• Healthcare
• Finance
• Manufacturing
• Technology
• Professional Services

Each pathway blends AI precision with expert validation, helping organizations speed up workforce time-to-readiness in their industry’s most sought-after skills, all while saving costs and time on manual curation.

How Is a Learning Pathway Created?

Every Open Library pathway starts with guided AI that is trained to surface credible, skill-aligned resources, rather than random web content. Human experts then refine tone, relevance, and design for clarity and deeper cognitive learning, following proven learning frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Coherence and Signaling principles.

Taking a collaborative approach, with human polish and oversight applied to AI output, maintains learning science at the core, driving higher learner completion rates and building skills that transfer more effectively on the job.

The Industry Edge: Pathways Built for Workforce Readiness

Our latest industry bundles are designed to solve specific challenges in each sector:

• Healthcare: Building empowerment, communication, and decision-making confidence in clinical and non-clinical teams.
  
• Financial Services: Enhancing trust, leadership, and compliance-readiness.
  
• Manufacturing & Advanced Tech: Upgrading workforce adaptability through analytics, safety, and innovation pathways.
  
• Professional Services: Strengthening client management, consulting, and data-driven problem-solving.
  
• Retail & Consumer: Empowering managers and associates with digital, interpersonal, and operational skills.

Open Library’s research-based structure and AI-powered scalability allows organizations to quickly roll out relevant learning across roles and geographies as needs evolve, without starting from scratch each time.

What Are the Results? 

Put simply, the outcome is learning that’s simple to implement, scalable, and cost-effective. As a result, Degreed clients are now turning to Open Library not just to complement content vendors, but to replace them.

• A telecom company is moving away from LinkedIn Learning in favor of Open Library and the added relevance and quality it provides.
  
• A global mining company was able to eliminate hours of manual quality assurance (QA) and reduced content vendor spend by leveraging Open Library’s auto-refreshed, high-quality pathways.
  
• A non-profit healthcare organization saved time and budget while boosting learner confidence and peer-to-peer learning.

In total, Open Library drives measurable value:

• 60% of Degreed clients now use Open Library, with adoption up 13% month over month.
  
• Content completions increased 13% between August and September, which shows rising engagement among global users.

The Future of Open Library

Open Library is evolving beyond a curated catalog of content. Specifically, it’s becoming a multi-format learning ecosystem by combining AI-powered summaries, Maestro coaching, interactive simulations, and future premium marketplace options.

By 2026, Open Library will feature:

• 500+ pathways and 7,000+ content items
  
• 16+ ready-to-launch bundles
  
• Integrated AI coaching and leadership learning journeys
  

Basically, it’s learning that scales and evolves with your business, and without added cost.

Explore the new industry pathway bundles and see how Open Library helps your teams build the right skills—more quickly, and with lower spend and less effort.

The post 150 Learning Pathways for Industry-Specific Workforce Readiness appeared first on Degreed.

Any organization with a significant EU presence will be concerned, and any organization using AI to screen, train, or manage talent may fall under the high-risk rules, meaning that compliance could be complex if you don’t choose the right partner or provider. But despite the challenges, there’s an opportunity— and that is to leverage regulatory pressure to increase workforce confidence and fluency in using Gen AI and develop a competitive advantage.

It’s an opportunity to enable your people to work with AI—ethically, fluently, and effectively—so your organization doesn’t just comply with regulations, but leads in the AI era. It’s a strategic inflection point for CHROs, CLOs, and CIOs to embed ethical, structured, and scalable AI learning into their organizations’ DNA.

Why the EU AI Act Changes the Game

The EU AI Act introduces sweeping rules on the development and use of AI, with some of the most stringent requirements impacting systems designed to automate workforce management.

Article 4 of the EU AI Act is clear:

“Providers and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to ensure, to the best extent possible, a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf.”

Organizations are responsible for ensuring that people who interact with AI systems are properly trained—technically, ethically, and contextually. For HR and Learning Professionals, that means rethinking how AI is introduced, adopted, and governed across your workforce.

If you’re using AI to hire, upskill, manage, or evaluate employees, you’ll also need to ensure that your AI provider has performed their due diligence and built their AI solution in a way in which your company can comply with the AI Act requirements.

Our global research with Harvard Business Publishing shows that:

• 68% of employees use Gen AI tools at least weekly, indicating widespread, decentralized adoption
• Yet 78% of employees lack the confidence to use those tools effectively
• Only 7% are fluent enough to build or customize Gen AI tools
• And 74% of executives have received no formal training in Gen AI themselves

Despite high usage, most organizations are flying blind—with employees using AI tools without the training, oversight, or infrastructure required by law. This is a serious compliance risk, but more critically, it’s a missed opportunity to turn AI adoption into measurable performance and innovation gains.

Understanding the EU AI Act

The EU AI Act is designed to regulate AI applications based on their risk levels, categorising them into different tiers: unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risk, and minimal risk. This risk-based approach ensures that the higher the risk an AI system poses, the stricter the compliance requirements it must meet. Some AI applications might be strictly illegal under the EU AI Act, while others, classified as high risk, might need to be developed in specific ways, in line with the AI Act’s requirements. 

Compliance with the EU AI Act is not just about adhering to regulations; it’s about ensuring that AI systems are trustworthy and beneficial for all users. For HR, Learning & Talent Management professionals, this means:

The 3 Levers of a Gen AI-Fluent Workforce

Our research shows that successful AI strategies converge around three critical enablers. These are the levers that bridge the gap between legal compliance and enterprise advantage:

1. Tools & Infrastructure

You can’t build Gen AI confidence without giving people hands-on access to AI tools—and embedding them into real workflows. This includes secure, explainable systems that:

• Align with ethical standards and enterprise risk frameworks
• Provide visibility into how AI outputs are generated
• Integrate into performance, development, and decision-making systems

2. Organizational Support & Training

AI learning must be structured, strategic, and consistent. What high-performing organizations are doing:

• Deploying AI academies, certifications, and on-the-job simulations
• Offering role-specific training for AI-enabled positions like Prompt Engineers and AI Analysts
• Making Gen AI literacy mandatory for managers and decision-makers

3. A Motivated Workforce

Motivation accelerates learning. Our study shows employees who perceive a personal benefit—such as productivity or creativity—are 77x more likely to engage deeply with Gen AI. This means:

• Clear communication of AI’s value
• Use of AI for self-directed learning
• Leadership that models responsible experimentation

When these three levers are deployed together, organizations unlock a confident, capable, and compliant workforce.

From Compliance to Confidence: Building Gen AI Fluency Across the Enterprise

As Gen AI reshapes work, compliance is only the starting point. Today’s CHROs, CLOs, and CIOs face a dual mandate: ensure governance and empower their people to use AI confidently and ethically. Meeting that challenge means moving beyond policy into practice.

Here’s how leading organizations are doing it:

• Evaluate your current AI literacy levels across employees and leadership
• Embed Gen AI into learning workflows and daily routines.
• Provide hands-on practice through simulations and real-world application.
• Develop fluency at every level—from frontline to executive leadership.
• Define new roles and responsibilities to scale AI capabilities.

By building a Gen AI-fluent workforce, organizations reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and position themselves to lead—ethically and effectively.

How Degreed Supports You Getting There

Compliance is at the core of our development process at Degreed. We build our platform to comply with the AI Act by leveraging:

• AI-powered platforms that prioritize human oversight, explainability, and data protection
• Structured Gen AI learning tools via academies, coaching, and personalized pathways
• Compliance-by-design architecture and logging to ensure transparency and auditability

We help you transform regulatory pressure into a competitive advantage—by building AI literacy where it matters most: in your people.

The post What the EU AI Act Means for HR Leaders in 2025 appeared first on Degreed.

I’ve joined more than 100 roadmap sessions and talked with learning leaders in 28 cities.

No matter where I go, the same themes keep coming up: CEOs want to future-proof the business, COOs want automation, and CFOs are demanding bottom-line contributions.

People are moving faster than ever—and yet the pressure builds.

The Workforce Transformation Imperative

Five years ago, the World Economic Forum estimated 50% of the workforce would need to be upskilled by 2030. Fast forward five years, throw in a little bit of Gen AI magic, and now that number is closer to 60%.

I’m no data scientist, but even I can tell that’s more skills to build and half the time to do it.

Learning teams around the globe are working tirelessly. Why? A company today can’t just hire the skills it needs. The talent isn’t out there. That company has to build it. And business leaders are scared. They know that the people that they have—and the skills that they have—are not those that they require for success in the future.

It’s why many learning leaders have AI enablement as the highest CEO priority. And they should.

Companies today need people who understand new technologies and people who understand core of business fundamentals. They don’t just need people who know AI. They need people who know the business and how to apply AI within it.

This is the moment for which Degreed exists. We make learning anything accessible. We make corporate learning enjoyable. We make a system that builds engagement and helps an organization deliver a culture of curiosity.

What a profound shame it would be if, at this moment of dynamic change, we couldn’t figure out how to use that system to help our colleagues succeed in this dynamic world.

AI and Its Immense Potential

At Degreed, we wake up every day focused on helping organizations:

• Pinpoint needs
• Personalize development
• Measure change

We know we need to make it easier for companies to align what their employees love to do with the outcomes that will make them relevant in the future.

Imagine if learning teams could deliver incredible, business-relevant content free of cost. Imagine if they could take that content and personalize it. Not for a job or a role or a function, but for an individual employee.

Imagine if a learning organization could rebuild L&D from the ground up the way learning leaders think it should be.

A learning management system (LMS) is good for compliance. A talent marketplace only helps 5% to 10% of employees. 

Forward-thinking organizations need more. This is what Degreed is working on, and it’s where we continue to head.

Aligning People to Needs

In the past 12 years at Degreed, we’ve indexed nearly 40 million content objects. We’ve mapped over 250,000 skills.

We’ve supported more than 10 million Degreed users. And we’re seeing that impact in the real world. At State Street, over 70% of employees learn with Degreed every month. At Volkswagen, a skills-first strategy with Degreed has already saved €2 million.

And now, we’re embedding AI directly into the flow of learning. We recently made three big product announcements:

Degreed Maestro Studio

This powerful tool enables your business to create and deploy customized and AI-native learning experiences easily designed to fit your needs. Maestro is already being used to democratize leadership coaching, scale simulations for sales enablement, and personalize skill development and evaluation. With Degreed Maestro Studio, you can further tailor each AI interaction to your organization’s needs.

Degreed Open Library

This vast resource is now available to every Degreed customer at no additional cost, featuring 500 deeply curated pathways on the most in-demand learning topics. Using AI and in-house expertise, we’ll continuously refine to ensure your organization always has access to high-quality and relevant learning content.

Degreed Maestro Services

This suite of services helps your organization maximize AI’s impact on learning while reducing costs. These include AI-assisted pathway development that leverages Degreed expertise and AI to create structured, high-impact learning journeys. These also include a custom AI experience deployment service for designing, building, and implementing AI-powered coaches and simulations tailored to your organization’s unique priorities.

This is where we’re going:

• More speed. Develop people faster than ever using Maestro, Open Library, and more.
• Less cost. Save budget with hundreds of Open Library pathways and AI-powered deployments.
• Bigger impact. Link learning to business outcomes. Track skills. Prove ROI.

And While We’re Talking About Content

It bears repeating: AI is going to transform the content experience.

Great content pulls at the heartstrings. It understands people’s rhythms. It keeps employees coming back for more.

Organizations are probably going to have more of this high quality content in their libraries moving forward.

Why? Because they’re going to have the budget for it. What’s going away is the mediocre content in the middle.

Companies are no longer going to have to buy an enterprise-wide library that gets 5% adoption just as an insurance policy, in case someone asks for executive presence training in a language that isn’t supported. This change will drive savings. And learning teams will be able to use those resources to invest in new, AI-native experiences. Things that are more engaging and more impactful. 

Employees will progress through learning content, and then when they have a question, they can grapple with that concept. They can engage with an AI mentor. They can test their skills and have much more impactful development experiences.

A Final Thought

Fifteen years ago, I asked a simple question: What will Fifth Avenue in New York City look like in the future?

Retail didn’t disappear. It evolved.

Like retail, work isn’t disappearing. It’s transforming. And that means people must transform too.

Find out more.

Check out our seven-part Degreed in Action webinar series to go even deeper on our innovations in AI and more.

The post More Speed, Less Cost, Bigger Impact: Learning in an AI World appeared first on Degreed.

As the gap between business needs and workforce capabilities persists, people need more control over how they develop. The knowledge they pursue needs to be hyper relevant.

Moving your people from Point A to Point Z in today’s world of work is more than a project. It’s bigger than a pilot. And that’s why workforce transformation is more than a buzzword.

We think about workforce transformation as changing your company’s structure and skills—to align your people with business strategy. Done well, it can have a profound effect on their ability to perform at their best.

The Importance of Shared Leadership

Like many other worthy business endeavors, workforce transformation requires collaboration among HR, Learning, and IT leadership.

Some organizations have created dedicated roles to lead the charge: Organization & Transformation Officer, Development & Change Management Lead, and Vice President of Workforce Planning, among other titles.

Innovative leaders know that transformation isn’t about repackaging L&D. It’s not about more training. It’s not even just about reskilling. 

Structuring for Change

To keep pace with shifting demands, successful organizations are rethinking how they build, organize, and support talent at scale. 

These organizations are:

• Establishing a language for skills that’s consistent and organization-wide.
• Identifying skill gaps through accurate, connected data.
• Helping employees adapt to new ways of working.
• Delivering personalized, business-aligned development at scale.
• Measuring whether skills are actually being built—and where.

These actions represent strategic changes that affect workforce planning, promote internal mobility, advance recruiting, and grow careers. They require clear ownership and coordinated execution.

The Critical Role of the C-Suite Stakeholder

At many companies, CHROs are defining workforce strategy. CLOs are making learning more relevant and aligned. CIOs are responsible for delivering infrastructure that supports flexibility, security, and interoperability.

None of this comes together in isolation. That’s why leading organizations are aligning their people systems and strategy around a shared foundation: skills.

Creating a Common Skills Language Across the Business

One of the biggest blockers to transformation is inconsistent skill data. Different systems define and track skills in different ways—or not at all. The result is duplicate effort and unclear decision-making.

Clarity is key. That’s why Degreed Skills+ eliminates roadblocks by integrating skill data from across your HRIS, LXP, LMS, and talent marketplace—and then cleaning, normalizing, and organizing it using AI. It  suggests and resolves synonyms, defines proficiency levels, and enables customization based on your unique organizational language.

With a shared skills framework, your cross-functional teams can finally work from the same data and unify how skills are defined and tracked—so you can identify gaps, measure progress, and plan with confidence.

Delivering Personalized, Scalable Growth

Once skill gaps are identified, the next big step is delivering meaningful development.

What makes learning meaningful? Relevance. With Degreed Learning, content, mentors, and pathways are tailored to each employee’s role, goals, and skill profile. Instead of navigating overwhelming content libraries, learners are guided toward what they need when they need it. Further personalizing the experience, Degreed Automations handles assignments, updates, and nudges automatically—triggered by employee actions or milestones.

And to make employee development even more adaptive, Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose-built for learning, uses role, context, and historical data to recommend content, coach employees, and assess progress. It reduces wasted time, boosts platform engagement, and improves learning retention.

Supporting Change as Your Strategy Unfolds

Transformation doesn’t end at go-live. As priorities evolve, systems need to support continuous adaptation.

As your organization adopts new technologies, embraces internal mobility, or rethinks how teams are structured, employees need to understand what’s changing—and how to keep up.

Degreed supports change readiness with features like skill-level descriptions, coaching, and role-specific Learning Plans and Pathways. Employees can see where they stand, what to focus on next, and how to grow into evolving roles.

What Leading Teams Are Doing Differently

What sets successful teams apart is not only vision, but also execution.

Forward-thinking organizations are: 

• Standardizing skill definitions across teams and systems.
• Prioritizing development aligned with business needs.
• Reducing friction in how people access and apply learning.
• Measuring progress in terms of actual skill growth.
• Using real-time data to make decisions about talent development and deployment.

A system like Degreed connects the dots across these workflows, reducing manual effort and creating visibility across functions—without adding complexity.

What comes next depends on the steps you take now.

Preparing for AI. Improving retention. Boosting employee performance. Whatever the goal, the pressure to adapt is no longer theoretical—it’s operational.

With tools like Degreed Skills+, Degreed Learning, and Degreed Maestro, you can define the skills that matter, develop them with purpose, and track progress with clarity. That’s how transformation becomes operational—and sustainable.

Learn 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 What Workforce Transformation Actually Requires appeared first on Degreed.

Of course, that’s all easier said than done.

“It’s not just that things are changing,” said Brad Watt, Chief Learning Officer at Colgate-Palmolive. “It’s the pace at which these things are changing that’s important. And the only way that you’re going to be able to build skill in the future is if you have this learning culture where people actually see the importance of building their full-self, growth mindset, sort of approach.”

Colgate-Palmolive employees assessed 5,000 skills and earned more than 3,500 badges in just five years. In that same time frame, more than 14,000 employees upskilled in data and analytics.

How has Colgate-Palmolive managed rapid change among 34,000 employees across 200 countries? By focusing on business goals, recognizing Degreed is much more than just a learning content search engine, and issuing lots and lots of badges.

Purpose-Driven L&D

Colgate-Palmolive began its L&D transformation with Degreed in 2018. But Watt soon realized that simply upgrading the L&D team’s tech stack wasn’t enough. The company needed to rethink how it used that technology to unlock its full potential. Initially, the company saw a big boost in monthly usage. But by 2020 adoption tapered off.

The team needed a fresh approach. Watt overhauled his learning strategy to make the best use of technologies like Degreed and keep up with the rapidly changing skills landscape of modern business.

The new strategy consisted of six pillars:

1. A business focus: Narrow down which skills and solutions to invest in.
2. People-centricity: Understand people, the skills they need to work, and the things they aspire to learn.
3. Modern, responsive architecture: Use Degreed and other technology to run blended learning programs that incorporate a variety of tools and methods.
4. Scale: Serve more than 34,000 employees in over 200 countries.
5. Context: Deliver learning in the flow of work to maximize incremental capability improvements.
6. Measurability: Track success across each pillar to understand company skill gaps, evaluate learning programs, and drive business results.

Spoiler alert: This strategy led to company-wide success. “The skill sets we have now around revenue growth management are meaningfully improved,” said CEO Noel Wallace. 

Degreed: More Than a Fancy UI & Content Search Engine

To implement its new learning strategy, Watt’s team focused on four steps:

1. Align learning outcomes to business goals (why people need to upskill).
2. Build strategic skill application with org-level bootcamps. (what people need to learn).
3. Personalize learning at scale (who needs to learn what).
4. Leverage tech tools like Degreed Plans, Pathways, Skill Review, and Badging (how people learn).

Aligning Learning with the Business

The first step to building the learning strategy Colgate-Palmolive needed was aligning every learning opportunity with business goals. Watt’s team broke down the interests of the business and HR, then paired those interests with learning solutions the team could deploy over time.

At first, the company needed to play catch-up against rapidly evolving technologies and markets, and HR needed standardization and self-service options. Then it would need to harness virtual and digital learning to master digital selling and enable remote work.

Building the Right Content 

Once Colgate-Palmolive clarified why upskilling was necessary, it homed in on what its people needed to learn. Watt identified two strategic areas that would move the needle—digital commerce and personalization—along with six skills that would drive KPIs in those areas.

Personalizing Learning at Scale

After identifying the most important skills for Colgate-Palmolive, Watt and team asked who in the company needed those skills. His team began by building modules aimed at employees companywide. All workers needed some basic digital knowledge. They needed to embrace a new nomenclature, so they could talk about digital and AI topics as an organization. They needed ideas for using AI in their individual work. And they needed shared expectations, so what they created actually worked. 

Next, the team focused on what leaders needed to know. Watt and team ran six bootcamps—one for each Colgate-Palmolive division. The goal? Help managers and executives understand digital and AI transformation and its relevancy to their specific unit. Then, help them gain hands-on experience, to ensure they could use their skills each day.

Degreed: Learning for the Business and Careers

Many organizations stop where Colgate-Palmolive had landed: with basic programs deployed company wide and deep training for executives in place. But Watt and team kept pushing—to ensure each and every Colgate-Palmolive employee could help drive digital change for the company. To refine how people learned, L&D turned to Degreed and found success—sometimes in surprising ways—using features like Plans, Pathways, and Skill Review.

A key success came with Badges, which Colgate-Palmolive launched in 2021. At first, employees used them as a form of recognition, and Watt described a typical progression: “I’ve done a badge, and I feel good, and I posted on LinkedIn.”

But badges also provided leaders with a very real visibility into individual employees’ capabilities, Watt said, adding they began using this inventory of skills for performance management and succession planning. “And that became a lot more motivational for individuals when they started to see that this is not only about showcasing it on LinkedIn, but rather it starts to have an impact in terms of where I want to go in my career.”

To earn badges, employees took skills assessments, which also allowed Watt and team to benchmark the company’s overall skill development—and to choose the next year’s goalposts. In 2022 L&D launched new badges that motivated employees to learn skills that would slingshot Colgate-Palmolive past competitors. And now, L&D introduces new badges each year—to continuously motivate employees to learn high-impact skills while advancing their careers.

A New Way Forward

The Colgate-Palmolive L&D department looks vastly different than it did five years ago. It has learning partners who sit at the boardroom table and translate business needs into learning opportunities. A design and development team acts as an in-house content creation agency. A metrics team ensures the company is measuring learning impact. And a technology team keeps the learning ecosystem running smoothly.

Does Watt have advice for other L&D organizations?

“As you think about your tech stacks, what really is important is not only making sure that you’ve got the right interfaces that your employees can use, but that you’re collecting the right data, you’re organizing that data so that you can gain insight from that data,” he said.

For Colgate-Palmolive, measuring success is two-pronged. Quantitative metrics are paired with qualitative feedback. Leaders can see that employees assessed 5,000 skills and earned more than 3,500 badges over the course of five years, and that more than 14,000 employees upskilled in data and analytics. But they can also see these skills are, “directly leading to growing e-commerce penetration and advancing our first-party data collection, digital media buying and advertising, and personalization, search, and social media strategies,” said Chief Digital Officer Brigitte King. Indeed, 60% of media spend was covered by analytics, and 14% of sales came from e-commerce—a nearly 10% increase.

And that drop in monthly Degreed users? The number of monthly Degreed users at Colgate-Palmolive surged to 86%—a statistic most companies only dream of.

Strategy + Degreed = Success

Early in its journey, Colgate-Palmolive saw Degreed as a Google-like search engine for learning content. But the true power of our solution comes when L&D aligns learning with business goals and leans into personalized learning. 

“If you unlock the potential of skills in Degreed, that’s where it really, really helps,” Watt said. “If you do the right sort of skills assessment and you get people to update the skill profile, then the AI works magic. That way you create that continuous cycle of learning that is really in the flow of what people need to do.”

Find out more.

Let’s talk about your strategy. Contact us today to request a Degreed demo.

The post Colgate-Palmolive Powers Digital Transformation with Degreed appeared first on Degreed.

Like a translation app on vacation, AI tools are always ready to help you at work. They can answer questions, give suggestions, and even do some of your work for you.  

With the ability to get help at work “just in time,” you might think you won’t need to learn important tasks ahead of time. Or that it may not be worth the effort to learn tasks “just in case” they’ll might pop up during the workday.

It’s true that AI capabilities will transform how you get work done. Still, I believe that, amid all this change, a simple and time-tested fact of work life will persist: Employees need to draw on skills and expertise without the help of technology. I call this skill fluency.

AI assistants are getting smarter.

OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple have announced that AI assistants will soon be able to understand context. In other words, they’ll be able to “see” what we’re doing on our digital devices and across applications. As such, we’ll be able to ask them to assist us in the digital work we do. 

If you haven’t already seen it, check out the video demo below from OpenAI. This video demonstrates the types of interactions you can have with GPT-4o when it can see your screen.

And check out this video from Google to see how AI can assist us in navigating physical spaces using our cameras.

AI is the Translation App, Your Skills are Language Fluency

AI demos (like the videos shared above) can leave us reeling and rethinking what skills we should spend time developing. Similarly, when OpenAI recently demoed its live translation capabilities in May, the stock price for Duolingo, a free language learning app, fell 3.5%. The market was wrestling with the question, “Do people still need to learn a language if they can use real-time language translation everywhere they go?”

The stock price has since recovered, perhaps based on the understanding that while translation is undoubtedly useful, it will never replace actual language fluency. You need fluency—and not just after a move to Mexico.

You need fluency for everyday life, wherever you might be. You speak about 16,000 words per day. You can’t outsource your most critical and fundamental form of communication. In interactions and relationships where speed, collaboration, and intimacy matter, you need fluency.

Skill Fluency in the Workplace

You also need skill fluency at work. Ask yourself this, “Is my work like an everyday interaction or more of a short vacation?”

Certainly, practical use cases exist for each approach. For tasks you perform infrequently (the short vacations), your ability to look up information is critical. I never seem to remember how to write a vlookup formula in Excel. Whenever I do need it I do a search, and AI makes that process seamless. 

But for the core parts of my work (the everyday interactions), there are tools and processes I rely on seemingly all the time. I don’t want any friction using these tools. I want skill fluency.

This analogy of fluency (everyday use) vs. translation (infrequent use) addresses a key dynamic of AI use. But it’s not the only dynamic at play. AI can help you with new or rare tasks, and it can even take on repetitive, mundane everyday tasks. It can also help you start, overcome obstacles, or gain new perspectives.

And through it all, one thing will remain true. No matter how AI assists you, your own abilities will remain the critical component at the core of the process. The bigger and stronger your core, the better the interplay between you and AI becomes, and the better off you’ll be.

5 Reasons to Develop Skill Fluency in Your Core Areas of Expertise

1. Speed and Associative Thinking 

Internalized knowledge helps you think fast, connect ideas easily, and see patterns without always having to search for information. To highlight the importance of speed in our work, computer scientists use a flute analogy. Imagine trying to play the flute with a one-second delay between blowing a note and hearing it. The delay would make it difficult for you to practice or perform, right?

Your thinking and problem-solving skills work best when you can access your knowledge without any distractions. Studies on working memory reveal that expertise involves complex cognitive chunks that boost reasoning skills. These chunks, like mental building blocks, enhance your capacity to unlock deeper understanding and creativity.

2. The Automation Paradox 

The paradox of automation is this: When you use machines to replace work, those machines also need to be installed, maintained, and managed, which leads to additional types of work. Replacing routine work increases your dependence on the expertise needed to maintain a complicated system and manage exceptions.

We’ve seen this trend with airplanes. Have you ever looked into an airplane cockpit recently? They’re complicated systems.

As Captain Chelsey Sullenberg (who heroically landed the plane on the Hudson River) has said, “It requires much more training and experience, not less, to fly highly automated planes.” When it comes to AI, every individual needs to maintain the expertise needed to oversee and manage AI systems.

3. The Unreliable GPS 

I use GPS to navigate my path almost anywhere I go. This means my ability to get anywhere unassisted, especially when I’m crisscrossing a new city or country, is really bad. Like “I refuse to pull out of the grocery store parking lot until my GPS is ready” bad.

Research shows that London cab drivers, who must legally memorize the city’s complex and twisty street map, boast larger brain hippocampi than the rest of us. But most of us don’t drive cars for a living, so relying on GPS is a rational trade-off between convenience and navigational dexterity.

The real challenge comes from the fact that AI is an unreliable GPS. What if 10% of the time the GPS guided you to random coordinates? Even worse, what if you had no way of knowing you were off course until it was too late?

The problem with being wrong about something is that it feels exactly the same as being right—until it’s too late. Outsourcing expertise to AI is an unpredictable trade-off because it is difficult to anticipate the manifestation and cost of errors.

4. The Last Real Competitive Advantage 

When AI tools are in everyone’s hands, you’ll need something non-AI to set you apart from everyone else. We’re used to relying on traditional “moats” such as prior experience or a college degree that helped us maintain our positions in the workplace.

Now, AI is a great equalizer. If you rely on AI for most of your work, then you’re easily replaceable by anyone else who has access to the same AI tools. This means that being able to constantly learn has become the new way to set yourself apart and maintain your personal competitive advantage.

5. Values and Craftsmanship

Not everything should be about short-term economics. I feel great joy and satisfaction from learning and being good (for brief moments at least) at what I do. As technology eats into more of our everyday lives, we may be headed for a crisis of meaning (if it wasn’t here already). 

Designing work that amplifies joy and meaning may not bring a short-term ROI boost, but I do think it will matter in the long run. AI is making it easier than ever to create mediocre work and products. But I suspect people will gravitate towards companies that value craftsmanship.

Don’t stop investing in expertise.

We can expect that new AI capabilities will continue to shape L&D trends and advance on-demand performance support. No doubt there will be huge productivity gains from these technologies.

However, we cannot write off the need for skill fluency and the processes that develop it. We cannot let our organizations and leaders discount the need to continue to invest in underlying skills and capabilities. Never assume that inexperienced employees using AI are equally as capable as your internal experts.

I believe the future will dramatically reward people and companies that continue to develop expertise and not merely rely on AI shortcuts. If something really matters, aim for skill fluency.

(And maybe don’t end that daily usage streak on Duolingo just yet.)

The post The Case for Skill Fluency in an AI-Assisted Workplace appeared first on Degreed.

L&D gets lean and focused.

With burned out teams and budgets under increased scrutiny, many L&D leaders are feeling the pinch. This is an opportunity to make learning more efficient and better connected to the business. Innovation often stems from constraints, positioning L&D as the perfect partner during economic downturns to drive experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking by equipping workers with the right skills. The current climate will also force consolidation of a learning technology market that’s become increasingly confusing.

“L&D teams are stretched. Everyone’s looking for ways to target more learning and skills where they’ll have maximum impact right now, and to do it with less wasted time and investment,” said Todd Tauber, SVP of Strategy at Degreed. “We’ve started to see more and more customers ruthlessly prioritizing not just specific people or roles, but also capabilities and even moments that matter most. They’re also looking to squeeze more out of what they already have. And they’re looking to scale their impact through peer learning and mentoring as well as tighter collaboration and crowdsourcing with business teams.”

Through a new learning strategy, Ericsson, for example, has increased the number of workers learning five skills identified as critical to the company’s future success (5G, artificial intelligence + machine learning, collaboration, sales and automation) by 14%. Over 15,000 people are now upskilling in these areas. Simultaneously, it cut the cost of operating its learning technology ecosystem by half.

The job as we know it… retires.

The traditional job is no longer fit-for-purpose. Widespread skills shortages mean employers are getting creative in sourcing the talent they need. The gig economy offers new opportunities for employees and employers — and it’s changing the way teams are set up. People leaders are shifting toward skills-based approaches such as placing workers on projects based on their skills and experience. It’s even coined a new term: the skills-based organization. 

As Deloitte explains: “Jobs are quickly giving way to more fluid ways of working. We found that 63% of current work being performed falls outside of people’s core job descriptions. 81% say work is increasingly performed across functional boundaries, and 36% say work is increasingly being performed by workers outside of the organization, who don’t have defined jobs, at all. We believe the answer is the skills-based organization, a new operating model for work.”

“What we’re seeing now is the culmination of many years of dissatisfaction with rigid job hierarchies that didn’t give employers or individuals the flexibility to adapt work to their needs,” said Yael Kaufmann, Co-founder and COO at Learn In. “Couple that with the drive to become more agile, inclusive and employee-centric, and you can see why so many leading organizations including Unilever and Ericsson are moving toward skill-based.”

Hiring criteria widens.

Hand in hand with the evolution of the traditional job format comes a shift in the expectations of who can complete a job or task. More employers are casting aside degree-level expectations when they aren’t relevant to a role — and not a moment too soon! 

“Boeing, IBM, Google Tata Communications, and Cargill are changing the way they assess a potential employee’s ability to do a role,” said David Blake, CEO of Degreed. “Instead of relying on credentials and job histories to understand someone’s ability to get work done  — and more importantly, develop as their job changes — the talent teams at these organizations are taking a more comprehensive view of a candidate’s skills. By taking this broader approach, employers can recruit from a wider talent pool. Making workforce decisions based on skills is also more accurate because it’s based on what someone can achieve today, not the degree they got a decade ago.

“Degrees are no longer the only gateway to upward mobility,” Blake said. “Now, learning is more intentional. Anyone can learn what they need quickly. And now organizations can build their own programs more cost-effectively.”

Bell Canada, for example, recognized a need to reskill its people in AI, machine learning, business intelligence, cybersecurity, software development, and cloud computing. It did this through an online learning strategy that has, so far, moved 241 employees into new roles that align with its future needs, and 30% of these candidates are women (+8% over market availability).

Learning agility becomes critical.

With the half-life of skills currently teetering at five years and falling fast, many L&D leaders are doubling down on learning agility as a competitive advantage. Cultivating the ability to learn quickly is vital to staying ahead of internal transformations and new market demands. 

“You can improve the learning agility of your workforce through their learning environment, and the opportunities they can access,” according to Annee Bayeux, Degreed Chief Learning Strategist. “Your learning environment consists of infrastructure  — like giving someone enough time and the technology to learn effectively — and culture. Having a strong learning culture additionally impacts your competitiveness and revenue, with workers in organizations with strong cultures 166% more likely to state that their companies grew revenue faster than competitors.”

Work wellbeing experiences endure.

The Covid-19 pandemic shifted expectations, as employers increasingly treated their people as holistic individuals who have goals and concerns affecting their lives outside of work. Look for this positive trend to persist to the benefit of all involved.

“The pandemic highlighted the new relationship between employers and employees, one of empathy and taking care of each other,” said Degreed Chief People Officer Janice Burns. “It’s something that employees want to continue, and employers who aren’t meeting expectations are suffering from phenomenons like quiet quitting and the Great Resignation.”

Workers are no longer satisfied with the nine-to-five workday and instead seek employers who care for them alongside their work. According to the World Economic Forum Good Work Framework, one way employers can achieve this is by focusing on employability and learning culture. Collaborating with workers on their learning and development and aligning their growth with business needs and their personal goals are surefire ways to create good experiences. 

Skills get mastered.

Amid the emphasis on rapid learning comes a new category of “mastery-based learning platforms” as Josh Bersin dubs them. Capability academies, in his eyes, are going to be white hot for L&D teams this year, because they provide ways to unleash the power of subject matter experts at scale. 

“Capability academies are the next big thing in corporate learning because it focuses on deep skill building by bringing everything together in a single place to learn,” said Jen Collins, Director of Academy Enablement at Learn In.  “They support business needs and goals with internal learning content, external programs, assignments, cohort learning, mentoring, experts, real-world experiences and more — potentially delivering enormous ROI and really adding to the bottom line.” 

L&D takes data seriously.

The shift to hybrid and remote work in the pandemic era has led to a significant increase in the digital tools employees are now using in the workplace, including virtual learning platforms. More platforms mean more learning and skill data is available.That, in turn, gives L&D leaders an unparalleled opportunity to become truly data-driven this year.

Gathering data through your HR, recruitment and learning systems gives you a dynamic, real-time overview of the skills in your workforce and what’s being built, so you can see if your workforce is on track to meet future goals and proactively address any skills gaps. Given the big push toward skills-based talent development, we’ve seen a proliferation of skills taxonomies, or “a common language for skills at work” as the World Economic Forum describes them. 

Industry players, including Degreed, are currently partnering with the World Economic Forum to form a common skills taxonomy that will enable organizations to collaborate more effectively and create consistency when vendor technologies integrate. 

“The skills taxonomy is the foundation to all of your skills-based, data-driven L&D initiatives — and farther afield, with any people process in your organization,” said Kelly Palmer, Degreed Chief Learning and Talent Officer. “With a wealth of data now at your fingertips, it’s vital that this common language exists so skill data can power decisions around recruitment, employee experience, upskilling, performance management, onboarding and more.”

Your people will power your success in 2023.

Of course, part of the joy of life is that it can throw curveballs. If one thing is certain this year, it’s that your people are core to navigating your business through life’s unknowns. So support them through it with the right skills and career opportunities.

Build a workplace culture and employee experience that allows them to thrive and your organization will too. 

The post Gazing into the Future of L&D in 2023 appeared first on Degreed.