Continuous rollouts of new tools without sufficient time to adapt is leading to change fatigue, fragmented adoption, and disengagement. When employees are overwhelmed or feel unsupported, productivity drops and performance stalls.

Yet, your business still needs the adoption to stay relevant, see the ROI, and grow your business.

As a leader, you can make it easier.

In moments like these, you need a united front and a confident workforce more than ever. Organizations where CHROs and CIOs align on AI upskilling, cross-functional collaboration, and ethical governance, companies are three times more likely to develop a Gen AI-ready workforce. 

To get there, key members of the C-suite have to band together and give employees the leadership and guidance they need to grow. 

Why CHROs, CLOs, and CIOs for AI Adoption?

As you start to see this large-scale workforce transformation for what it is—people who need to learn a new technology—it’s obvious why the key stakeholders here are Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs), Chief Learning Officers (CLOs), Chief Talent Officers (CTOs), and Chief Information Officers (CIOs). 

Framing it this way also showcases why these teams have to come together to be effective at readying their workforce for AI.

The Art of AI Alignment

Employees aren’t resisting AI, they’re resisting the confusion that comes with it. 

They’re tired of unclear expectations, shifting tools, and too few answers. To drive meaningful adoption, align HR, L&D, and IT around a common goal: delivering clarity and direction that ties directly to business outcomes. When people understand the “why” and the “how,” adoption becomes progress instead of pressure.

Once you’ve got buy-in from all the leaders, here’s what you have to work together to do:

1. Establish a framework with clear AI guidance.

Above all else, people need to know what they can do with AI and what they can’t. No employee wants to be the one putting the company at risk, but without a clear strategy and framework, they’re left to guess. Whether it’s what platforms they use, how they use them, or what they can use them for, people need the guardrails. 

Here are some questions you can consider when creating AI guidance:

• What is safe AI use? 
• What does it mean to use AI responsibly at your company? 
• Are there any AI regulations your company is subject to? (e.g., the EU AI Act)
• Which platforms can they use? Which can’t they? Why?
• What work can be done by AI and what can’t? (This one may require a little experimentation.)
• What are the expectations for employees?
  

2. Establish a plan of action.

As the leaders in the midst of a full-scale workforce transformation, you need clear delineation for which departments will handle which aspects of adoption. For example, there may be some portions of the transformation that are best-served by certain teams and other components that could be owned by any function. Clarity is key.

Here are some questions to consider as you make your plan:

• Who will be responsible for AI tool governance?
• Who will communicate AI guidance, news, and information with the workforce?
• Who will create the learning and upskilling opportunities in AI?
• How will your employees learn to use AI appropriately?
• How will you all work together on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence to stay in sync?

Boost AI Adoption with a United Front

Why are organizations with aligned leaders so much more likely to have a team that’s ready for AI? Because that alignment gives employees two key components of successful Gen AI learning: Support and infrastructure.

Once aligned, you can empower your employees to develop the confidence needed to easily adopt AI through learning experiences—both hands-on AI practice and self-guided learning resources.

As part of that learning, they can also experiment with AI within the new guardrails. Experiential learning is one of the best ways to develop skills and in the process of trial and error, your employees will also be able to suss out the value of different AI tools for different use cases across your organization.

That confidence they’ll develop is the key to beating AI fatigue. Compared to others, Very Confident Gen AI users are:

• Nearly twice as likely to use Gen AI daily
• 4x more likely to apply it to real problems
• 32% more likely to learn on the job
• 38% more likely to get support from peers and mentors
• 77x more likely to engage with and become proficient using Gen AI

With confidence, your employees are no longer wasting brain power trying to figure it all out. Instead, they have the resources, the limitations, and the expectations. They approach AI refreshed. They can experiment and grow with renewed energy.

The post Align Your CHROs, CLOs, and CIOs to Grow AI Adoption appeared first on Degreed.

External hiring is expensive. It takes time, and turnover is high. Indeed, about half (53%) of hiring managers across Canada say finding people with the right skills is their biggest challenge. That’s why learning leaders at the telecommunications firm instead turned to the company’s workforce. The goal? Reskill existing employees with the high-tech skills of tomorrow.

An internal workforce development program created by the company successfully graduated more than 500 professionals with specialized qualifications in high-tech fields. What’s more, the program led to happier and more successful employees and an estimated $18 million in cost savings and productivity gains. 

The Program: A Skills-First Approach to Learning

Like many others, this telecommunications operator experienced a rapid digital transformation. This shifted the demand for workers from traditional retail and technician roles to more advanced positions in software development, AI, cloud computing, and cybersecurity.

“We have very dedicated, engaged, and talented employees,” the company’s director of learning strategy said, adding that the organization was committed to adapting this enthusiastic and hardworking workforce for the future. “So the question was: With a surplus of people on one side, how do we create a bridge to the skills we need?”

Choosing Degreed

With an emphasis on quick and easy-to-access online learning, comprehensive curriculum development led by subject-matter experts from across the organization, and with a rigorous selection process focused on diversity, the strategy came alive. It’s a multi-pronged model—a customized online learning program followed by a two- to three-month temporary job placement for real-world practice.

With online learning as the foundation and skills as the key measurement of progress, the firm looked to Degreed to curate content and manage skills.

“We needed a place that made it easy to build curriculums and tie the pieces together. Not just the clicks to the content, but also the storytelling around it, and Degreed is really good at that compared to other platforms,” the learning strategy director said. “Degreed also allows us to build community by putting cohorts in virtual Groups where they can support each other.”

Managing Skills

“The only reason we were able to do all of this is because we were very laser-focused on skills and the proficiency levels needed for each skill in the reskilling process, “ the learning director said. “At the same time, we already had a little under 2,000 team members in technical fields who needed to stay upskilled. That was why we turned to Degreed—for both the reskilling of new talent and the upskilling of our existing technical workforce.”

The Results: More Engaged Employees, and Lower Costs

The results have been impressive, including: 

• Improved retention and satisfaction. The program in four-and-a-half years boosted retention among participants by more than 10% above the company average, with an average annual participant retention rate of 98%. Participant engagement and satisfaction levels exceed company averages by 8% and 10% points, respectively.
• Career advancement. More thanA substantial 22% of graduates were have been promoted following completion of the program, highlighting its role in career progression.
• Financial impact. The program has already delivered an estimated $18 million in return on investment (ROI), through cost savings from new hire recruitment and productivity gains.

The program is also about creating opportunities for graduates. “The number one measure of success we use is being able to say,  ‘Here’s your new job offer. Here’s your new salary. Here’s your new title,’” the learning director said.

Lessons Learned: Turning Executives into Deans

A key to the success of the program is its strong executive sponsorship—starting at the top with executives who play the role of “deans” in their areas of expertise, to directors representing each business unit, to subject matter experts who help develop the curriculum. 

“Those three layers of sponsorship give people pride, the learning director said.  “At the same time, everyone knows this is a CEO priority. Having that governance and that structure is super important for getting resources—and that included getting funding for Degreed.”

Learning leaders also attribute success to the combination of structured online Pathways in Degreed and on-the-job, experiential learning for participants to reinforce skills, expand their networks, and meet a potential hiring leader. The program includes biweekly touchpoints designed to help cohorts overcome roadblocks.

Seeing the results in action “feels amazing,” the learning director said. “I recently saw that a man who used to work in a retail branch just won an internal award for outstanding software development. He doesn’t have a university degree, but he participated in the program, built up his skills, and is absolutely stellar in his new career.”

Your company can reskill at scale too.

Your company can transform workers into award-winning software developers—or fill other critical roles.

It’s just a matter of following the telecom’s model of building scalable, personalized content and finding the right tools that support reskilling.

And if you do it right, you’ll not only prepare your company for the high-tech future, but you’ll boost employee morale and can save your company millions. Those kinds of reskilling returns beat the risky and expensive strategy of buying skills every time. 

Find out more.

Join us at Degreed LENS 2025, where learning pioneers will share insights, best practices, and bold visions for the future of work.

The post This Telecom Reskilled 500 People into Tech Jobs for Big ROI appeared first on Degreed.

From the start of 2022 through the end of September 2024, upskilling in AI on Degreed grew dramatically among users across eight key industries.

A breakdown reveals employee skill building that’s astounding:

As eager-to-learn workers increasingly dig in, savvy CLOs are paying close attention—engaging with new tools and exploring how AI can advance learning: New ways to pinpoint needs, to hyper-personalize learning experiences, to improve efficiencies, to measure skill development in real-time, and to make better business decisions.

The goal? Orchestrate powerful, relevant, impactful talent development—to provide the right learning to the right people at the right time.

At Degreed, we believe a big part of our job is to help you take advantage of this moment of innovation—and to help you explore and use AI tools for learning in a risk-free, safe way.

“Our investments into automations and a refreshed user experience lay the foundation for everything that’s to come in an AI-first world,” said Max Wessel, Degreed Co-CEO. “Imagine it: AI agents tuned for every learning experience.”

AI and L&D Strategy

Like a learning program elixir, AI-powered learning paired with strategic skill building is a winning combination that can help elevate L&D as a key driver of business growth.

AI-powered learning tech can help you pinpoint needs. You can:

• Generate data on the skills your workforce has.
• Identify emerging skills in your industry.
• Find skill gaps that need to be filled to execute key business strategies.
• Manage and harmonize data from across your ecosystem.

AI-powered learning tech can help you personalize development. You can:

• Automate workflows to deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time.
• Provide AI-powered virtual coaches to every employee.
• Deliver highly relevant content and experiences that are easy to find, based on each employee’s unique skill set and proficiency levels.
• Transform the workforce you have into the workforce you need through efficient upskilling.

AI-powered learning tech can help you measure change. You can:

• Assess expertise to validate skill growth.
• Harness AI-assisted analytics for quick answers to important questions.
• Keep your employee’s data up-to-date with AI-powered profile skill suggestions.

AI and the Evolving L&D Toolset

At Degreed, our enterprise customers currently average more than 30 learning-technology integrations. As AI plays a bigger and bigger role in powering learning platforms, personalized content creation, and L&D program performance analytics, we expect to see it infused across our clients’ learning-tech ecosystems.

With this in mind, we’re dedicated to creating and integrating AI-powered L&D toolsets that deliver.

“GenAI is the ultimate people pleaser, trained to deliver results to try to make you happy. But when it comes to learning, that’s not always what we need,” said Taylor Blake, Degreed Senior Vice President for New Initiatives. “There are significant challenges and opportunities. The key challenge is making sure AI is accurate, effective, and purposeful—not just appeasing us with its people pleasing tendencies.”

Degreed + AI: Going All-In

At Degreed, we’ve been hard at work testing new technologies, tuning models, experimenting with workflows, and rolling out new features and functions—all to enhance our platform’s value and unlock better ways to help advance your business.

Pinpoint skill gaps.

Degreed uses AI to provide actionable insights into skill gaps across organizations. This enables businesses to identify critical areas for development, ensuring resources are focused where they are most needed. AI also enhances skills inference and taxonomy normalization, simplifying the management of complex skills data​​.

Personalize learning experiences at scale.

AI-driven personalization with Degreed Maestro ensures that learning pathways are tailored to individual roles and career goals. This includes cohort-based learning, mentorship, and certifications. By aligning development opportunities with emerging needs, Degreed accelerates skill-building across global teams​​.

Automate administration.

Through AI-powered automation, Degreed reduces the administrative burden of delivering and tracking learning. Automations deliver the right learning to the right employees at the right time, streamlining operations and boosting efficiency​​.

Enhance measurement and ROI tracking.

Degreed standardizes and integrates learning data across platforms, using AI to provide real-time tracking of progress and impact. This allows organizations to measure the effectiveness of their L&D initiatives, maximize ROI, and make informed, data-driven decisions​​.

Find out more.

Watch Degreed Vision 2024 on demand—for a deep dive into more details and prototypes in action.

The post How Savvy CLOs Are Driving Big Business Impact with AI appeared first on Degreed.

With 98% of business executives planning to incorporate more skills-based approaches, aggregating, analyzing, and acting on essential skills and skill data is no longer an option for L&D, HR, Talent, and Change Management professionals.

Indeed, savvy organizations are already incorporating skills-based strategies, and they’re seeing impressive results. They’re 98% more likely to retain high performers, 57% more likely to be agile, and 107% more likely to place talent efficiently.

It’s time to put skills and skill data to work. 

Let’s face it: harnessing skills is complicated when you’re getting started. 

Luckily, Degreed has been working on this for years. Recognizing essential skills, making skills actionable, and driving impactful learning has underpinned the Degreed mission from Day One. For years, we’ve helped organizations simplify the process of identifying changes in their skill supplies. We’ve helped them scale learning through personalized development. And we’ve helped them measure change to show impact.

Degreed can help you too, by putting essential skills and skill data to work across your organization, so you can develop your workforce to be ready for anything.

Using Skills to… Pinpoint Needs

To get started, you need skill data. But obtaining data on your workforce is easier said than done. That’s why Degreed tackles this challenge in three ways.

1. Inferring Skills

Skills inference extracts information about your employees’ skills from existing sources like resumes and job descriptions, so you can quickly and easily gather data on the skills of your workforce. We offer skills inference in multiple aspects of our solution.

For example, when learners onboard with the Degreed LXP, we help populate their skill profiles by suggesting skills based on their job roles and resumes. And by using AI to automatically map skills to roles, we make it easy to get started identifying what skills you need for the roles at your organization. We’re even exploring new AI skills inference capabilities to discover hidden talent at your company.

2. Assessing Skills

It’s important to understand not only what skills your workforce has, but at what levels of expertise. That’s why we offer multiple methods to indicate proficiency levels, including Self Ratings, Manager Ratings, and Peer Ratings to provide a high fidelity view of your people’s skills. Adaptive questionnaires provide another method for validating your people’s skills and skill levels.

3. Managing Skill Data

To manage skill data, you need tools to analyze and understand your skill supply, fill data gaps, manage your taxonomy, and normalize skill data and labels from across your ecosystem. Degreed Skills does exactly that.

Degreed enables skill scale normalization. A skill scale measures skill proficiencies, typically using a numeric range. With Degreed you can normalize inconsistent scales from across your learning and HR tech stack—so you can measure all skills against the same rubric: yours. 

Let’s say your organization wants to measure skill proficiency using a 4-point scale, but your HCM uses a 5-point scale and your LXP an 8-point scale. Degreed normalizes those differences from across your tech stack, so you can see all your skill data in your preferred scale.

Similarly, the tools across your tech stack likely use different skill labels. For example, your HCM may use the word “Innovate” as a skill label, but your LXP may use “Innovative” as the label for the same skill. With Degreed, you can normalize skill labels so they’re consistent. In addition, Degreed removes duplicates, misspellings, and synonyms and accounts for multiple languages. 

And while AI makes recommendations for normalization, with Degreed you’re ultimately in the driver’s seat. You can override AI recommendations, meaning you have more control over your data.

In addition, our taxonomy management features empower you to create and leverage a bespoke taxonomy that meets your organization’s needs.

Using Skills to… Personalize Development

Once you have skill data, it’s time to put that data into action to drive better outcomes. But how do you use skill data to better personalize learning?

Degreed helps you. . . 

Orchestrate learning using skill data. 

To orchestrate learning, you need to deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time. Degreed empowers this in many ways.

With Degreed, you can create segments of learners based on many factors—including their skills and skill levels—and then automatically assign learning or send messages and nudges to those segments. 

For example, you can create a segment of everyone at your organization with a skill level 1 in Artificial Intelligence and then assign everyone in that segment foundational learning that is essential to leveraging AI at your business. You can even use Automations to send nudges that remind learners to complete that content.

Degreed also helps you. . . 

Connect learners based on based skills.

Research shows that 75% of people prefer learning with others over learning by themselves. Harnessing skill data is a perfect way for you to facilitate that colleague-to-colleague learning collaboration.

In Degreed, manager dashboards show people leaders data about what skills their team members have, enabling those managers to optimize team strengths and coach individuals on where to focus for maximum growth. With Degreed, you can also use skill data to automatically recommend mentors to individual learners based on the skills learners want to grow. 

And Degreed helps you. . . 

Curate experiences for skill growth.

High-quality curation incorporates skill data, to ensure people receive the right learning and experiences they need to grow critical skills at speed and scale. 

In Degreed, you can curate Plans and Pathways to target the growth of skills important to your organization’s success. In addition, you can create Academies that provide your people with cohort-based learning opportunities for deep skill building. 

In addition, Degreed helps your people to. . .  

Discover resources that are personalized according to an individual’s skill profile.

Learning is impactful when it’s relevant to the learner, which is why it’s so important to help your employees discover the right content for their needs and goals.

When learners search for learning resources inside the Degreed LXP, our AI surfaces personalized, relevant content and experience recommendations based on the individual’s skills, goals, and experiences. 

Using Skills to… Measure Change

Once you’ve accomplished skill growth, it’s important to show off your results. With Degreed, you can measure skill growth to demonstrate the impact of learning across your business. 

Degreed skill analytics provide powerful visualizations that simplify complex skill data—so you can uncover the impact of learning on skill growth, identify supply and demand of skills across your organization, and make smarter investments in your people. 

All employees using Degreed have a skill profile where they list their current skills, they select focus skills, they obtain skill ratings, and they track experiences and content tied to their skill development. Not only do these profiles help drive a personalized learning experience, they also allow individuals to track their development and growth. 

But measuring change shouldn’t happen in a silo. Combining data from across your Learning and HR ecosystem provides a more holistic view of change and helps you capitalize on it, for example by identifying talent for projects and roles. That’s why interoperability achieved through integrations like our bi-directional skills sync with Workday is so important to Degreed. It allows distinct systems to easily share information and work together, and it reduces the manual work of combining data from multiple tools.

What This All Means for Your Business

Pinpointing needs, personalizing development, and measuring change are great, but why do they matter?

These actions matter because they unlock your ability to develop a workforce that’s ready for anything. From market shifts and competitive threats to economic shocks, there’s no telling what the future holds. That’s why it’s so important to develop an agile workforce and put mechanisms (like efficient, personalized learning) into place to facilitate agility and allow your people and your business to respond effectively to changes and challenges.  

This is how you transform the people you have into the employees your business needs. 

Find out more.

Start using skills to transform your workforce.

Leading organizations around the globe use Degreed to prepare for the future, pinpoint their needs, personalize development, and measure change.

Ready to learn more about how Degreed can help you know, learn, and grow the skills your business needs? Get a Degreed demo today.

The post Knowing and Growing the Essential Skills Your Business Needs appeared first on Degreed.

How is your L&D department helping? 

Whatever you do, you must show that your learning programs improve skills, productivity, revenue, or other important metrics for leadership. In other words, you must show how L&D delivers the best ROI of learning, not just any old ROI of learning. 

Companies have no time or money to waste, so if you can’t prove your learning solutions are solving critical business problems, your L&D budget could be sliced. Protect and expand your budget and influence. How? Upskill yourself in tracking and explaining success metrics that matter the most to leadership.

Here’s how to find the best way to track and communicate the best ROI of learning and development in your organization.

What are the best metrics for ROI of learning?

The metrics you track to understand L&D within your team are great, but they’re not the ones executives will care about or understand. You have to translate them for the C-Suite.

L&D leaders know that the impact of learning reaches far beyond a balance sheet, but they tend to speak in metrics like course completions, learning hours achieved, and engagement surveys. The problem is that executives don’t always see how these successes cause profit. They don’t always see the business value. You have to get them there.

Some measures are qualitative, like worker confidence and morale. But make no mistake, qualitative benefits do affect the company’s bottom line. Combining qualitative and quantitative metrics gives you the hard, relevant data points executives look for—and helps tell the human side of the story.

More Revenue

The absolute best way to prove the ROI of learning and development at your organization is by linking it to revenue generation. It’s a clear signal to executives that money spent on tools, processes, and L&D personnel are investments, not simply a cost.

Where should you look for links to revenue generation? Check your company’s financial documents and see how they slice up revenue. Then grab revenue metrics from those areas and connect them to specific L&D initiatives. Here are a few examples:

Sales 

Sales is the number one place to find opportunities to link L&D to revenue, so make it your first stop. 

For a quantitative measurement, get a baseline on sales numbers before you deliver a specific training, then measure them afterward. Compare them to the same period in previous years to account for seasonality. Also, consider the typical sales cycle for specific products or services. If it takes three months to close a deal, the true impact of a new sales training program will take at least that long to show up in the data.

As a quantitative measure, look to customer NPS scores. If sales associates are successfully matching customers with the best products for their needs, properly setting expectations, and weeding out customers that aren’t a good fit, then customers will be happier with their purchases—and your company. You’ll also be able to tie your efforts to boosting brand reputation, customer loyalty, and overall long-term customer value.

Product

Imagine starting a new program to help turn research and development (R&D) into successful new products. One metric could be analyzing the change over time in the ratio of R&D spending to new-product sales. To do this, understand how each dollar of R&D investment translates to new-product sales before and after your first cohort, then regularly afterward. 

Depending on your industry, your R&D-to-sales cycle might take three or more years. (Yes, showing the value of learning can be a particularly long game to play). But no matter the sales cycle length, get a baseline before you launch your academy, then track these for several years afterward through multiple new product launches. Once you have your results, pair them with product reviews and share any stand-out quotes from reviewers.

Fewer costs

Sometimes the ROI of learning lies in what a company doesn’t spend. So if you can’t show executives how you make them money, the next best thing is to show how you save them money. The greatest opportunities to save your company money are often in salaries, retention, and recruitment, so start there.

Salaries

According to a LinkedIn study, 74% of Gen-Zers want to learn new skills—about as much as they want to be successful (73%) and be financially secure (73%). And that means companies with robust skill development can attract new talent at cost-efficient salaries.

Recruiters can leverage growth opportunities against salary considerations to pull in more talent at a lower cost. You can help by showcasing your learning and growth opportunities in your company’s employee value proposition (EVP). Once you do, compare changes in average salary from before and afterward. Continue to track these numbers as you launch and showcase programs for specific types of roles. 

Recruitment

When learning is part of your company’s EVP, recruiters can expand their hiring pool to candidates who have skills adjacent to a role’s skills. In other words, they can hire people poised to quickly upskill—which can be even faster and more cost effective than hiring a candidate who already has a full skillset. Plus, you’ll be giving new hires additional opportunities that can boost job satisfaction.

So alongside changes in salary, show executives any improvements in employee NPS scores of trainable new hires. You’ll show that L&D has saved your company recruitment costs now—and how you’ll help keep employees engaged and loyal in the long run.

Career Mobility 

Speaking of recruitment, it’s no secret among HR, Talent, and L&D that companies often save money building skills internally rather than buying or borrowing them. But this can be news for executives.

Often, executives use a simplified equation to calculate recruitment costs. Many consider only the administrative costs of hiring a candidate—which comes out to around $4,000 per role. You know that getting a new employee up to speed with onboarding—and continuing to develop them—costs far more. Gallup estimates that voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses alone over $1 trillion annually.

Retaining more talent and promoting from within the organization can put a huge dent in recruitment costs, so include them in your reports to the C-suite. Calculate how long it takes to onboard new employees and get them performing optimally—which can take up to three years. Then multiply that by their compensation for that time. Amortize the cost of creating and maintaining that training and add that to the new-hire price tag, too.

Retention

According to Gallup, employee engagement has been steadily dropping since 2021. And low engagement leads to lower retention. Gallup also found that opportunities to learn and grow dropped more than many other elements of engagement. 

The ability to upskill and reskill employees helps your company keep the talent it has while reducing the need to recruit new talent. And that means recruitment savings.

For most L&D pros, that won’t come as a surprise. You’ve known that learning helps keep workers engaged, and engaged employees are more likely to stick around. But for the C-suite, the connection may not be as obvious. 

Show how L&D is combatting low engagement—and turnover—by tying your most robust learning programs to retention rates among the employees who engage in learning. Go even further by calculating recruitment costs—and by multiplying them by the employees you’ve helped hold onto.

Recently a bank shared how participants in leadership training significantly boosted retention and career mobility. And they did it using specific metrics to illustrate their point. In fact, this customer story is a bit of a masterclass on proving the value of your learning programs to business leaders. If you’re curious about how they did it, download Bank Boosts Employee Performance & Cuts L&D Costs. 

Business alignment is critical.

Tracking and communicating the ROI of learning is challenging, but if you balance quantitative and qualitative metrics, you can tell the story of your impact in meaningful ways. Deciding which metrics to use can be tricky, but you don’t have to come up with them in a vacuum. In fact, it’s better if you let executives tell you which metrics they want to see. They’ll do this by setting business goals.

If you’re not sure what leaders are trying to solve, download our guide How to Win Learning and Influence the C-Suite. You’ll get a step-by-step guide to aligning learning programs with business goals—and to making L&D a key partner in solving business critical problems.

Will your company be like those losing $116 million per year in productivity due to the skills gap? When you discover critical company goals, find a way to align learning with them, and pitch your ideas to the C-suite, it doesn’t have to be.

The post Speak Up: How to Convey the ROI of Learning appeared first on Degreed.

It’s difficult to say. The most accurate metric we have on the topic is The Brandon Hall Group 2020 Learning Strategy Study, and the results aren’t reassuring. While almost all L&D leaders [87%] agree that business alignment is critical, “only 13% said they were ready to take action on creating it.” 

Clearly, there is room for improvement. But L&D does so many great things to help the business, surely there is more alignment than this statistic shows? Perhaps there is more alignment that either side knows—it’s just the message is lost in translation. 

Your L&D could be aligned with the business, but maybe you’re just not using the right words or metrics. To truly understand how aligned L&D and leadership are, L&D first needs to learn to speak the language of the business. 

L&D-ism and Metrics aren’t impressive to C-suite.

Imagine you’re in a Zoom waiting room with only your CEO. They ask how things are going in L&D. In the 15 seconds before anyone else joins the call, you say, “Great! The team just told me that course completion rates are up 10% this quarter.” 

While that metric might impress a fellow L&D professional, it won’t impress your CEO. In fact, it’s likely your CEO would follow up with, “Okay, but how does that help our business? And the CEO would have to ask those questions—not because they’re trying to throw shade or be difficult—but because they genuinely wouldn’t understand what an increase in course completion rates means for the business. 

So what’s wrong with this Zoom exchange? A disconnect between L&D and other business units persists because activities like “the learning experience” and metrics like “participation rate” are almost exclusively cited and understood in L&D circles. It’s like a a regional dialect; travel to another place and the meaning and significance of L&D-ism are lost.

L&D matters when it speaks the language of business. 

What language should L&D use when speaking to the C-suite? The language C-suite uses and understands. Does this mean you have to use cringe-worthy words like “synergy?” That depends. If your leadership consistently uses terms like “initiatives,” “business outcomes,” or “KPIs” then consider using those. But don’t use business jargon for the sake of business jargon. Remember, it’s all about clear communication.

So let’s consider that Zoom interaction again—this time using business language: 

Notice that not only does the example use a leadership favorite term, “business strategy,” but the takeaway is that L&D is aligning with the business goals. The reason you are using leadership metrics and language is to demonstrate that you understand what they want and that you’re helping them achieve it. 

Even your L&D metrics need to be translated.

Along with the right language, L&D also needs to translate its metrics for leadership. In a LinkedIn article, Paul Petrone and Allaya Cooks-Campbell explain that “measuring utilization and completion rates tells the company one thing—how frequently users are engaging with their training programs. It doesn’t tell them how effective the training is at improving employee experience or impacting the bottom line.” 

Because the traditional L&D metrics don’t include the ROI leadership craves, L&D must use different metrics when talking to leadership. Now don’t misread this: this is in no way an argument that L&D should abandon all its traditional L&D metrics. Knowing the utilization of a learning tool, rate of learning, or rate of completion is effective in understanding the efficacy of your program from an L&D perspective. But when you talk to leaders in the C-suite, they don’t want to know how well the program is going. They want to know how it affects their bottom line. 

What are the best metrics to use? When in doubt, connect learning to money saved, money earned, and risks reduced. Also look at the specific metrics that your leadership constantly uses and discusses. Look at KPIs and business metrics to find ways to connect learning to the bigger business picture. 

Susie Lee, SVP & Client Innovation Officer at Degreed, explains this best in her article, “The New Learning Metrics: Demonstrating Business Value and Impact.” She argues that “new learning metrics are less transtional. They deemphasize time spent learning and focus more on usage through a lens of workforce engagement. They look at social learning and consider content. They address the skills your people have and those they need. And they convey how all of these data points influence the results that matter to your stakeholders, not just your learning, talent, and HR teams.” 

Ready to learn more? 

Don’t just ask questions on the off-chance you’ll get stuck in a Zoom waiting room with an executive. Speaking C-suite is a skill you should use in all your interactions with leadership. A great example of how you can use this new skill is when you pitch new learning initiatives to leadership. 

Watch a recent webinar, Speaking C-Suite: How To Tie Learning to Business Outcomes, to explore how HR, L&D, and Talent professionals can think, measure, and speak about learning in ways that resonate better with leadership. 

Tania Palen, a Director of Talent Management at Five9, will share a step-by-step process for preparing a winning business case for your L&D initiatives.

In this webinar, you’ll learn to:

• Frame the business opportunity. 
• Define the right learning metrics to build your case for change.
• Bring it all together in a compelling, relevant narrative. 

Register today

The post Found in Translation: Bridging the Gap Between L&D and the C-Suite appeared first on Degreed.

The financial hardships rooted in Covid-19 — now compounded by threat of recession — can devastate your company’s revenue and obliterate any business unit. Organizations around the world are operating on economic quicksand. In a climate like this, L&D programs are too easily discontinued. 

Retaining your budget is imperative. If your organization is going to survive another economic downturn, it needs learning intact to help, retain and upskill top talent and get ahead of the competition.

If you want L&D to remain essential, now’s the time to closely align your learning with the most critical goals of your overall business.

Alignment requires understanding.

Where can you start? Look to the near term and tweak L&D to match important business objectives now and for the next quarter. By thinking through this with urgency, you can equip the right people to make the right work happen as soon as possible.

“The number one measure they [senior executives] want to see is a business impact. Number two is ROI,” according to a recent article in Chief Learning Officer by analytics expert Jack Phillips and former utility executive Patti Phillips, who together serve as Chairman and CEO of the ROI Institute, respectively. 

Imagine an HR team that’s so tightly aligned to its line-of-business counterparts it doesn’t submit separate budget requests. When IT implements a new system, part of the IT budget includes training programs sourced or curated in partnership with an in-house L&D expert. Or when Sales leaders want to expand into new territories, they request headcount and an accompanying sales enablement program with help from learning partners.

“Most executives see learning as a cost, not an investment. When this is the case, they cut costs to save resources,” the Phillipses said.

Alignment today requires thinking through recession.

Programs at risk typically land in one of four categories, according to the Phillipses.

1. Expensive programs (a good cost-cutting target)
2. Soft skills initiatives (often considered “fluff”)
3. Long-term or culture-change programs
4. Easily-postponed initiatives (including new ones)

As an L&D leader keen to prevent cuts, it’s important to identify your specific risks and strategize your defense and determine which programs you can stand to cut a little.

The Phillipses identify several key actions:

1. Rally your supporters.

Budget decisions are typically not made alone. L&D leaders should call in all favors.

“Although the top leader may have final approval, other key executives will influence that decision. Think about the major projects you have successfully conducted with different functions of your organization, such as Operations or Marketing. That success positions you to ask those department leaders to support L&D funding in the budget meetings.”

2. Buy time.

It’s rare for a budget cut to be enforced absent discussion and analysis, adding you can use that time to bolster your defenses. “Most executives will allow you that time.”

3. Show impact and ROI.

If you can convince executives they’ll get more out of a project than they put into it, you may be able to save or obtain funding. Preparing and sharing a credible ROI forecast may be necessary. And it’s not just the Phillipses saying this. Learning leaders across the L&D space back this approach. As Senior L&D Manager Megan Dillon recently said: “Tie it back to dollars.” 

We here at Degreed would add that the right metrics — data points that take success measurement above and beyond traditional L&D methodologies — can breathe new life and value into your learning team’s narrative.

“Telling your workforce development story — in fresh ways with new metrics — can capture the attention of your business leaders and make your learning program an important business priority,” according to Susie Lee, Degreed Senior Vice President & Global Business Transformation Officer. She encourages L&D pros to communicate metrics that reinforce the value and impact of learning, talent development, and career mobility. “It’s about your company’s highest priorities and biggest goals and demonstrating how an investment in people can help achieve them.”

In their book, The Expertise Economy, Degreed CEO & Co-founder David Blake and Degreed Chief Learning & Talent Officer Kelly Palmer caution corporate learning is often viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue-generating function. “Learning typically becomes more reactive than strategic. For example, one business leader asks for a conscious bias training program, another wants an agile development training program, and maybe a third asks for an onboarding program.”

As Blake and Palmer noted: “A strong learning leader who understands business can develop a… strategy based on data from several sources and show how this learning can impact both the business and employees in meaningful ways.” 

The Right Metrics — Moving Beyond “Meh.”

Tracking and sharing course completions and hours of training won’t effectively reinforce the value of learning to your CEO, business leaders, managers, individual contributors or anyone else.

Combined with efficiency ratios like hours of learning consumed per worker, the cost of learning per hour, staff-to-worker ratios and your modality mix, these metrics begin to tell a basic story of how your workforce interacts with your learning initiatives.

But those metrics don’t confirm that anyone actually learned anything.

You can do more:

Tell your engagement story.

Low employee engagement costs the global economy $7.8 trillion and accounts for 11% of GDP globally, according to the State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report by Gallup. The analysis of 112,312 business units in 96 countries found a strong link between engagement and performance outcomes including retention, productivity, safety and profitability.

Your engagement story at the end of the day is about driving business results. By understanding if your people are personally committed to their career development and advancement you can determine whether you’re creating a culture of innovation and evolution that drives profitability.

Focus your learning data on:

• Activations
• Login frequencies
• Monthly Average Users (MAUs) and whether they’re returning
• Assignments made and completed
• Net promoter score (NPS)

Communicate your social story.

The goal here is understanding how people at every level of your organization are sharing their expertise, so learning isn’t solely a structured series of L&D-driven events. It’s about discovering how your people are interacting to help each other via crowd-sourced, collaborative, peer-to-peer upskilling. It helps you identify who people are turning to for guidance, so you can find, engage, and retain influencers and experts. All of this can help make sourcing and curating learning content more efficient.

Look at:

• Trending or emerging skills
• Recommendations for content, people, and experiences
• Takeaways, including the percentage of workers logging them
• Influencers
  • Subject matter experts (SMEs)
  • Followers
  • Posts
  • Organization network analysis (ONA)

Relay your skills story.

Developing a skills story demonstrates what capabilities your organization has currently and those it still needs. These metrics answer the question “Are learning programs helping drive or save revenue?” 

Address:

• Capability gaps
• Emerging skills
• Velocity (how quickly people are learning)
• Skill shift (how quickly individual or organizational skill profiles change)
• Skill value (the dollar value of in-demand skills)
• Skill cost avoidance (recruitment savings from internal upskilling)
• Workforce readiness
• Talent identification
• Career mobility
• Trends

Still not convinced? Look to the horizon.

If your company’s goals are to survive, recover and grow, then diminishing your capacity to deliver the learning your company needs could be its downfall.

When the economy does bounce back and hiring picks up, companies that have either previously cut L&D programs or full departments find themselves behind the curve, according to learning industry consultant Andrea Maliska, owner of Rebel Learn.

Those companies “are left with no onboarding programs for new hires, no role-specific training for key roles in profit centers and no product training to make sure sales, support, and product teams understand the intricacies of a product to successfully sell, support, and evolve the product,” she said. 

“All the money, time and effort that once was put into the L&D program seemingly went up in flames when the program was cut or stopped being supported. This can create a huge impact on a business that is trying to hire back the best talent and land the best-fit clients.”

The post Beating Recession: Align L&D and Retain Your Budget appeared first on Degreed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in early 2022 that over 48 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in 2021. Employees are citing low pay and the inability to grow as some of the top reasons why they are leaving their current employers. In fact, workers are 12 times more likely to quit their jobs if they do not have sufficient professional development opportunities at the company, said a 2021 IBM study. 

To remain competitive and attract and retain top talent in this market, organizations must provide professional development opportunities to workers. By providing employees with the right skills, organizations see a higher retention rate, higher employee engagement and more internal talent mobility. 

Calculating an exact return on investment for upskilling and reskilling your employees can be difficult. Luckily, you don’t have to do it on your own. In a recent study we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct, we’ve found that Degreed clients achieved 312% ROI and $4.7M net present value (NPV) over three years.  

To help you calculate your own economic impact, we’ve commissioned a dynamic calculator from Forrester Consulting to help you determine your organization’s ROI for implementing the leading learning experience platform, Degreed. Reach out to a Degreed representative to calculate your own ROI. 

Curious about more findings? We’ve laid out a snippet of them: 

Want to Learn More?

These findings are just the beginning. Read about all the results in the The Total Economic Impact Of Degreed study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Download it today.

Want to calculate your own ROI? Reach out to a Degreed representative, we’re excited to help guide your organization to savings.

The post Calculate the ROI on Upskilling appeared first on Degreed.

The Forrester Wave: Learning Management Systems and Experience Platforms, Q4 2021

Learning experience platforms, or LXPs, wield hefty influence across the elearning technology marketplace.

Why? Because what people experience as they build skills is at the heart of a strategic and successful learning solution.

It’s a belief that’s transcended the history of Degreed dating to when we pioneered the LXP. And it’s a belief that guides our decisions today, in pursuit of innovations designed to simultaneously benefit workers and the companies they work for.

To quote our Co-Founder David Blake: “You will learn more over a lifetime of learning administered by the hands of HR and L&D than you will in your lifetime administered to you by a university or professors… It should be our skills, irrespective of how or where we develop them, that should be what determines our opportunities, and I wanted to be part of the solution.”

Recently, Degreed joined select companies Forrester invited to participate in The Forrester Wave: Learning Management Systems and Experience Platforms, Q4 2021 report. In this evaluation, Degreed was cited as a Leader and its top scores came in the talent ecosystem integration, product vision, execution roadmap and commercial model criteria.

In the Degreed vendor profile, the Forrester Wave stated: “Degreed is investing in adding select learning management system (LMS) functionality while doubling down on its commitment to bring opportunities to ‘learn by doing’ and ‘signals’ about learning from all parts of the work ecosystem to craft the learner experience and provide robust workforce data to the employer.”

5 Ways LXPs Have Influenced the Learning Tech Market

The marks made by LXPs are undeniable. Let’s explore some of their significant contributions to new standards for learning — and how Degreed fits in. 

1. Applying the science of learning to structure, capabilities and user experience:

Degreed engages and instructs in all the ways people learn. It promotes diverse learning experiences and content (user-generated content, social learning, articles, videos, classes and more). This includes the ability to create, syndicate, and consume content. Our research consistently shows people learn in a multitude of ways, inside and outside of work, structured and unstructured, yet it’s not always tracked and displayed. 

Degreed also provides ways to give feedback on people’s progress, offering both guidance for workers and visibility for the organization. And it motivates people with clear career paths and relevant development opportunities (see more on this below in No. 2).

Another critical piece? The ability to utilize behavioral science to recommend and connect users with relevant resources, experts and experiences.

2. Delivering personalized, relevant learning in the flow of work:

Today’s world of work incorporates multiple learning modalities including in-person, virtual instructor-led, video, self-paced, experiential and social learning. Any one of these options can prove crucial to someone learning a new skill or role.

Even though there are now many ways to deliver learning, choosing learning and career development opportunities that fit the needs of individual workers remains complex. To cut through this, Degreed uses skill inferences, or “signals” as referred to by Forrester Wave, to deliver a personalized learning experience. This enables us to recommend relevant content based on a learner’s needs and goals to match them to the right on-the-job opportunities (see more on this in No. 4). 

Our most recent How the Workforce Learns report found that workers who rate their learning cultures as positive are more likely to practice all three types of learning experiences in the 70|20|10 model: experimental, interactive, and instructional. And they’re more likely to get diverse perspectives inside and outside their organizations, proving that learning can happen on or off the clock.

Our platform runs on demand in the cloud, and it’s available anytime, anywhere on the Degreed mobile app. With our Google Chrome browser extension, learners can dig deeper into topics they come across on the web and access relevant learning content immediately. And we integrate with Microsoft Teams. 

3. Integrating tools that empower L&D:

Now more than ever, the future of L&D means delivering personalized learning remotely at less cost. At the same time, expectations that were once the province of HR have now landed squarely on the modern CEO’s agenda. 

Traditionally, L&D teams have been responsible for the performance of workers, legal compliance requirements and general workforce readiness to meet business needs. Those old expectations remain, joined by new initiatives. Learning leaders are now increasingly responsible for making the workforce more agile, innovative, healthy, inclusive and more — often amid talent shortages.

Degreed helps learning leaders be strategic business partners who have a huge stake in business performance and resiliency. Our strategic integrations now streamline platform admin and provide data that allows leaders to make better decisions about their programs, set and understand success measures, pinpoint resources most needed and anticipate the future.

4. Providing experiential learning opportunities to practice new skills: 

Career mobility and experiential learning are already seen as benefits for workers. But what if learning leaders instead focus on helping people build and practice new skills that can deliver measurable impact across an entire organization?

When you hire people, you’re making a long-term investment in their success. That investment is about more than finding the right fit when you’ve got a role to fill. It’s about encouraging and supporting people’s development over time — to cultivate mutual trust and help them grow with internal opportunities. 

Learning and HR leaders have always understood the high cost of employee turnover, but recent research from Gallup shines a bright light on just how significant it can be: the impact on productivity for disengaged employees is equal to 18% of their annual salary. By Gallup’s math, for a company of 10,000 employees with an average salary of $50,000 each, disengagement costs $60.3 million a year.

The Degreed experiential learning solution creates a dynamic opportunity marketplace that connects your people to the projects, gigs, stretch assignments and mentorships that matter most to your business right now.

5. Igniting targeted skill building with intuitive, data-powered tools:

Today’s complex world of work requires a proactive emphasis on resiliency. As a result, every company needs more sophisticated ways of looking at the skills and capabilities of workers to better plan and pivot.

Degreed Intelligence provides a suite of tools designed to help workers, managers and learning leaders understand and build skills they need across the organization. It’s a cost-effective way to turn learning and skill-building activity into insights you can use to understand skill supply and demand and make smarter decisions. 

For example, Skill Coach gives people managers an intuitive toolkit for discovering, building, and rating team skills — to set development goals and target learning where it matters most. Skill Review uses machine learning and skill insights to provide real-time skill intelligence on the skills your business needs as well as who has them, who needs them and who wants them.

We generate our analytics from that data and then structure them as in-app dashboard reports, visualizations and insights.

Our new algorithms pull skill data from Degreed and package it into simple and intelligent dashboards. This purpose-built software enhances the Degreed platform and takes the complexity out of data science.

When advanced skill analytics give you the bigger picture, you’re ready to plan, respond and be a better strategic business partner.

The Future of Learning Looks Brighter Than Ever

We’re excited about where the market’s going. And we’re bullish on continued developments at Degreed that will strengthen choice of content, personalization and machine learning capabilities.

These innovations and more promise to deepen the learning experience and lift the burden of curation and tracking, so learning leaders can step into a more valuable role and become business superheroes — supporting a skilled workforce that uses continuous learning to meet personal goals as well as key business objectives. 

The post LXPs Are Here to Stay — and They’re Driving Business Strategy appeared first on Degreed.

Maybe your program’s already a priority. You’ve still got a story to tell, one that reinforces the value and impact of learning, talent development, and career mobility. It’s about your company’s highest priorities and biggest goals and demonstrating how an investment in people can help achieve them.

For many organizations, there’s an immediate urgency to consider. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently mandated human capital disclosure by all publicly traded companies in the United States. This change took effect in November and is expected to eventually affect privately-held companies as well as nonprofits, which means CFOs and CHROs will be asking for metrics that are “material to the business.”

Details Make a Good Narrative Great

The right metrics — data points that take success measurements above and beyond traditional L&D methodologies — can bring your new learning story to life.

In their book, The Expertise Economy, Degreed CLO Kelly Palmer and Co-founder David Blake caution that corporate learning is often viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue-generating function. “Learning typically becomes more reactive than strategic. For example, one business leader asks for a conscious bias training program, another wants an agile development training program, and maybe a third asks for an onboarding program.”

As Palmer and Blake put it, “A strong learning leader who understands business can develop a… strategy based on data from several sources and show how this learning can impact both the business and employees in meaningful ways.” 

Where We’ve Been: Metrics Important to Learning

If you’re like many HR, talent, and learning professionals, you’re looking to be a business enabler who’s more data-driven and strategic about workforce development, so you can guide decisions and investments that deliver results.

Senior executives and CEOs want their teams to lead with advanced analytics, according to Deloitte. In that same study, organizations that reported having the strongest cultural orientation to data-driven insights and decision-making were twice as likely to have reported exceeding business goals in the prior 12 months. Findings from the new Degreed State of Skills 2021 report show that HR professionals rank advanced data analytics among the top ten in-demand skills.

However, traditional learning metrics like course completions and hours of training often aren’t enough to reinforce the value of learning to your CEO, business leaders, managers, individual contributors, or anyone else. Combined with efficiency ratios like hours of learning consumed per worker, the cost of learning per hour, staff-to-worker ratios, and your modality mix, these metrics can begin to tell a basic story of how your workforce interacts with your learning initiatives, but they don’t confirm that anyone actually learned anything.

An employee survey or “happy sheet” might tell you how workers felt about their latest learning experience, help you see how they used what they learned (from their perspectives), and provide some qualitative feedback on how to improve L&D. But this data doesn’t stretch beyond L&D. It isn’t much use to anyone else.

These learning metrics will always be important to track. But as HR and L&D efforts increasingly influence business strategies, advanced companies go further.

Where We’re Going: Metrics Important to Business

Your business has unique needs and goals; they’re the best place to start. 

Perhaps retaining salespeople is a big priority. Maybe it’s reducing the time it takes for engineers to upskill, so they can keep up with new technologies. It might be keeping customer support teams knowledgeable on product updates. These things matter to front-line managers and they matter to business leaders. Because these are the things that impact their ability to drive results.

The new learning metrics are less transactional. They deemphasize time spent learning and focus more on usage through a lens of workforce engagement. They look at social learning and consider content. They address the skills your people have and those they need. And they convey how all of these data points influence the results that matter to your stakeholders, not just your learning, talent, and HR teams.

In our work here at Degreed with hundreds of the world’s most innovative companies, we’ve started to see four new stories take shape. Together, they paint a clearer picture of the changes in culture, behavior, and skills that drive performance.

Your Engagement Story

This is about understanding if your people are participating in learning and feel personally committed to their career development and advancement. With this, you can determine whether you’re creating a culture of innovation and evolution that drives business results. Your engagement story focuses on:

• Activations
• Login frequencies
• Monthly Average Users (MAUs) and whether they’re returning
• Assignments made and completed
• Net promoter score (NPS)

Your Social Story

The goal here is understanding how people at every level of your organization are sharing their expertise, so learning isn’t solely L&D driven. It’s about discovering how your people are interacting to help each other via crowd-sourced, collaborative, peer-to-peer upskilling. It helps you identify who people are turning to for guidance, so you can find, engage, and retain influencers and experts. Your social story looks at:

• Trending or emerging skills
• Recommendations for content, people, and experiences
• Takeaways, including the percentage of workers logging them
• Influencers
  • Subject matter experts (SMEs)
  • Followers
  • Posts
  • Organization network analysis (ONA)

Your Content Story

This is about knowing what your organization is learning. Then you can ask how, where, and what your people want to learn. Your content story considers:

• Popular searches and topics
• In-demand content providers
• Content consumed formally and informally, internally, and externally: courses, videos, podcasts, books, and more
• Content added by employees (social sharing)

Your Skills Story

This tells you what capabilities your organization has currently and those it still needs. These metrics answer the question “Are learning programs helping?” Your skills story addresses:

• Capability gaps
• Emerging skills
• Velocity (how quickly people are learning)
• Skill shift (how quickly individual or organizational skill profiles change)
• Skill value (the dollar value of in-demand skills)
• Skill cost avoidance (recruitment savings from internal upskilling)
• Workforce readiness
• Talent identification
• Career mobility
• Trends

Use Learning Metrics to Stay Agile

Telling your story in new ways is the start of a journey. Your story will evolve as more and more data is collected. What you see at 30 days will be different than what you see at 60 or 90 days, or a year in.

Equally important is developing a culture and processes that use the data you gather — to make changes that continually improve the alignment, efficiency, and impact of your learning investments. 

Your learning metrics story will shift as the needs and goals of your business evolve. Each new chapter provides insights in real time, so you can make better business decisions.

The post The New Learning Metrics: Demonstrating Business Value and Impact appeared first on Degreed.