To answer these questions and streamline skill development, L&D and HR leaders must focus on three things:

1. Defining expectations clearly for every role 
2. Communicating those expectations
3. Connecting employees with the right information to fill gaps

With new Degreed functionality, you’re equipped to accomplish this, guiding employees to develop the skills needed to be successful in their roles. 

How Employees Can Leverage Role Expectations for Better Skill Development

Let’s use Cynthia, a fictitious Software Engineer, as an example. Cynthia just started at Acme, Inc. She held a similar engineering role at her previous company, but she’s curious how expectations differ at Acme. 

When Cynthia logs into Degreed, her profile automatically includes the skills that Acme prioritized for her role, along with the target proficiency level for each skill. There’s also a description for each skill and proficiency level, so she can understand the behaviors she should exhibit to reach the target level. She can then use this information, along with a Maestro Skill Review Coach, to identify and set her current proficiency level in her profile. 

Once she establishes this baseline, Cynthia can focus her development on filling any gaps. Degreed makes this process straightforward by creating a dynamic skill plans for Cynthia which is automatically populated with content targeting skill gaps for her priority skills. The plan is unique to her current proficiency levels and displays content that will help her progress to the next skill level.  

And when she searches for additional resources, she won’t lose any more time sifting through content that is too basic or too advanced. Instead, she will quickly find content that matches her specific proficiency level and where she is in her development journey. 

As a result of this process, Cynthia now knows what skills are expected of her, where she needs to improve, and what resources will help her grow the skills that matter most. This certainty and access to right-sized development resources will accelerate her skill development and increase engagement. 

How Admins Can Automate at Scale

Personalized learning experiences used to be an exclusively manual process that was too time-consuming to scale. Now, AI handles the manual work so L&D and HR leaders can focus on more strategic work, like defining which, role-based skills are required to align to business objectives

In Degreed Learning, the admins can upload a list of organizational roles, which skills are associated with those roles, and what target proficiency levels are for each. They can also set the priority skills they want to appear on employees’ profiles to target skill development.

In Degreed Skills+, admins harness AI to amplify the impact of the work they have done in associating skills to roles. For example, AI generates proficiency level descriptions for each skill, providing precision on what proficiency means at each level. This information guides employees when reviewing skills, so they can select the right proficiency level according to the organization’s definition. 

Admins are also empowered to use AI to automatically tag content in their catalog with proficiency levels. Admins can review and approve these skill proficiency tags as well. This helps match employees to the right content for their skill level.

How the Role-to-Skill Workflow and Tagging Creates Business Value

Administrative efficiencies and personalized experiences translate directly into powerful, scalable applications that drive business value. Core use cases that deliver immediate impact include:

• Strategic asset management: Identify gaps and eliminate redundant or outdated resources.
• Onboarding: Automatically serve new hires content tailored to their specific proficiency level in required skills, accelerating their time to readiness.
• Search and Discovery: Deliver search results personalized to each employee’s needs and skill level.
• Career Pathing and Internal Mobility: Clearly map out the skills needed to move up in seniority or from one department to another, creating a win for employees and organizations. 

Implement AI for Workforce Development

There are a lot of promises that AI will improve the learning experience and reduce admin workload. With Degreed Skills+, AI can do both. 

With our role-to-skill workflow, dynamic skill plans, and automatic proficiency tagging for content, organizations can now deliver highly personalized, meaningful development opportunities at scale—and without added work. Clearer role expectations and tracking mean businesses can speed up skill development to better match the pace of change.

*The functionality discussed in this blog is scheduled to be generally available in April 2026.

The post Accelerate Skill Development with Clear Role Expectations appeared first on Degreed.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

From Limited Insight to Connected Capability

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

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

How the Degreed–Workday Integration Functions at State Street

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

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

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

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

Strategic Impact That Scales

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

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

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

Key Lessons for Talent Leaders

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

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

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

Learn more.

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

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

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

Can AI help? Let’s find out.

Why do organizations need taxonomies?

For most companies, employees are the biggest expense (and asset). But how companies invest in those employees can quickly become disjointed. If the job description, interviewing process, onboarding, performance management, and career pathing aren’t in sync, you create a mess. It reminds me of coaching my daughter’s soccer team: I yell for kids to stay in their positions and the parents yell “Go get the ball!” The result is chaos and confusion. 

Taxonomies create a shared understanding of what’s important. Companies use taxonomies to organize resources (discovery), connect people to opportunities (matching), and align activity to insights (reporting). Taxonomies can align each part of the talent lifecycle. As HR expert Dave Ulrich says: “Every discipline, to become a sustainable science, uses systematics (classification of separate items into common groups) to create taxonomies (types of things that go together) to make progress.” 

Taxonomies make the ambiguous actionable. Has a business leader told employees to “improve your business acumen” and left them wondering what that even means? Are there roles your people are interested in but they don’t know the steps needed to get those roles? Taxonomies can help. Taxonomies break complex ideas or challenges into smaller, more actionable steps.

Experiment No. 1: Skills Taxonomy for a Generic Role

First, let’s create a skill taxonomy for a fairly generic role using AI. This taxonomy could serve as the backbone for writing job descriptions, guiding interview questions, building training programs, and helping form the criteria for performance management conversations. We’ll do this one as a video so you can see the process.

The taxonomy came together fast and the results look reasonable. I could easily add or remove extra layers of details (even getting into tasks within a skill). Being able to drill down let me get as granular as necessary. 

This would be a great place to start a taxonomy effort.

The biggest downside is allowing the AI to make its own judgments (within the parameters of our prompt) to come up with its own skills. It doesn’t use a predefined list of skills which limits the ability of the taxonomy to create a common language across tools and applications.

The real benefit will come when the dynamic capabilities of the AI are combined with a company’s internal skills language. This will require some extra implementation, but it is definitely doable and something you should watch out for from the Degreed product team in the future.

Experiment No. 2: Skills Taxonomy for a Hyper-specific Role

Every company has unique sets of job titles. Let’s see how well the AI does when we select a very specific role. Using the same process for our previous experiment, here’s the result:

The more detailed skills are cut off in the screenshot, but even without any edits, the results look impressive. This could be a great way to build out skill taxonomies, especially for roles that wouldn’t typically have good skill suggestions from your HR and L&D tools.

Experiment No. 3: Highlighting Skills That Are Out of Date

Keeping taxonomies up to date is such a manual, time-consuming task. Let’s see if AI can do the heavy lifting and identify which skills in a taxonomy may be out of date (e.g. it lists an old technology).

To do this we aren’t creating a new taxonomy. Instead, we’re evaluating our existing taxonomy with customizable criteria. First I’ll create a rubric with values for “Current” and “Out of Date” and then ask the AI to classify each skill according to the rubric.

Here’s a video to show the steps:

You can see that one skill—React 16—was flagged as being out of date. React is a technology library that is on version 18, so React 16 was rightfully flagged. Having a system like this would make it easy to identify when and where you would need to make updates.

Experiment No. 4: Highlighting Increasing or Decreasing Demand for Skills

To have our taxonomies guide talent decisions, it would be helpful if we knew which skills were becoming increasingly important. Let’s create another custom rubric and see if AI can help us identify which skills are increasing, or decreasing, in demand.

Here are the results:

One thing to remember in this type of analysis is that the training data for LLMs can be more than a year old (e.g. April 2023 for GPT-4 Turbo). There are techniques available to provide LLMs with information from search engines to give them up-to-date information. This would be especially useful when trying to make future projections.

This analysis could also be made more powerful if combined with some of your own internal data from your hiring or learning systems.

Experiment No. 5: Highlighting the Impact of AI on Skills

Upskilling takes time, which means it’s helpful to have projections on how skills will change. In this case, we want to see which skills or tasks are more or less likely to be impacted by AI. This would help us plan appropriate skilling initiatives.

After creating another custom rubric, here are the results:

Again, the results look fairly reasonable. For this type of in-depth analysis, we could likely improve the results by using different prompting techniques. Techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning (which makes the LLM approach a problem a step at a time), multi-shot prompting (where you provide examples of good results in your prompt), or using multiple agents (having multiple LLMs work together to do the analysis) would give us even better results.

Experiment No. 6: Showing User Progress Against Skills

So far we’ve used taxonomies at the administrative level—for planning and organizing talent across the company. Let’s now explore the other benefit of taxonomies—their ability to deconstruct goals into more actionable items. This could be useful at the employee level as a way to guide learning and measure progress.

Here we’re visualizing a taxonomy that reflects an employee’s mastery level of each step.

I love this example because it highlights the power of combining AI capabilities with employee data to create something personalized that you would not get from a generic tool like ChatGPT.

Experiment No. 7: Using Taxonomies to Guide Personal Learning

As we saw in the last experiment, taxonomies can be useful at the individual level. I’m going to use a personal use case for this next one. I’ve been trying to learn photography, but it’s hard to know where to start.

Here I’ve asked AI to create a personalized learning plan for me based on my specific camera:

This feels like a really nice outline. I would want to remove some things and go deeper in some other areas. But, now that I have this outline, I can imagine adding actions such as “Show me an example” or “Give me ideas on how to practice this.” I could even ask the system to analyze some of my photos and highlight the skills for me to improve. I could also use this outline to create an assessment that could then inform a baseline for each skill. 

I think there’s a lot of potential here. This could really get us closer to personalized, dynamic skill-building.

What do you think? 

Do you see potential upsides or too many challenging downsides to AI-generated taxonomies? If you have thoughts, or feedback, or would like to build your own taxonomies, please email me at tblake@degreed.com. To keep up with updates, follow me on LinkedIn.

Ready to learn more about taxonomies?

The Degreed Professional Services team offers free consultations. Its core focus is acting as a partner to you, not offering transactional services. Let’s work together to explore your learning strategy, technology goals, and questions about taxonomies.

Book a private consultation with the Degreed Professional Services team.

Thank you for experimenting with us.

We’ll see you at the next one.

This is the second post in a regular series. You can also read the first post Degreed Experiments with Emerging Technologies.

The post AI Taxonomies for Skills: Actionable Steps for Career Goals appeared first on Degreed.

A global, top-down mobility approach is appealing but increasingly, the complex strategies that solve today’s needs are outdated by the time they’re implemented globally. Organizations notoriously spend years on competency frameworks, for example, only to realize they are outdated by the time they’re complete. These tumultuous conditions, we hope, are temporary. But if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that the pace of change will only accelerate. Rather than ignoring this reality, organizations should build a culture of experimentation by favoring a more agile work environment over long-range planning when innovation is required.

In the early days of software development, the business would put together long, complex lists of technical requirements, and engineering would commit to building a product, exactly as outlined, with every associated bell and whistle. Turnaround times were measured in months or years, with few mechanisms to capture feedback on usability, value, or changes in the market. The products built this way were sometimes successful, of course, but the risks were huge: what if users don’t like this solution? Or can’t use it? What if the problem has changed so dramatically that our solution no longer addresses a need?

These risks pushed IT to move toward agile methodology — building lean first iterations, collecting feedback quickly, and releasing and testing improvements more frequently. This takes the burden off of the initial requirement-gathering phase, acknowledges the dynamic nature of today’s world, and prioritizes the most important type of feedback: the kind we get from users when they’re actually using the product.

People in the L&D space know that stealing from marketing and IT can sometimes garner amazing results — and this is no different. You can steal the idea of an agile methodology as well to create an agile work environment at your organization. Let’s take a look at how this can be done.

1. Champion an agile work environment within your organization.

Usually this requires experimentation. Perhaps you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and get going. You might even feel a little excited. But then you remember: you work in a corporation. Things are complex, sometimes bureaucratic, and principles that work for startups have failed in the past (remember the bean bag chairs?) That’s not how budgets get allocated, and you don’t want to risk being seen as naive.

Luckily, there’s a ton of research to tap into as you become your team’s lean champion. One study found that projects applying lean methodology were more likely to come in under time (5% sooner), where others usually finished right at time. Budget-wise, lean projects came in, on average, 9% under budget, while others were only 2% under.

A company Degreed recently worked with had a large call center population, and trouble with turnover. Attrition rates had been raising red flags in this part of the business for years, and engagement rates for this population were low. One of our Degreed champions committed to approaching the problem differently, and began by compiling data on previous efforts. There had been some work done in the area, but many of the solutions felt like shots in the dark. She knew she needed to better understand the problem before she’d find the right solution.

She didn’t begin by championing agile practices across the entire organization all at once. She chose to implement an agile work environment for one particular initiative to demonstrate the power of the approach.

2. Get to know your employees.

Remember when implementing an agile work environment, we’re looking to maximize value for our employees, which means we have to first dig into their challenges. Most enterprises begin with engagement surveys, and these are great places to start. Many of our clients, for example, come to us with a goal of improving the learning experience after a less-than-stellar result for a question like “How does the firm support your development?” While investments in Learning Experience Platforms are great ways to enable your team to drive more meaningful experiences, creating real value for employees requires going deeper into their challenges with the current environment.

Whether it’s in response to an engagement survey, or retention/promotion rates within an area of the business or demographic, grab a few of these folks (and a few of their managers) and speak to them candidly about what’s going on. Interviews work best here, but a follow-up survey with free response can work well too, depending on resourcing. In some cases, especially if there’s a lack of trust, it’s helpful to use a third-party firm, but even in high-trust environments, ensure your employees know the responses are confidential. Everyone has to be aware that this isn’t a shame or blame game.

Conducting interviews to deeply understand the challenges your people are facing takes discipline. This framework from the Silicon Valley Product Group has been helpful as we’ve prepared for and conducted interviews like these.

Our call center champion found that many people were leaving within the first 90 days, and those that made it past 90 days were likely to leave at around two years. So her problem was actually two problems, and she used her interviews to dig into each. Because of the high volume of hiring and the high turnover, she was able to sit in on exit interviews for both populations. 

3. Define employee challenges. These are the problems you’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve conducted the interviews, it’s time to make sense of what you learned. Are you hearing similar themes from your employees? If so, what are they? (If not, you likely haven’t spoken to enough people yet, so get back out there!) Group what you’ve heard into the key challenges and prioritize. 

When prioritizing, you’re living in the tension between two poles: maximizing user value and minimizing waste. At this stage, imagine Steve Jobs on your right shoulder and Marie Kondo on your left. Steve says think bigger, and focus more on delight. Marie helps to keep unnecessary complexity in check. If talking to imaginary characters doesn’t work for you, try using the Value vs. Complexity model to rank these problems, with the goal of finding those with the highest potential value and the lowest effort required to solve.

In the call center, it was discovered that employees leaving within 90 days of being hired struggled with many things, chief of which was friction in processes and social isolation, whereas longer tenure employees were leaving largely due to lack of career progression. Managers were stretched so thin that they could often not give either population what they needed: adequate onboarding or adequate career conversations.

4. Design a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Once we have a clear understanding of our priority problems, we can start to form hypotheses about the best ways to solve them. The critical element in an agile work environment is that our solutions, no matter how sexy they seem, are hypotheses. For each problem, frame your solution as an MVP, identifying:

• Value proposition: how will this solution create value? How will it solve the problem we identified?
• Key activities: what do we need to do, at a minimum, to drive this value?
• Key resources: what will we need to execute on the above? 
• Metrics: how will we know if it succeeds?

In the call center, one elegant solution was proposed: give longer-tenured employees opportunities to mentor new employees. The hypothesis was that this would create engagement for each population, and could provide career development for the tenured folks. A program was defined, and success would be measured based on a pre- and post-engagement survey, as well as retention rates for the participating population.

Remember, the first iterations of program rollouts are about maximizing value, but they’re also about learning as much as we can, as quickly as possible, and about whether our solutions are the right ones. So as you’re designing, keep in mind that MVPs may require more manual effort than you’d hope. This is fine because if it works, you can invest more in infrastructure later. With reducing waste as one of our guiding principles, we can’t invest more than necessary in a solution we don’t yet know will work.

Depending on the number of problems you’ve prioritized, you may need more than one MVP. Depending on your resourcing and other constraints, you can run these MVPs in parallel or sequentially. One thing to note: if you’re working to tackle multiple problems for the same user group, you likely want to run these MVPs at different times, so you can measure results from each independently.

5. Measure & iterate.

Once you’ve rolled out your MVP(s) and collected your results, it’s time to make decisions about what about this solution, if anything, drove value as measured by our metrics. This is the time where we may want to think about how to more efficiently scale, make some tweaks and run another MVP, or scrap the project altogether. This is the process that will dictate organizational agility

In the call center, the program reduced turnover for the new employee population but did not have a meaningful impact on the tenured employees. Before scaling the mentorship program, our champion will conduct another set of interviews to understand the pain points for the longer-tenured folks. She solved part of the problem, but needs to iterate in the next go-around to drive even more value.

So if the MVP is a “failure” — i.e. it didn’t drive the results you were hoping it would — it’s time to celebrate! You learned something valuable, and because we rolled it out as an MVP, we wasted as few resources as possible. This is probably the most important element of embracing an agile work environment: we have to have the humility, honesty, and confidence to pivot entirely when something isn’t working. This will lead to incredibly impactful results in the end.

Want to learn more about creating an agile work environment? Take our mini-course on career mobility — five days, five experts, 15 minutes per day. Sign up here!

The post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love an Agile Work Environment appeared first on Degreed.

I consider the role of a People Leader to be that of an enabler. An enabler whose primary job is to enhance the performance of a team and its individual members, and to create an environment in which people can achieve their career goals. In this enablement capacity, the People Leader coaches, mentors, clears obstacles, provides success tips and encouragement, inspires people to reach higher, and provides the necessary resources and tools to support performance, growth, and career mobility.

The Positive Enabler

As its definition conveys, the word “enabler” has a negative connotation, and this comes through frequently in discussions about psychology.

But enablers can also be positive. They can influence behavior in constructive, productive ways.

A positive enabler “helps to make things possible,” according to Ruth Nina Welsh, author of Be Your Own Counselor and Coach. “They support a person’s plans and encourage their dreams. 

“Being a positive enabler is a selfless behavior,” Welsh said. “It occurs because the enabler wants the best for a person. They want to find ways to help make things possible. It’s not about taking over or bossing someone, but it’s about being a supportive presence.”

To many people, Welsh’s take might seem too abstract or like an emotional, feel-good message. But there’s truth in there. We all can be powerful influencers of people. And I believe that we all know that we get the best performance out of people when they feel inspired by a leader and sincerely believe that leadership is concerned and invested in their success. 

This concept — the notion of setting people up for success — is the foundation of positive enablement.

Unfortunately, a more traditional performance management process typically takes precedence. 

Employee Appraisals: A See-Saw History

The predominant goal of employee appraisals has changed over decades — at times reinforcing employee accountability, at other times driving employee development.

“Appraisals can be traced back to the U.S. military’s ‘merit rating’ system, created during World War I to identify poor performers for discharge or transfer,” according to “The Performance Management Revolution,” a 2016 Harvard Business Review article that traces the history of performance assessment. “After World War II, about 60% of U.S. companies were using them (by the 1960s, it was closer to 90%).”

A shortage of managerial talent in the late 1950s and the 1960s inspired companies to use appraisals to develop new supervisors and executives.

In the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Amid rampant inflation, annual wage increases gained importance. And with new anti-discrimination laws on the books, companies were pressured to award pay more objectively, according to the article. “Accountability became a higher priority than development for many organizations.”

The forced ranking of employees championed by General Electric CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s reinforced the use of appraisals to hold employees accountable. A 1993 law that exempted bonus pay from salary tax deduction limits also reinforced the trend, along with other factors.

By the early 2000s, an estimated one-third of U.S. corporations and 60% of the Fortune 500 companies were using a forced-ranking system.

In the past 10 to 15 years, the pendulum has started to swing back toward assessing performance as a way to drive employee performance. But it hasn’t swung far enough. Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

Performance Management Today

At most organizations, the annual performance review is a staple of HR performance management. The review typically covers at least two of these four topics:

• Results, including commentary about an employee’s achievement of pre-established goals.
• Contributions, including an assessment of an employee’s efforts compared to those of other employees.
• Quality, including an assessment of the quality of the results achieved.
• Behaviors, including commentary about how an employee achieved results.

Performance reviews are often positioned as a way for managers to provide feedback on the previous year’s performance. They’re touted as a way for leaders to recommend areas of focus or improvement for the upcoming year.

Performance Reviews: A Faulty Process

In reality, the performance review is a compensation tool that’s used to determine how, or whether, an employee is rewarded and recognized for his or her contributions and results. As such, the performance review discussion often turns into a negotiation around the employee’s rating or a grievance brought by the employee.

Performance review advocates often say that the tool also serves as documentation of poor performance that can be used if an employee files a lawsuit. However, many employment lawyers counter this assumption, stating that in many cases performance reviews actually hurt an employer due to poorly executed or contradictory wording.

While we could list many problems with performance reviews, let’s look at the most egregious identified in “Drawbacks of Performance Appraisals,” an article in the Houston Chronicle that identified four key problems making performance reviews ineffective, unfair, and possibly even harmful.

Performance reviews are problematic because they:

• Limit perspective. They’re based on one person’s view, sometimes supported by feedback from others, but most often driven by the manager.
• Erode motivation. They determine compensation but are seen by the employee as rigged, in that they don’t always accurately correlate performance and pay. This is due to enforced bell curves and other tactics that limit the number of people who receive the highest ratings.
• Consume time. Many, if not most, People Leaders dread writing and conducting performance review discussions due to the time required to collect data about performance, write a review reflective of the evaluation period (typically one year), and have a conversation that the leader knows won’t be satisfying to most employees.
• Accommodate bias. The primary, if not only, assessor brings his or her own biases to the table when evaluating performance. These biases may be social in nature or due to other factors like communication style, work location, and comfort with the employee.

Recent research on the topic is eye-popping. Only 13% of individual contributors strongly agree their performance review inspires them to improve, and that percentage is a microscopic 8% for managers, according to The Manager Experience, a five-year Gallup study published in 2019. 

Managers, the study revealed, “also find performance reviews to be less fair and less accurate than individual contributors do. If there were a single argument against the traditional performance review, it would be this: Those administering performance reviews think less of the process than those receiving them.”

It’s no surprise that many companies have moved away from formal performance reviews and adopted other mechanisms for improving performance and internal mobility.

Enabling Career Mobility

No matter what method an organization chooses to replace performance reviews, the replacement should embrace positive enablement as its core goal. Why? Positive enablement breeds a company culture that’s ripe to support career mobility — which can be truly transformational for organizations and individuals.

Career mobility happens when employees have the ability to learn new skills that lead to new opportunities for career advancement. It’s a win-win for employers and employees. Employers benefit from a constantly developing pool of internal candidates who can rise to new challenges and keep the organization competitive. Employees benefit too, because they’re able to stay more engaged, be more excited about the future, take on new projects or roles, and achieve their professional goals. 

Performance Previews: A Dynamic Process

A good model for replacing the performance review is something that I’ve started to call the “performance preview.” The idea is this: Kick off the year with a conversation between the People Leader and employee that’s ongoing. While the traditional performance review inherently looks backward, the performance preview is always forward-looking — focused on what employees need to do in order to do their jobs well, and what they need from the organization to keep advancing on their individual career journeys.

An important part of making a performance preview work — and unlocking its support for career mobility — is understanding what skills people have and what skills people need. These days, a career isn’t defined by a bunch of successive jobs; rather, it’s a portfolio of skills and experiences. When somebody’s career is mobile, it’s because they’re able to demonstrate how their skills have evolved, or how transferable they are.

When People Leaders proactively help employees map out a development journey based on the skills employees need, everyone involved takes a critical first step in setting employees, and the company, up for success. And then something wonderful happens: A learning process begins. And increasingly, an upskilling platform like Degreed, which maps learning to skills and roles, is helping employers quickly connect employees to a wide range of curated and personalized learning content. 

The next step? Providing real-world opportunities for employees to put their new knowledge to work. Career mobility opportunities like these include shadowing, mentoring, short-term assignments, ad- hoc projects, and even new roles. These are great because they let employees test their new knowledge, build confidence, and continue to build even more new skills. 

Through it all, the People Leader provides success tips to the employee, rather than backward-looking feedback that’s often perceived as critical.

Positive Enablement is the Way to Career Mobility

As more and more companies embrace ongoing career conversations, yours should too. 

If you do choose to continue relying on traditional performance reviews, be honest with yourself about this fact: They’re a tool for creating a rationale for compensation, or for documenting a performance problem to limit liability in litigation.

And be realistic about this as well: Performance reviews are not helping your organization improve people’s work and contributions in a meaningful way.

To truly help your employees, and to help your organization get ahead, you need a dynamic, forward-looking employee development process that supports career mobility.

Want to learn more about career mobility? Sign up for our free mini-course, 5 Days of Career Mobility, to get started.

The post How to Achieve Career Mobility Through Positive Enablement appeared first on Degreed.

Why the turnover? Some companies go private. Some merge or are bought out. Others stagnate or go out of business. It’s a trend that’s accelerating, with a further 50% of the S&P 500 estimated to be replaced in the next decade. And that projection might very well be understated because it doesn’t account for the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the global economy.

To stand the test of time, organizations need to figure out how to innovate and continually reinvent themselves. And more and more, a dynamic, comprehensive strategy for building skills and optimizing talent is key to that longevity.

A Winning Formula for Growth

Before we talk about how skills grow and evolve, let’s make sure we understand how companies that do stand the test of time grow and evolve. They aren’t just launching new and better products and services. They’re often relying heavily on inorganic tactics like alliances and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Companies that strike the right balance of organic growth, partnerships and alliances, and M&A — in other words, a mix of building, borrowing, or buying growth — are significantly more likely to not just stick around, but to outperform those companies that rely on just one mode.

Look no further than the four largest companies globally by market cap: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Since 2005, they’ve averaged an eye-popping 25% growth annually on the back of trillions of dollars in research and development spend, massive partner ecosystems, and hundreds of acquisitions. This is impressive by just about any standard, and it highlights an important question: How did they succeed while so many others fell by the wayside? 

While it’s impossible to attribute their success to only one thing, it’s clear that each of these firms are world class at accurately assessing the gap between the resources they have and the resources they need to grow. In fact, it’s been shown that assessing that gap is the most important factor in determining the success of a growth strategy.

When it comes to a company’s most valuable resource — its people — the buy-build-borrow lens can be equally helpful in thinking about talent as it is in thinking about growth. “People allocation is as powerful as financial allocation,” said Aon CEO Greg Case, whose close partnership with his CFO and CHRO ensures the company has the right talent to meet the challenges of the future.

Your Talent Strategy Is Probably Outdated

The use of buy-build-borrow tactics for an organization’s talent strategy can vary widely, depending on multiple factors including the industry, business model, and stage of maturity. Let’s start by defining each tactic.

Buy: This refers to the sourcing, recruiting, and hiring of external talent, including the acquisition of full-time employees as well as contingent workers.

Build: This is the development of employees through upskilling and reskilling initiatives.

Borrow: This is internal hiring and career mobility initiatives, including job rotations, stretch assignments, and internal gig work.

It should surprise no one that external recruitment commands the lion’s share of resources at most companies. The War for Talent, as first described by McKinsey more than two decades ago, focused almost exclusively on finding and hiring the best people at any cost — a zero-sum game of sorts.

According to data from SHRM, an estimated 66 million roles are filled per year, with the majority of the $20 billion annual spend for HR technology going toward talent acquisition. On a per-employee basis, that shakes out at an average cost of more than $4,400 per external hire, almost double that of internal candidates, and more than three times the average annual investment in learning programs. 

Spending on external hiring often makes sense for organizations grappling with hyper growth, addressing diversity imbalances, or undertaking significant strategic shifts requiring an infusion of specialized skills or experience. But in general, an over-reliance on external hiring is simply bad business.

The costs of hiring externally don’t stop with recruiting. A growing body of research suggests that, compared to alternative strategies such as internal hiring, career mobility structures, or upskilling, hiring external candidates requires more compensation, takes longer, and carries more risk.

Compensating external hires is more expensive: They make 18% to 20% more than internal hires. Why? It’s partly because external hires often have more experience. But that’s not necessarily a recipe for success.

External hiring takes longer: The average time it takes to get through the interview process is about 22 days. It takes between 39 to 43 days to hire an external candidate.

External hiring carries more risk: It leads to lower performance ratings during the hired employee’s first two years as compared to employees promoted to similar roles from within. In addition, 20% of new hires leave within the first year. And external new hires are 61% more likely to be fired from their jobs than those employees promoted from within. People hired from outside often realize the job’s not what they signed up for, develop a poor relationship with their new managers, or never get onboarded, trained, or assimilated well. This is less likely to happen when someone internal, who already knows the company and its people, takes on a new role.

Taken together, these factors are inspiring the most advanced HR leaders to rebalance their strategies — and to put more focus on building and borrowing.

The New World of Work 

A closer look at how the world of work is evolving sheds light on why companies are putting more emphasis on creating a more balanced approach to their talent strategies.

Shifting worker priorities: Opportunities for growth and development have increased in importance for employees, even more than compensation in some surveys. This is especially true among Millenials, a majority of whom prioritize career mobility and opportunities to learn on the job, differentiating them from other generations at work, according to Gallup. Despite this emphasis, only 39% of Millennials strongly agreed that they learned something new in the past 30 days that they could use to do their jobs better. The lesson for employers? They need to be more proactive about employee development.

New and redesigned job architectures: A shift away from the traditional idea of one person to one job is moving organizations toward a more agile model of work, informed by a better understanding of how skills map to work. This, for example, lets an organization assign the right people to a project as needed. It’s possible they all come from different departments, with the understanding that the group will likely only work together for the duration of the project. After that, its members disband, joining other similar groups for new projects, or simply refocusing on their regular roles. In one inspiring example, European IT services provider Atos used this model to accelerate project engagement.

Evolving management practices: An organizational trend toward creating work environments that are less bureaucratic, more nimble, and give everyone the opportunity to learn, innovate, and flourish is gaining momentum. For example, Adidas trained a couple thousand frontline retail employees on how to think like business innovators. Then Adidas solicited their ideas. The company then developed thousands of ideas, sharing them in open meetings. For some employees, it was the first time they were excited and inspired at work.

Upskilling: The rapid pace of change driven by advancements in technology and business practices means that acquiring new skills is critical to career longevity. Whether grappling with the new reality of remote working or facing the prospect of learning new skills as a furloughed or laid-off employee, millions of people around the globe are learning that new skills like adaptability, resilience, and a growth mindset may be their most important assets. 

It all adds up to something quite compelling. These trends are forcing companies to rethink how they invest in, grow, and manage their people. 

And that means your talent strategy for the next 10 years probably won’t look like the strategy that worked (or didn’t) for the last 10 years.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Although we’re no longer facing historically low unemployment, and while it appears that COVID-19 has softened the skills shortage, growing demand for new and emerging skills means that simply hiring outside talent doesn’t work as well as it used to. We’re entering a new era, one in which organizations are broadening their view of the talent supply chain and embracing a new way of operating.

More and more, companies are putting their people first to unlock competitive advantage and career mobility.

In July, researchers from McKinsey recommended that organizations “revamp their upskilling and retraining approaches, and adopt an agile approach to strategic workforce planning.” The intent was clear: Smart companies need to take a different approach to filling and deploying talent pipelines and embrace an approach centered around upskilling, reskilling, and career mobility. 

In other words, it’s time to build and borrow.

In these turbulent times, support for upskilling and the agility it affords has never been greater among senior business leaders. In fact, 82% of global executives at companies with more than $100 million in annual revenues project that these approaches will provide at least half the answer for addressing the skills gap, compared with only 30% for external hiring.

These changing attitudes toward skill acquisition and deployment don’t come from advancements in the science of learning or from strategic workforce planning. Rather, they’re driven by the emergence of a new blueprint for valuing and investing in people. 

A New Skills Operating Model

Companies that are upskilling and deploying their talent effectively are adopting a new approach that emphasizes internal rather than external resources.

This new operating model is designed around new investments in the data, tools, and processes that prioritize employee learning, skills, and opportunity. So what does it take for an organization to put this new build-borrow model to work?

First, this new model requires that companies take inventory of existing talent supply. It’s vital that organizations compile a complete picture of the skills and experiences of their people.

The next step is figuring out future skill needs, specifically which critical skills workers will need to drive business forward. Amid COVID-19, this is more important than ever. And it’s critical that this happens in an ongoing, flexible manner.

We like the way Diane Gherson, IBM’s former chief HR officer, put it: “We need real-time, sense-and-respond capabilities for skills as our businesses move to agile models and adopt new technology, exponentially changing the nature of work. In this environment, strategic workforce planning is relegated to the trash bin.”

Next, companies must provide access to tools and resources — to build and apply the skills that people want and companies need. Gone are the days of the traditional corporate university, organized top-down with a rigid view of careers and competency models.

Our research shows that most employees know the skills they need to perform better in their current roles and advance their careers. Tenaris SA, a global manufacturer and supplier of steel pipes, gave its 22,000 employees across 30 countries more ownership of their learning and career mobility and saw immediate benefits to engagement and skill development.

But building skills isn’t enough. Creating real business value happens when employee learning is connected to opportunity. This is a core tenet of the new talent operating model. And it really comes to life when organizations establish a marketplace that connects employee skills and skill development to ongoing, real-time internal opportunities for employees to explore new types of work.

With a talent marketplace, organizations can reallocate talent quickly, putting the right people in the right roles as needed. It’s about enabling agility and building empowered teams. In many ways, successfully executing a career mobility initiative requires looking at people and work in a more granular way.

A good example of an organization that’s embraced this thinking is BMO Financial Group. The company’s goal is “to move from matching people to jobs into matching skills to work, so we can be more nimble,” said CLO Gina Jenereux, who described how the company is taking a strategic view of the supply and demand of talent based on skills.

Similarly, Credit Suisse estimated eight-figure cost savings after implementing a program called Internals First. This program mandated that recruiters call candidates inside the company before contacting any from outside. In doing so, Credit Suisse reportedly shifted more than 10% of its more than 40,000 employees to new roles in 2016 through lateral moves, promotions, and other transitions.

It’s Your Culture That Gets You There

In the future, companies that are successful for the long haul will be those that take a balanced approach to developing and deploying their talent. 

To build an effective culture of learning, upskilling, opportunity, and career mobility at their organizations, business and talent leaders need to take stock of the investment required to ensure that everyone buys into the vision and change that’s required.

When a company’s senior executives champion skill development, it’s a recipe for building an effective learning culture. Employees need to understand and embrace their own development and feel empowered to design, grow, and achieve their career goals. And managers must adopt a mindset shift that enables talent to flow more freely across the company, supporting people who want to use their skills beyond their immediate teams.

Your organization may never be in a position to replace a company on the S&P 500. But, as we can now see, that doesn’t make your talent strategy any less important.

And no matter what your long-term business strategy prescribes for your company, surviving and thriving until you reach your next big milestone is critical.

Now more than ever, it’s clear that embracing a new operating model — a talent strategy that supports development and unlocks career mobility — can help you and your organization overcome any new challenges and stay competitive.

The post You’re Buying Too Much Talent. It’s Time to Build and Borrow. appeared first on Degreed.

But depending on the needs and culture of your company, one approach may prove more effective than another, according to a new report by RedThread Research and Degreed. 

Whether you call it job mobility, internal mobility, or career mobility, It makes sense to connect your people’s skill development with growth opportunities. A successful job mobility strategy keeps your workforce engaged and competitive. It aligns opportunities with the needs of your business, to ensure your company is growing along with your people. 

What’s right for your organization? To help provide some clarity, RedThread researchers surveyed 70 leaders from 17 companies, noting: “While we found similarities between approaches, no two orgs are handling career mobility in exactly the same way — or for the same reasons.” 

The Five Job Mobility Strategies

The study identifies distinct patterns or standard job mobility frameworks. Understanding how these are defined, and how each supports a certain type of organization and culture can help you figure out which might be best for your company. This is true if you’re just getting started or looking to tweak your existing strategy.

Before we break down each of these further, it’s important to note that a hybrid strategy is common. Usually this means that a majority of the people at an organization uses one approach and a subset uses a secondary approach. Only rarely does an organization exclusively lean on only one strategy; the new study found no examples of that.

Ladder: An Emphasis on Permanent Roles

In this, people move from one full-time role to another. Generally, they move vertically within a silo or function. For example, a graphic designer becomes an associate creative director. Or a sales representative becomes a regional sales manager.

This works best if permanent roles are the main way your company organizes its people, if there are well-defined career paths that aren’t highly flexible, or when people don’t have a high degree of ownership over their career paths or job mobility.

Lattice: An Agile Mindset

People move up, around, and sometimes down.

This too works best if permanent roles are the primary way a company organizes its people. But what makes this different from the Ladder approach is that it’s most successful when people have a high degree of ownership over their career paths. That’s only possible when your company culture embraces an agile mindset in which people try out new roles in new functions or business units. For example, a customer service representative joins Marketing to become a customer references manager.

Agency: Skills and Flexibility 

People move around based on their skills and preferences.

This approach works best when your people have a high degree of ownership over their careers and come together in teams or other flexible arrangements to get work done. For example, a team disbands at the end of a project and another forms for a new initiative, similar to the way a creative agency functions.

Outside In: Specialized Help

People with certain skills are brought in to support specific projects. This requires understanding your people’s skills and how to strategically deploy them to get work done. 

This approach does not provide workers with much ability to define their careers within the context of a single employer organization. More often, they work with several organizations. For example, a database manager on contract spends a month helping two nonprofit organizations clean up their records.

Reset: Moves to Meet Needs

People are strategically reskilled and redeployed into new roles based on strategic needs.

Most of the time, workers are first identified for new roles, which they can accept or reject. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they can choose a different one. For example, a communications company reskills its retail store workers in response to COVID-19, moving them to the call center.

The Relationship Between Ownership and Skills

How are the five approaches similar? And what is each best suited for?

These are key questions leaders pursuing a job mobility strategy tend to ask. To help answer them, the researchers plotted each of the five approaches to job mobility on an X-Y axis. In doing so, they considered who owns career mobility and the relationship between career mobility and skills.

The resulting graph looks like this:

The graph illustrates noteworthy occurrences that can guide the creation of a job mobility program.

According to the study:

• As organizations embrace skills, the goals of mobility change from moving people along well-developed career paths to helping people identify where they can best apply their unique capabilities.
• Moving toward a skills mindset often means adopting Agency and Outside In approaches — to free skills from defined roles and help people find short-term or project work.
• Embracing skills also often means engaging independent gig or contract workers.

Critical to Any Job Mobility Strategy is Its Purpose

Each of the five strategies has strengths that lend themselves to achieving certain business goals.

While some organizations might be looking to boost retention, others may be more interested in succession planning or in moving skills where they’re needed most.

Charting where the goals intersect with the approaches illustrates strengths and weaknesses. 

What Are Your Goals?

Does your organization embrace roles or skills? How much are your people able to own their careers? Do you want to increase mobility? Why?

These are all key questions to ask as you begin to move forward with any strategy that promotes and supports internal opportunities for your people.

Want to learn more? If you’re still unsure about which strategy to choose, take RedThread’s free quiz created by RedThread and Degreed! After a few simple questions based on how your organization functions, it will suggest a strategy for you based on our original research. To read more about career mobility strategies and implementation, download the full report, Career Mobility: Mindset Over Movement, today!  

The post Your Five Workforce Mobility Strategies for 2021 appeared first on Degreed.

For the most part, these activities take place on tucked-away platforms built for an administrator — not your workforce — to standardize and automate processes.

Important opportunities for career growth often are buried in these same forgotten spots, unused by workers who are building skills in other platforms, or not using platforms at all.

“Today’s businesses must keep abreast of new technological and business developments. If they don’t, they’ll be overtaken by competitors that are willing to do what they are not: improve and adapt to new circumstances,” according to the Digital Marketing Institute. “A workforce that can learn new things will avoid obsolescence.”

To help your people grow, and to create real business value for your organization, it’s time to bring career mobility out of the shadows. Let’s look at how you can use technology to lay a foundation for engaging your workforce continually, integrating solutions across your learning ecosystem, and gathering rich skill data you can use to make informed talent decisions and thrive amid disruption.

User Experience: Key to Engagement

More than half of business leaders (53%) say a lack of visibility into skills is their top barrier to workforce transformation. 

Even with upskilling technology in place, you’re not guaranteed that skill data. Gaining visibility into your people’s skills and actually generating data takes user engagement. Motivating your workers requires their buy-in. And to get that buy-in, it helps to give your employees a reason to engage with new opportunities to grow.

“The first principle and probably the most important is experience and engagement,” said Danny Abdo, Degreed VP of Solutions Consulting. “Remember, career mobility relies on employees voluntarily engaging. You can’t really force them to do it like you can with things like compliance (training).”

When shopping for technology, don’t focus on features. Value — not bells and whistles — inspire workers to buy in, Abdo said. “That’s what will get the user to engage. And once they engage for the first time, it shifts to making sure that experience is as pleasant and frictionless as possible, so that they will continue to engage and build out that cycle of receiving and giving value.”

When your career mobility program is powered by a platform like Degreed, where people are continually learning, engagement becomes ongoing.

Integration: Playing Nice Across the Board

It’s critical that the solution powering your career mobility program integrates across your existing ecosystem.

“Just think of the frustration that can happen if a user is going through an experience and they have to log in multiple times during that experience, or they’ve already added data in one platform and now they’ve got to add that same data in another platform,” Abdo said. 

From an organizational perspective, you want to future-proof your technology because the tech landscape is always changing rapidly amid ever-present innovation, Abdo said. “Your ability to evolve with it really relies on your vendor’s ability to integrate and stay current. You don’t want to get stuck with a DVD player when nobody’s making DVDs anymore.”

How can you evaluate a vendor through this lens? Above all, don’t believe people who say their platforms don’t need to integrate with anything, or that they already do everything you need. 

The all-in-one solution might sound great in theory, but it’s rarely as engaging, or as effective, as you need it to be.

Skill Data: It’s Got Your Back 

If you’re successful at engaging your employees, your career mobility program is probably swimming in a sea of data. Hopefully, it’s the right kind of data — valuable skill data that can help your organization make critical decisions.

“Just like not all currencies are equal, neither is skill data,” Abdo said. 

Good skill data helps you answer questions like: Do we even have the skills to achieve our strategy? If we don’t have the skills, what’s the best approach to get those skills? Do we need to hire? Can we upskill or move skills around?

There’s more to skill data than simply knowing if someone has a skill. You’ll want to know what that person might be working to develop. You’ll want to know that person’s proficiency level. Is he or she a beginner? Advanced? What kind of training happened, and was it applied on the job? What about certifications? If there are any, are they recent?

Find a technology that can help you answer all these questions and more. When you have a platform like Degreed, which connects people’s skill-building to career opportunities, valuable skill data becomes readily available.

“It’s really just about giving the person that is using that data the best information and the confidence that they can use that data to make these important decisions,” Abdo said. “It’s important to vet your technologies to ensure that they’re capable of capturing these attributes.”

The post Career Mobility: What to Look for In a Technology Solution appeared first on Degreed.

That’s why today we’re announcing the arrival of Degreed Career Mobility — a new tool designed to make skill-building and career development even easier for you and your people.

Tools for publishing career opportunities have existed for years. The problem is they’re rarely used by workers because there hasn’t been an effective way for anyone to find those opportunities. All too often, opportunities are buried in the same places people go to enroll in benefits, complete their performance reviews, or request time off. These are systems that workers use infrequently. They’re built for the administrator to standardize and automate processes, not for the workforce.

There also hasn’t been a simple, easy, fast, or flexible way for team managers and business leaders to share opportunities. They’ve had to work through talent acquisition teams more focused on — and better equipped for — recruiting candidates from outside for full-time roles. Or worse, access to those opportunities is limited by personal networks and word of mouth.

Degreed Career Mobility changes that. We’re helping connect people to all kinds of work (not just full-time jobs) by sharing them in the same place the workforce goes to build skills every day. And we’re making it fast and simple for team managers to create and publish gigs, stretch assignments, longer-term projects, and more.

A Different Kind of Talent Marketplace

With Degreed Career Mobility, your company can build an internal talent marketplace that’s directly tied to learning and upskilling. It can help everyone gain better visibility into the skills that are in demand right now, and it can help HR and talent executives, business leaders, and team managers discover the skills workers have. And that matters because more than half of business leaders (53%) say a lack of visibility into skills is their top barrier to workforce transformation. 

In addition, talent development can become more relevant than ever, because employees can take on real-world experiences that can directly shape the next step in their careers. As this happens, companies can create new value as they’re able to pivot, adapt, and thrive in the face of disruption. 

With Degreed Career Mobility, your employees can:

• Showcase their strengths, achievements, and aspirations in a personal profile that’s kept up-to-date automatically, by tapping into their everyday skill-building activities
• See opportunities they’re a good match for — right in their Degreed feeds
• Access people and on-the-job experiences to grow skills for opportunities they’re interested in

People managers can:

• Add opportunities directly in Degreed
• Search, browse, and explore who’s a good match
• Share opportunities with candidates they think are a good fit
• Track the performance of each opportunity posted

Making the Connection

Jennifer needs someone to speak to a customer insights team about search engine optimization (SEO). She searches for SEO skills and quickly identifies two qualified employees for the task. Rashad is an expert in sales, but he has an interest in becoming a Sales Manager. Degreed suggests not only relevant skills but also a mentor to help guide him. Whitney, an HR analyst, sees that the Finance team is looking for someone to write a blog post about emerging markets. She reads and listens to podcasts on the topic, and she’s taking an online course on business writing to prepare herself for the challenge. So she connects with the Finance team to put her skills to work.

But you’re hearing that pitch a lot lately. So what’s different about Degreed Career Mobility? Degreed is built largely on skill data — in particular, our unique ability to measure and track skill development over time by weaving the whole process into the one thing people value most: their career growth. And we use that real-time data on people’s skills to automatically match people to relevant opportunities. We do this in two key ways: matching for employees’ existing skill expertise and for areas in which they want to grow new skills.

In addition, Degreed engages workers day in and out, constantly generating information that’s used to influence opportunity matching. A talent management system simply doesn’t see that kind of engagement. Talent management systems are designed to automate and standardize HR processes, like benefits enrollment, payroll, performance reviews, and service delivery. People only use them occasionally — when they have to. 

So, what’s the secret to unlocking career mobility at your organization? It’s the same as the secret to upskilling your workforce, increasing employee engagement, and driving a rewarding employee experience. Put the worker at the center of your talent strategy. Prioritize the needs of your workforce. That’s what Degreed does.

Interested in learning more about Degreed Career Mobility? Contact us for a demo today.

The post Introducing Degreed Career Mobility appeared first on Degreed.