybe you need to acquire a new technology… Once you decide, then you can design to that.”

When learning is part of the solution, partnering with key stakeholders is important for guiding development toward the right priorities. To secure that support, Nagler recommends L&D frame learning as a platform for senior leaders’ agendas.

In addition, set goals and track progress. Success metrics are important, and it’s imperative to tie learning metrics to business metrics. In one example, learning teams at PepsiCo analyzed a development program that connected people during the pandemic. How? By measuring growth in their online networks. In another instance, L&D tracked the rate of one-on-one meetings between managers and workers to gauge the success of diversity and inclusion training focused on improving mentorship.

Don’t forget to share qualitative and anecdotal impacts too. Sometimes, they steal the show.

“For our big leadership programs,” Nagler said, “we always have participants meet with senior executives after the program to share what they learned and what the program meant to them. Those testimonials are just priceless. We talk so much about, you know, ‘follow the data.’ And that’s really important. But there’s no substituting for that personal story.”

Influence Through Storytelling

Stories open people to new ideas. They engage our senses, bring us closer, promote empathy, bring catharsis and attach us to a brand or culture, said storytelling expert and keynote speaker Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte, Inc. 

“Telling your story is going to be the first step in you changing the world,” she said. “You’ll have people follow you to this place in the future where you’re trying to drive positive change.”

From creating better learning content to presenting L&D success metrics, understanding how a well-told story is constructed can make you and your team more influential.

Stories often have three acts. In the first, we typically meet and like a flawed hero who has a goal, Duarte said. In the second act, an incident occurs. Hardship creates roadblocks, and we root for the hero to overcome obstacles. In the third act, the hero emerges transformed.

“There’s always a lesson,” Duarte said, adding this gives audience members permission to admit their own flaws. From there, they can overcome obstacles too.

A similar story structure applied to L&D analytics can be equally influential. To better communicate your data and findings, first describe your business problem or opportunity, Duarte said. Second, share whether the data supporting that is positive or negative. Third, make the action that needs to be taken crystal clear. 

“By structuring it in the shape of a story, your decision will be made quicker. It’ll move your decision making from ‘Let me think about it’ to ‘Let’s do something about it.’”

Urging L&D leaders to think like story-telling marketers, keynote speaker and marketing consultant Neil Bedwell, Partner at LOCAL, said workers want to belong and feel valued. Creating positive narratives about your company, he said, can sway people toward positive employee experiences that in turn drive successful customer experiences. “Your employees are an audience worth winning.”

Embrace Experiential Learning

You’ve got a choice. The red pill perpetuates the status quo. The blue pill brings change, a chance to accelerate skill growth and give your people new capabilities the world needs.

If you opt for the latter, understand people learn by practicing — and that experiential learning can create the right conditions for applying new knowledge on the job. You can enable it by connecting workers to stretch assignments, gigs, mentorships and more based on their skill-building goals. An online opportunity marketplace can help. And remember: experiential learning doesn’t need to lead to promotions. The growth can be lateral and incremental.

For L&D to solve the problems of tomorrow, it needs workers to be confident in skill building — and experiential learning can instill that determination by engaging people and their sense of belonging while simultaneously supporting business imperatives, said Haylee Metzner, Senior Human Resources Programs Specialist at Synopsys.

Like PepsiCo, Synopsis L&D accounts for corporate strategy, using company objectives reaching one, two, three years into the future as a starting point for determining how experiential learning can help advance the organization.

These days, more and more of those learning experiences happen online. 

“Recently, I partnered with our applications engineering group,” Metzner said. “Prior to the pandemic, they would bring everybody globally to one city, one space, one hotel, eight hours a day, five days for a week to upskill on our new products.

“We had to look for alternative ways to create those experiences,” she said, adding technology has played a big role and opened opportunities to a wider audience. 

“These would have been experiences that only a small group or maybe a small cohort would have had access to,” Metzner said. “But now… we’re able to open those opportunities to others within the organization and be more inclusive, right? To drive home that belonging.”

Use Skill Data for Good

Embracing analytics can change how your learning team thinks about maximizing its investments. It’s an especially logical next step if you have established L&D programs.

“Using skill data to improve our organizations isn’t just a pipe dream,” said Isabel Sapriel, Director of Embedded Product at Visier, a Degreed partner. “If we do this right, we can really transform L&D from a cost center to a true driver of revenue.”

Skill data is the measurement of what your people can do. One example is data on how people self rate their current capabilities. Another example is the skills they’ve identified as those they’d like to learn.

To use skill data, start by understanding your company’s goals and priorities then consider the capabilities it needs to achieve them, Sapriel said. “Apply skill analytics to say, ‘What are the skills I have in my organization today? How is that similar or different from what I need in the future? And how can I think about filling those gaps strategically?’”

This leads to more questions: Should you build needed skills in house? Hire new people? How far will each approach get you? How long would each take? How much will it cost?

With those questions answered, “then we can start applying this across the employee lifecycle to see what interventions we need at each stage — to make sure we’re implementing this cohesively.”

Insights gleaned from skill data can inform things like future job descriptions and candidate interview questions, Sapriel said. “It could be unstructured learning. It could be growth opportunities or stretch assignments. We can really think creatively about how we get this done.”

Reimagine Your L&D Team

Keynote speaker and business advisor Stedman Graham urged attendees to be the best leaders they can be.

“You have a chance to transform people’s lives based on the work you do every single day,” said the Chairman and CEO of S. Graham and Associates.

How you help your learning group do that is largely a question of investment. Investment in technology, internal marketing, design, measurement, your L&D workforce as a whole and its relationships, said Holly Travis, L&D Strategy and Enablement Director at Intel.

To get it right, it’s important to be agile and ask questions.

At Intel, L&D tech investments start with trials of numerous new solutions at a small scale, Travis said. “This allows us to … fail, learn fast, move toward the things that are really successful and make those investments richer.”

To market learning to workers, Intel L&D often explores new channels. Leaders there ask: How do we bring people along? How do we alert them to opportunities? How do we let them know learning in the flow of life is how you keep developing as an adult?

Investments in the L&D design team are increasingly dictated by how much content is built versus bought in addition to the realities of creating and managing learning remotely.

Measurement brings its own challenges, Travis said. “How do we connect it to our HR data to drive insights that tell us how learning is helping the bottom line?”

Overall spend on the L&D workforce is largely about skill set acquisition — through training and hiring.

“And then finally,” Travis said, “we’re looking at ‘How do we create business unit relationships?’ Because our goal is to move from softer skills at the enterprise level to more hard skills. We’re going to be hiring up to 30,000 new engineers at Intel over the next couple of years. We need to upskill them technically… We need to be really creating great relationships with our business unit partners, who are those subject matter experts, so we can pair their expertise with our learning expertise.”

That’s a Wrap

As your unique 2022 L&D plot line goes from good to epic, recall the words of our closing keynote speaker Sebastian Terry, Founder of 100things, who emphasized that being passionate and believing in what you do can make a huge difference in what you’re able to accomplish.

“We become infinitely more creative, more motivated, more resilient, more collaborative,” he said. “We become unstoppable.”

If you missed Degreed LENS, you still have a chance to catch its best scenes. We’ll be writing more about its compelling sessions in the weeks ahead. And keep an eye out for session recordings available on Degreed on Demand soon.

Did LENS help you get your groove back? Keep rockin’ out to our California-themed conference playlist: 

To learn more about Degreed, contact us for a demo today.

The post Lights, Camera, L&D: Innovating in 2022 appeared first on Degreed.

But more than anything, our flagship virtual conference on Wednesday was an opportunity for dialogue. 

We welcomed more than 11,000 people from 133 countries on our event platform. And with so many insightful business leaders on hand — including keynote speakers Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, and Adam Grant, author and organizational psychologist — people came with questions, ideas, and an energy that lit up the (virtual) room.

If you missed LENS Lite, it’s okay. We’ll be writing more about its compelling sessions in the weeks ahead. Sessions like the one led by Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, who spoke about improving your people’s experiences and said: “Investing in learning is about creating a better you, building a better business, and ensuring a better world.”

If you want to watch all the sessions for yourself, you can find all the video content at our On Demand page.

For now, let’s explore some of our favorite questions (and answers) of the day — takeaways from a wide range of participants that we hope you can apply to your unique strategy.

1. Given full authority and unlimited resources, how would you change education in the world?

This first question went to Branson, who said he’d like to see more companies de-emphasize academic credentials in recruiting.

“One of the first things I would do is what we’ve done at the Virgin Group, which is to do our interviews based on the individual and their particular skill set, their character,” he said.

Education needs to be relevant. If you’re going to have formal education, make sure it’s grounded in reality. Talk about Bitcoin. Talk about what’s going on under the oceans, Branson said, urging people to reimagine learning.

2. What advice do you have for people who aren’t a fit for current models of education but want to do great things?

Let life educate you, Branson said. He described how he and his team bootstrapped their early business endeavors and grew Virgin to what it is today, echoing themes from his most recent book, Finding My Virginity.

At the age of 16, “I dropped out because I was dyslexic and found conventional schooling really, really tough. I wasn’t enjoying it. It just seemed to be a waste of time. I dropped out to start a magazine to try to bring about change… The magazine became my education.

“That education was very, very real — and worked.”

3. What are some strategies for building a strong learning culture?

Grant fielded this one. In his latest book, Think Again, he challenges all of us to open our minds and reconsider our assumptions. Building a learning culture, he said, requires a similar mindset.

“The starting point for me from an individual perspective is to recognize that every single person you meet knows more than you do about something. Your first task is to say, ‘Even if I’m more senior than this person and experienced… they have expertise that I don’t.’ I want to hone in on that as quickly as possible and then try to soak up some of their knowledge.”

Modeling that curiosity, Grant said, becomes contagious.

At the organizational level, “One of the things that stands in the way is best practices,” he said. “I get what you’re trying to do when you create a best practice. You’re aiming for a repeatable system that is going to maintain excellence of execution. The danger of best practices, though, is they create an illusion that you’ve reached an endpoint.”

Instead, aim for better practices, Grant said. “What’s ‘best’ today may actually be inefficient or counterproductive tomorrow. And we should keep searching.” 

4. Does Ford Motor Company have any advice for people at the beginning of a learning experience technology journey?

At Ford, workforce development is built on three pillars:

• Learning is a collaborative responsibility among equals
• Learning is a human-centered, growth-oriented, everyday experience 
• Ford invests in learning that matters most to company and career 

When you’re investing in a new technology, create a strong business case and secure significant leadership support, said Dr. Marsha Parker, Director of Learning Services & Infrastructure.

When she proposed Degreed at Ford, Parker highlighted the gap between the company’s existing learning technologies and the needs of its workforce.

“To build the business case, you really need to focus on the learner,” she said. “What can you build to include your [learners’] skills but also demonstrate business value?”

If learning isn’t aligned with the business, making change is always an uphill battle.

5. Any tips from Signify for launching a learning platform to multiple countries?

Signify takes a balanced approach, said Hans Ramaker, Senior Director of Learning Innovation and Technology: “No countries are exactly the same. Some countries want certificates. Some don’t. Don’t treat implementation the same in all countries. The needs are different.”

6. What’s some advice from BAT for someone with a small team taking on a big project?

To help BAT (British American Tobacco) get the most from Degreed, its learning team of only two people embraced the “three Cs” of marketing: creativity, community, and communications.

Among other tactics, they partnered with corporate comms and used guerilla marketing that drove adoption, said Amritha Murali, Global Digital Learning Innovations Lead. In one such project, she learned how to create a promo video inspired by an engaging Apple ad to tease the launch of the BAT learning platform.

“It resonated with a lot of people,” Murali said, encouraging learning leaders to get inspired by work they see every day, particularly in the marketing space, and to reinterpret those ideas.

Her biggest piece of advice? “Speak to a lot of people. There are a lot of people who can guide you in the right ways to get you the information you need. . . You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

7. How did FICO and Whirlpool overcome fears that worker skill data won’t be used for good?

FICO intentionally decoupled skills from performance, said Chrissy Chamberlain, Senior Director of Digital Learning. 

“We keep skill data confidential between the person and their leadership chain,” she said, adding the company celebrates progress made over time, and emphasizes that people should feel good about growing. 

At Whirlpool, the philosophy is similar, said Rayssa Medeiros, Corporate Learning & Development Sr. Manager. “We emphasize that the main objective of this process and experience is learning and development and growth… It’s not around the measurement itself, but to inform learning experiences.”

8. Does Citigroup have a standard for how many skills to focus on when mapping skills to roles?

At Citi, L&D is committed to being more skills driven — to increase agility and efficiency. And yet leaders understand that the company’s shift from skills to roles would never happen overnight. It takes alignment and commitment across the organization, said Chris Funk, SVP of Talent & Performance Platforms.

For skill mapping, there’s no right number to focus on, Funk said. “Some initiatives are very clear cut, and you can align three or four or five target skills to them. When you start thinking about roles, and the variability of work within a single role, it’s hard to put a limit on it. You can always identify the top 10 or the top 15, but that doesn’t mean you eliminate the bottom 30 or 40.”

9. How did Novo Nordisk design its data ecosystem?

Integration and anonymity were key, said Derek Mitchell, Global Performance Data Lead.

“Our ecosystem is very simple. . . We have Alteryx sitting in the middle, then we have Degreed and lots of other data systems that anonymize the data and then spit it out to Power BI. The anonymization is very important because we allow anyone in the organization to go in and look at the data.”

10. How do learning leaders at Tata Communications partner with others to prioritize learning success?

Executive alignment has been critical — dating to the start of the company’s digital transformation journey nearly five years ago, said Ina Bajwa, Sr. Director and Global Head of Learning, Organisation & Leadership Development. 

“Our CHRO led the conversations with our top team members, to ask them what are the skills they need for themselves and their teams to be successful in the near term. And very surprisingly, we did not get very definitive answers,” Bajwa said. “And that actually led us to then start a dialogue across the organization with employees.”

That dialogue reiterated the importance of learning, reinforcing the likelihood that people’s jobs would change drastically over the next three to five years — and that the onus was on them to learn what they needed to stay employable. This process then led to leadership alignment.

Fast forward to 2019, when the company still had disparate learning solutions and also a new CEO. Upskilling and reskilling had gained speed and scale. A more unified learning solution was needed, and again the executive team quickly aligned — this time around adding Degreed to the ecosystem.

11. At CVS, what’s your perspective on mobility?

Mobility is a huge and hot topic that raises important questions, said Ted Fleming, Head of Talent Development.

Among those questions: How do you foster talent mobility? How do you move people around?

The answer isn’t mobility for mobility’s sake; rather, it’s applying skills in different situations to gain new experiences, Fleming said. It’s, “How do we give people a diverse set of experiences, so that they have nuance in their skills?

“That’s really what we are looking for.” 

Want more great LENS Lite insights? You can find all the presenters mentioned above and more on our On Demand page. And look out for announcements regarding our next LENS conference in Los Angeles, California, November 2021! 

The post Our Favorite Questions from Degreed LENS Lite 2021 appeared first on Degreed.

I originally wrote those words while recalling the 2011 fire that destroyed the Great House on Necker Island, my family’s Caribbean island home, which is part of the Virgin Limited Edition portfolio of luxury properties. As I recounted in my most recent book, Finding My Virginity, hurricane-fanned flames sparked by a rooftop lightning strike advanced on my closest friends and family members as they slept inside.

Thankfully, everyone escaped and survived. As we gathered in shock, I drew comfort from a life lesson that once again was crystal clear: Things aren’t important. People are.

It’s no secret that I’m always learning. I view life as a big adventure. I’m continually looking for new things to try and challenges to overcome. Success inspires me, but lessons drawn from failures are what make successes possible. The lifelong learning mindset has helped me tremendously since I started out in business more than 50 years ago after dropping out of school at age 15.

In business, adversity is guaranteed. Like a fire, problems come unexpectedly. You can’t douse every threat, but there’s a lot you can do to stay prepared for the uncertain future.

Helping your people build skills and providing them with new career opportunities helps your organization take on tomorrow. That’s the key insight running through this year’s Degreed LENS Lite virtual conference on Wednesday, May 5th. I’m delighted to be the opening keynote speaker and thrilled to be joined by closing keynote speaker Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and bestselling author, with whom I’ve had several enlightening conversations about the future of education.

If you’re a business, talent, HR, or learning leader, I hope you’ll join me and the innovative people at Degreed as well as thousands of your industry peers at LENS Lite. I look forward to exploring how the most durable and effective companies are investing where it matters most — in their people.

Like Degreed, I view education as fluid and flexible. At the Virgin Group, we’re always building on individuals’ needs and talents. Time and again, I’ve seen workplace upskilling opportunities stimulate, nourish, and celebrate potential. As I once said, and is often repeated across the talent and learning community: “Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

In today’s pandemic-affected world of work, the upskilling need is clear.

The people on your team can always learn something new and helpful, no matter where they are in their careers. Wherever your business needs to go, the future is yours to create.

Indeed, no matter what happens you can learn from it — and create something really positive.

What happened after the Great House burned is all the proof I’ve needed.

Less than six months after the fire, an amazing thing happened. My daughter Holly got married in a beautiful ceremony right there amid the ruins.

And today, the Great House stands again.

See Sir Richard Branson’s full presentation at Degreed LENS Lite, May 5. Register here!

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