And chances are you have lots of questions about the Degreed learning platform.

We like answering them.

Some of the best questions came our way after Degreed Vision, where we shared our product roadmap. Posed during Vision in Action, a follow up webinar series you can watch on demand, they probed our latest innovations in AI, skills, and automations.

Let’s take a closer look.

Degreed & Artificial Intelligence

Degreed uses AI to personalize the learning experience for each employee. It helps assess skills, tailor content recommendations, and reassess skills after learning.

AI also powers Degreed Maestro, a virtual coach that orchestrates executive coaching, targeted skill review, and career development. Pre-programed Degreed coaches retain past conversations and apply that personalized context each time a user engages with them. Maestro’s functionality can also help users find skill-related content, update their skills, curate a Pathway, and recommend content.

What does the future of Degreed Maestro look like?

We’re already planning a few key enhancements, including the ability to:  

• Create custom virtual coaches according to your organization’s needs and serve expanded use cases.
• Embed Maestro into Pathways and Academies.
• Adjust the coach’s persona including voice, tone, and coaching style.

In addition, we plan to expand Maestro to the Degreed mobile app.

How will Maestro use proprietary content to teach an AI model?

In the future, you’ll be able to train a company-specific AI model (also known as Coach Builder) on internal content. You could train it on your latest product release notes or strategy updates to make it more useful in answering company-specific questions. All training data will be used according to the Degreed Privacy Policy.

When Maestro recommends courses, does it provide links within Degreed to the content? 

Yes. For example, recommendations point directly to applicable content or curated Pathways.

What tone and dialect of English does Maestro comprehend?

Maestro has been able to comprehend various dialects of English spoken by Degreed employees across the world. In the future, we expect it will support additional languages.

Is it possible to monitor the quality or satisfaction of Maestro dialogues?

We’re deeply interested in understanding the quality of conversations with Maestro and ensuring high satisfaction. In addition to qualitative feedback, our product team takes a rigorous approach to reviewing the interactions witih Maestro and refining our use of AI to improve user experience.

How much insight will admins have into the questions or conversations their users have with Degreed AI?

This is one area we are exploring with our early-release program. Our intent is to protect individuals’ privacy while providing meaningful insights to leaders that help drive their workforce development efforts. Administrators will have insight into general Maestro usage, and most likely into the skills users are working on just as administrators would have with other learning content via Degreed.

Will reporting be available for Maestro?

As we learn more about which types of insights are meaningful indicators of value, we’ll add these to our reporting capabilities for administrators. 

Degreed & Skills

Degreed helps organizations home in on the skills that drive success. Degreed Skills+ helps you manage the complexity of skill data from across your ecosystem so you can pinpoint skill needs; use skill data to power highly personalized, impactful learning; and measure change. 

When it comes to skills language, is Degreed the single source of truth?

Degreed Skills+ can be—but does not have to be—the single source of truth for skills at your organization. If you aren’t using another tool as your single source, the features in Skills+ will help you manage skills in numerous ways. However, we understand that many organizations store their skill data somewhere else, often in a human resource information system (HRIS). Our focus is not on being the single source. It’s to help you take skills and put them to work within Degreed, so you can achieve your desired business outcomes through efficient, impactful skill-building that transforms the workforce you have into the workforce you need.

Will Degreed be able to ingest third-party skill assessment ratings?

Yes. We’re close to opening our ratings integration to accept data from other providers. We will accept assessment scores and also ratings (integer or label provided by the assessment partner).

Can I customize skill descriptions and skill level descriptions?

Yes. We make suggestions, but as with all things AI at Degreed, you are the driver. Feel free to edit the skill labels, skill descriptions, and skill level descriptions

How are users notified of skills rating changes?

When organizations change skill labels or merge synonymous skills, employees receive a bell notification to inform them their organization has made changes to skills on the platform. This notification encourages them to review their profiles.

Besides uploading, are there going to be other options for auto integration (e.g., APIs)?

Yes. Uploading is just the first step. APIs will be added to support populating skill sources with settings, proficiency level descriptions, and more.

Can proficiency level descriptions be unique by skill?

Yes. Skill-specific proficiency level descriptions allow for organizations to either define or infer appropriate examples of what it means to be, for example, a novice in agile vs. a novice in coaching. This is helpful for improving the outcome rating process by contextualization and also improving the quality of inferred proficiency on skills tagged to content.

I remember seeing custom rating scales, so it sounds like we could now customize the descriptions at each rating scale per skill. Is this correct?

Yes. You can customize your skill scale at the generic level. That means you can select the number of levels, level names, and level descriptions. Then you can flesh out skill-specific proficiency levels for the skills that matter to your organization.

Degreed & Automations

Degreed Automations helps you deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time by automating personalized messages and nudges that remind employees to return to the Degreed platform. And by automating admin tasks like adding people to groups or changing permissions, you can free up valuable time to focus on high-impact work.

Using Automations is a no-code process, which means you can deliver more impactful learning experiences without consulting IT, and that translates to more free time for your learning and IT teams to drive the business forward.

Is there any plan to allow administrators to preview which learners an automation will impact?

Yes. This is on our roadmap. Please note that the preview will be an estimate because certain triggers and conditions are dependent on future data or actions. 

What are some of the key, common use cases for automations?

Key use cases include:

• Onboarding users using hire dates or assigning content due date
• Increasing engagement with nudges 
• Personalizing learning by sharing Plans and Pathways with the right user population
• Rolling out a program and seamlessly notifying all impacted users 
• Sending reminders and deadlines for upcoming assignments 
• Streamlining management of users within groups 
• Managing access and visibility through permission roles and visibility settings
• Running L&D marketing campaigns 

Can I assign content, a Plan, or a Pathway with a due date to a new user based on a future start date? For example, let’s say I set an automation today to assign a Pathway to a user. Can this automation apply to a user who joins next month?

You can assign content, Plans, and Pathways using a specific date or X days in the future. This can push out the due date based on when the user is assigned. Please work with your CX partner to configure a rule that meets your needs.

The post You Asked. We Answer. Exploring the Degreed Product Roadmap appeared first on Degreed.

In other words, it’s time for a “How to Choose an LXP” refresh. While the learning experience platform may have started as a content consolidation machine, today it’s a lynchpin in learning ecosystems and a lever to pull for business results. 

With these evolutions in mind, here is your refreshed guide on how to choose a learning experience platform in 2024.

Critical Product and Value Shifts 

Using an LXP, employees can learn, grow, and expand their capabilities beyond what was listed on their resumes the day your organization hired them. For this reason, the learning experience platform is an incredible storehouse of critical learning and skill data, and that information needs to be shared. 

L&D needs better data for strategy, talent, and recruitment, so naturally, as a product, the LXP has become a master at connecting with other platforms. “The LXP is something that connects workforce intelligence and talent to internal marketplaces, HCM systems, and people analytics,” explains Todd Tauber, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Degreed. 

Not only has the learning experience platform become a lynchpin of the learning ecosystem, but L&D objectives have changed—especially in the past few years. In the beginning, the buzzwords that got C-suite executives, well, buzzing, were “engagement” and “learning culture.” While those are still in the lexicon, today it’s all about getting stuff done and impacting the business. 

Amid recent economic hardships and tightening budgets, the focus for the learning experience platform today is business impact. So as we look forward, let’s think more about framing the value of the LXP as a powerful tool to advance the business and less about bells, whistles, features, and functions. 

The Nuances of Choosing a Learning Experience Platform

Thinking of the LXP as a lynchpin and focusing on business results alters yesteryear’s strategies for choosing an LXP. While many bullet points from how-to guides are the same as they were ten years ago, it’s nuance that matters today. A great way to illustrate the importance of nuance is with the number one bullet point on most “How to choose a software” articles—cost. 

Cost: Look beyond the price tag. 

When you’re exploring different solutions, it’s easy to ask vendors for a budget that includes implementation fees. It’s easy to review a per-user license fee and to compare apples to apples. That was mostly how you’d look at costs when comparing LXPs in years past, but today it’s not as simple. 

Remember how the C-suite is all about business impact? There’s a reason we commissioned our Degreed Total Economic Impact study with Forrester Consulting—to get to the bottom of cost versus value. The data speaks for itself. With Degreed, you have the flexibility to reap big benefits like more efficient onboarding, better retention in key roles, improved employee upskilling, learning content savings, and an overall return on investment of 312%. 

This isn’t to pat ourselves on the back. Well, perhaps just a little. More importantly, it’s to illustrate the kinds of stats you’ll need to dig up and consider in addition to a dollar sign comparison of price tags. Don’t just figure out the hidden costs here and there. Gather statistics on how much money a solution saved another company and other solid data points that prove overall ROI. 

Features and functions: Compare more than long lists. 

We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it a million times. If it seems like every vendor out there pretty much does the same thing, that’s intentional. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and when competitors in the L&D space see something that’s working, they jump on the bandwagon. 

Most LXPs have strikingly similar functionality although one may do something slightly differently or even better than another. This is why weighing your RFx criteria is key. If three vendors say they support “in the flow of work” learning but only one offers truly robust skill ratings, which of those two things is more important to you and your business? 

As we mentioned earlier, today it’s more about framing the value of the LXP as a powerful tool to advance the business and less about bells, whistles, features, and functions. So don’t fall into the pitfall of thinking a list comparing features and functions will help you choose the best learning experience platform. 

Instead, focus on researching and discovering how well those features and functions work. Does a feature of one LXP provide better results than the same feature of another? Focus on the things that matter, and hierarchize the rest.  

Customer experience: Use more than sales process interactions.

Before signing with a vendor, your company should always consider the experience it’s getting as a customer. But don’t equate customer service with your pre-contract, sales process interactions. It’s all smiles and emails until the contracts get signed, and using those presale niceties as the sole metric for future customer service may not be accurate. 

This isn’t to say that you should disregard your early pre-contract experiences with a vendor. It’s important to feel like a vendor gets your company and works well with you. Just be sure to combine those feelings with harder data.

Here’s a tip: Ask vendors if you can speak with some of their current customers before signing a contract. This tip is from Dan Carlson, Senior Manager of Ecosystem Insights at Degreed. Too often you can feel ghosted, gaslit, and abandoned after the ink dries on a contract. To avoid that, have a frank conversation with current customers so you have more realistic customer service expectations. 

Here’s yet another tip: Ask and evaluate how well a vendor stays on the cutting edge of technology. A company committed to innovation will continue to grow, learn, and evolve with you. This piece of advice comes from a Degreed collaboration with RedThread Research. Although the advice is more than five years old, it remains a shrewd way to help you assess the vendor’s commitment to you and your future goals. 

Flexibility: Prioritize more than one kind of learning.

We’re not talking about adding your brand colors to a home page, we’re talking about using a tool to support your idea of what a learning strategy looks like. When the LXP emerged, many companies focused on one or two learning needs. Now, L&D is evolving and many companies require personalized learning to meet complex and critical learning needs. 

Specifically, you can break down a learning strategy into three critical learning needs: training, everyday learning, and skill development. Will a learning experience platform give you the flexibility to support this diversity of learning needs now and into the future? 

Degreed, for example, can be used for numerous (and dramatically different) use cases like onboarding, operating, engaging, upskilling, and reskilling. Degreed also covers a range of learning experiences from core training to everyday learning and targeted skill building. If that sounds like a lot, that’s okay. We’ll work with you and your teams to help you decide where to start and where to focus, so the platform works for what you need right now. 

Integrations and ecosystem: Plan for many vendors.

As L&D embraces more personalized and complex learning strategies, the tech ecosystem supporting workforce development increasingly becomes more complex. It may seem tempting to source all your solutions from the same vendor or group because that way they all work together and are built (hopefully) to interact. But what happens when that provider doesn’t offer a module that you need? Or when you need to integrate with an outside vendor? 

This is exactly why savvy learning leaders choose a vendor with an open ecosystem. Your tech ecosystem will only get more complex, and it is increasingly critical that everyone can play nicely together. This means choosing a vendor that freely supports and encourages integrations with other technologies, services, and platforms. It’s the opposite of a closed ecosystem, in which only one vendor’s own products play nicely together. Expect your L&D strategy to change over time. A welcoming approach to integrations ensures that the technology you buy today will grow with you, not hinder or limit your growth.

The right LXP: The next step is yours.

A learning experience platform is just as critical as it was ten years ago, if not more so. But the criteria for picking an LXP continue to evolve and grow. So when you’re selecting the right LXP for your company in 2024, remain mindful that it now serves as a lynchpin for learning ecosystems and a lever for business outcomes. 

Now that you have a better idea of what to look for, get out there and do more research! Scour websites, schedule vendor demos, and speak to executives at companies in your industry to find out who they’re using, and why. If you’re ready to get started with the bid process, check out our article outlining three steps for getting the learning tech bid process right. 

Visit our website to find out more about our Degreed, or schedule a demo today.

The post How to Choose a Learning Experience Platform in 2024 appeared first on Degreed.

At some point, those conversations will turn to technology, and likely to the merits of a learning experience platform (LXP): “Does it still have a place in our learning tech mix? Do we need one now if we never bought one 10 years ago? How is an LXP useful?”

For savvy L&D organizations, an LXP in 2024 is more critical than ever.

For learning teams, the past 12 months wrought the perfect storm, according to Todd Tauber, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Degreed. “They had to navigate an increasingly confusing learning technology market, with pressure from the C-Suite to create more business impact through learning, with tighter budgets.”

More and more, leaders want learning powered by data—to help deliver opportunities that grow skills their businesses need. 

“Learning platforms are evolving, especially the LXP, which is expanding from being just a content consolidation machine to something that connects workforce intelligence and talent to internal marketplaces, HCM systems, and people analytics,” Todd said.

Weathering the Storm: Engagement, Support, Impact

Maybe your business needs to do a better job upskilling and reskilling by meeting your people where they’re at—with a lot less guesswork and better communication—so workers can learn what they need to when they need to and add more value.

Perhaps you’re looking to explore or fully embrace skill data—to identify skill gaps and deliver outcomes-focused learning to fill those gaps. And the moment your people raise their hands and say, “I’m ready for a new opportunity,” you want your learning team to know it’s true—and your company to be ready too.

If your organization is like others, you’re looking for better ways managers can build and lead world-class teams, uncover team skills, and optimize team strengths. You’d love a tool that facilitates this collaboration, a solution that continuously delivers the most relevant content mapped to strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe job readiness tops your to-do list. Wouldn’t it be great to easily provide your people curated pathways of videos, courses, podcasts, books, and more tailored to the immediate skill-building needs of their teams or departments?

If any of this rings true for you this new year, there’s a place for an LXP at your organization.

Big-Picture Goals: Building to Your LXP Moment

Learning tech is core to learning strategy. The forces and trends that make the LXP a great solution in 2024 reflect that. Let’s take a closer look:

• Learning in the flow of work. Engaging development that happens as needed during the workday is table stakes for any organization, according to Nehal Nangia, Research Director at The Josh Bersin Company. “By building the right learning experiences and developing critical future skills, learning organizations can help workers amplify their future growth potential. And, by illuminating pathways for workers to use those newly acquired skills and experiences to grow within the organization, they can help employees grow while building critical talent for their future needs.”
  
  
• Relevant, fast, and effective skill building. Old ways of predicting skill needs don’t work anymore. Business leaders need dynamic skills strategies, according to Gartner. This means understanding skill shifts as they’re occurring and developing skills at the time of need. It means creating employee-employer channels for sharing skill information, so employees can more accurately develop skills matched to what their organizations need.
  
  
• Upskilling at scale for digital transformation. The need for proficiency in digital technologies is massive, according to PWC. “Upskilling at scale is imperative to keeping businesses competitive, keeping societies stable, and providing a good livelihood for millions of people. And it starts with learning how to learn.”
  
  
• An ecosystem view. How your systems are designed can determine how well the combined elements of your learning tech stack work (or don’t work) together. It can determine how prepared your business is for challenges and change and how your organization works day to day. An open learning ecosystem can grow with your organization and connect tools you already use. As new challenges and opportunities arise, you can get access to new, innovative tools quickly and easily.

A Best-in-Class LXP: Intelligent Workforce Acceleration

A best-in-class LXP does a lot more than provide a front door to learning content, engage your people, and boost your learning culture. These are all hallmarks that helped drive the popularity of the LXP during the past decade, and they remain outstanding benefits. But today there’s even more to attain.

A top-tier LXP today unifies a company’s learning technology ecosystem, enabling L&D to provide people with highly personalized, always-on learning from any number of sources. In doing so, it gives learning and business leaders a wealth of data on people and their skills that can inform insightful and strategic business decisions.

What does that unification look like? A high-quality LXP can integrate your existing LMS, for example, as well as other learning and people solutions. Sitting at the top of your learning tech stack, the LXP boosts interactions, supports automations, and generates and visualizes learning insights based on core analytics. This enables learning leaders to reduce administrative overhead as they create the types of learning experiences essential to success in today’s economy. This consolidation can translate to cost savings, as L&D teams identify and eliminate learning content that isn’t being used. 

In addition, a good LXP is designed to be adaptable at scale—to help self-directed employees search and quickly access content easily in the flow of work, whether they’re in the office or on the go. Likewise, a good LXP promotes social learning. It connects people through intuitive features and functions. At Degreed client PointClickCare, for example, learning leaders used skill data to match people interested in learning new capabilities with mentors. The Degreed Skill Coach tool, which supports collaboration between leaders and employees, helped drive those conversations.

Adding It All Up

For the employee, the LXP supports an experience in which learning and skill development is engaging, immediate, productive, and continuous.

For L&D, team members have a place where they can go get their jobs done more efficiently.

Take the Degreed platform, for instance. End users each have a homepage that’s unique, and they receive personalized learning recommendations based on their skills (for content, stretch assignments, mentorships, and more). The more personalized the learning recommendations are, the more relevant and impactful they are to each employee. This means learning teams using our LXP can deliver impactful learning (through personalized learning recommendations) at speed (automatically on the homepage without manual work from L&D) and at scale (to every employee with a Degreed profile).

Supporting Your C-Suite, Advancing Your Business

Meeting critical learning needs to support the C-suite and influence positive business outcomes—often on a tight, stagnant budget—is the core challenge learning teams face today. And, yes, the business units L&D partners with and serves often don’t want to pay for a solution but do want to steer how it’s used. All the while, L&D is accountable for coalescing, coordinating, and providing ongoing, cost-efficient support.

“Executing the CEO’s agenda almost always requires people within the organization to adopt new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. Success requires learning at scale, with speed, in the places where it will matter most,” said James Fulton, Global Head of Talent and Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs. “This is easier said than done.”

Meeting Critical Needs: More Diverse Learning

To get real value from employee development, companies today require three types of essential learning experiences—core training, everyday learning, and targeted skill building. 

Core training can be thought of as the learning experiences your business has to deliver, like compliance training. Everyday learning empowers employees to grow in the ways they want to. And targeted skill building encompasses all the learning experiences your company needs to deliver to stay competitive.

A best–in-class LXP positively impacts all three critical learning experiences. Powered by data—and by unifying your learning tech—the LXP helps you know the skills your company needs, build the skills your workforce wants, and grow the skills your organization needs to meet business objectives. 

Ready to learn more?

For a deeper dive into how an LXP can help people learn and a company thrive, download the new Degreed guide Why Buy an LXP? 

The post Your L&D with an LXP: Doing Things Differently in 2024 appeared first on Degreed.

It’s easy to get swept up in hand-selected best-of-the-best stories, but what about average results experienced? For example, a company might have an engagement rate worth bragging about, but maybe time or money spent increased. Not every L&D initiative ends up being a top-tier case study. 

This is why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct our Total Economic Impact study, which aggregates data from five current Degreed clients and turns it into a composite organization. According to the study, the composite organization is representative of the five decision-makers that Forrester interviewed and is used to present the aggregate financial analysis.

We know a 36-page study can be a lot to digest. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together some highlights, which we covered during Discover the Total Economic Impact of Degreed, a July 20 webinar that featured Matthew Carr, Consultant at Forrester Consulting, as a guest speaker.

More Efficient Onboarding

Using Degreed can make a new employee’s time-to-productivity 20% faster, according to the study. Financially, this can equate to $2.86 million in productive time earned over three years. Essentially, organizations are getting new employees up to speed on their role-based tasks faster and making them productive employees sooner, which can save the organization millions.  

Employees who previously used a learning management system (LMS) for onboarding also noticed a difference when shifting to Degreed.

“When new employees engaged in independent learning with LMSs, that seemed to emphasize checking boxes more than gaining knowledge, as our customers explained it to us during the interviews,” Carr said.

While the study is anonymized, we understand it can still be helpful to hear how data plays out in the real world. Throughout the webinar, Linda Moeller, Key Account Director at Degreed, shared results from Degreed clients that we feel further illustrated the study’s findings.

TEKsystems is one key example of how Degreed can create more efficient onboarding. After implementing our platform, the IT service management company reduced the time-to-productivity of newly-hired recruiters by four weeks.

Better Retention in Key Roles

Degreed can decrease employee turnover rates from 10% to 2% for certain key roles. How?

“Prior to Degreed, long-term skill development was inconsistent, and guidance from mentors was lacking once that formal training period ended,” Carr said, noting this is what he heard during interviews with Degreed customers.

Turnover dropped most among people who’d recently taken a leadership role, he said. Once organizations began using Degreed, employees had more resources available to help them succeed.

“Interviewees said Degreed enabled ongoing mentorship and learning, which lowered turnover in key roles at their organizations,” Carr added.

Reduced turnover of this size can have a financial impact of $1.28 million in saved hiring costs.

Improved Employee Upskilling

Degreed can reduce the time trainers and learners spend upskilling. Using our platform, the average time to upskill employees can be reduced by 35%, which can result in $1.74 million in time saved from more efficient upskilling.

When Tata Communications implemented Degreed, it capitalized on efficient upskilling and drove tangible business value by encouraging certification completions in strategic skills, such as agility. In one fiscal year with Degreed, employees at the telecommunications company exceeded the targeted certification completion goal by 176%, Moeller noted.

“[The learning team] really helped their teams to focus, to reskill and upskill… They were able to support their employees in meeting their customer’s requirements much faster than they’d done in the past,” Moeller said.

Learning Content Savings

Degreed has an open ecosystem that provides access to premium content providers and can make third-party content subscriptions unnecessary. The financial savings from reducing content subscriptions can be $317,000.

Ericsson reduced its overall learning spend by 50% while increasing learning completions by 62%. Now, almost all workers (97%) at the telecommunications company have active Degreed profiles. It’s the definition of doing more for less.

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI has been a hot topic in learning and development because it isn’t always easy to measure skill value. However, the Forrester study did calculate it, finding Degreed can create a 312% ROI. And with a payback period of fewer than six months, our platform can pay for itself quickly. 

Beyond Numbers

Yes, statistics give concrete numbers you can point to, but it’s also worth noting many clients interviewed expressed immeasurable — yet valuable — benefits. Those included:

• Social and team learning that drive culture
• Better communication with employees
• Remote work made easier
• Democratization of learning

“Customers we talked to said Degreed allowed learning and upskilling to be available to more employees across regions, across languages and across employee roles,” Carr said. 

The numbers in the Forrester study show how learning tech can have a tangible and quantifiable business impact. This is data you can confidently take to your managers and executives to show what Degreed can do to foster learning, growth and financial security across your organization.

Want to know more?

Read the study.

The post The Total Impact of Degreed: Quick-Hit Data To Show Your Execs appeared first on Degreed.

That’s how workers and managers at Allegiance Bank used to go about finding the upskilling content they needed. Challenged to navigate disparate, difficult-to-search learning systems including several LMSs and numerous content providers, “People would just call us,” said Joanna Lacey, Director of Learning and Development.

To fulfill its vision to grow, the Houston-based bank needed a better way forward. Specifically, it needed to create a first-class L&D organization designed to promote and support high levels of performance.

“We wanted to make it easy to access learning in the flow of work,” Lacey said. 

To help make this happen, learning leaders chose Degreed. And when we caught up with the Allegiance team recently, we found out the results have been tremendous.

You can check it all out in our latest video.

See how Degreed helps the bank:

• Provide all workers with a single, easy-to-find front door to development
• Capture, codify and share institutional knowledge 
• Empower people to become learning advocates
• Strategically promote learning that supports high performance

“People still do call,” noted Leslie Rainwater, Talent Management and Leadership Development Consultant. However, “Instead of having to go into a lot of detail, it’s like ‘Just look it up on Degreed.’”

Watch the full video:

The post How Allegiance Bank Enhances Performance with Degreed 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.

Now imagine a lush, verdant greenhouse.

“An LMS is like the frozen food section — a bunch of prepackaged, cold learning resources,” said Mike Ernst, Learning Solutions & Tech Consultant at Fifth Third Bank.

“An LXP is like a community garden in the middle of the forest… There’s a ton more fresh content that’s growing there, and there’s so many more options.”

It’s easy to see why learning leaders at Fifth Third Bank have embraced Degreed. Using our learning experience platform (LXP), they’re helping their people plant seeds of success on a platform that excels at personalized development.

We loved that garden analogy. And when we caught up with the Fifth Third team recently, we found out there’s even more to its story.

You can check it all out in our latest video.

See how Degreed helps the bank:

• Make learning social and accessible
• Support strategic initiatives
• Benchmark the progress of L&D programs
• Build engagement over time

“There’s several ways, I’d say, that we’ve made learning a priority for our employees with Degreed,” said Brian Walsh, Learning Experience Leader. “Simply by investing in the platform, we really help support our employees in their own professional development.”

Watch the full video:

The post How Fifth Third Bank Made Learning a Priority with Degreed appeared first on Degreed.

But here’s the good news: a whole marketplace of solutions has developed in the past decade to help reskill your workforce, gather data on your people, and help inform business and HR decisions.

From HCMs to learning ecosystems, LMSs, and learning experience platforms (LXPs), this blog is intended to help you cut through the noise (and acronyms) of the marketplace and help you identify the solution that fits your needs best. Here are the quick and dirty answers to your most frequently asked questions about learning technology.

1. What’s a Learning Experience Platform (LXP)?

A learning experience platform (LXP) is a user-focused learning software system that provides a single point of access for all learning — both formal and informal. The software encompasses the use of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, social learning and a host of features that help create a personalized, user-directed learning experience for the learner.

Formal learning resources, like online courses and internal training created on a learning management system (LMS), are tracked and measured from the same platform as informal learning resources, like articles, videos, podcasts, and ebooks. Rather than administrators managing employee learning from the top-down, LXPs enable employees to manage their own learning, pulling from the resources they utilize in their everyday flow of work. 

While learning experience platforms are known for having an intuitive user interface, the most important characteristic of an LXP is the ability to connect the dots between all of the points of learning in a modern work environment.

LXPs wield hefty influence across the learning technology marketplace. Why? Because what people experience as they build skills is at the heart of a strategic and successful learning solution. Read more about how the Degreed LXP does just that.

2. What’s a Learning Management System (LMS)?

An LMS allows companies to create training and learning courses, deliver them to employees and gather data on those courses and learning programs. An LMS is designed to deliver formal learning courses and internal training, such as onboarding and compliance courses. 

Companies typically have administrative teams managing the LMS and selecting the content to make available to their employees. As an administrator-driven platform, they’re best suited for implementing top-down learning initiatives and aren’t flexible, meaning they won’t recognize any resources users access outside of the system. An LXP does not replace an LMS,. Rather, an LXP integrates with one or multiple LMSs, so learning and development teams don’t have to sacrifice compliance training and specific coursework for a more personalized learning experience.

3. What features should a learning experience platform have?

When researching LXPs, keep in mind that capabilities are more important than features. Features constantly change and evolve with the technology. Capabilities serve as your solutions. Therefore, you should identify the capabilities you want from an LXP based on your learning and skilling strategy. Here are some common capabilities learning leaders look for in an LXP:

• Guidance or insight into what skills employees should be developing
• Diversity of learning experiences and content (user-generated content, social learning, articles, videos, classes, etc.). This includes the ability to create, syndicate, and consume content
• A process to provide feedback on users’ progress, offering both guidance for employees and visibility for the organization 
• Motivation in the form of clear career paths and relevant development opportunities for employees 
• The ability to utilize behavioral science to recommend and connect users with relevant resources, experts, and experiences
• A process to measure the skills of your current workforce

4. What’s the difference between an LXP and a Human Capital Management (HCM) system?

Just like an LMS integrates with a learning experience platform, so does a human capital management system.

An HCM is built to manage your people at the organizational level and should keep your organization legally compliant with processes like payroll, benefits, time, attendance, and more. In short, an HCM helps you hire and employ your people, whereas an LXP helps professionally develop and retain them.

5. What’s a learning ecosystem?

A learning ecosystem is an entire collection of learning technology tools working together within a given organization. It’s called an ecosystem because the different platforms influence each other, much like different species and natural factors influence each other in a natural ecosystem.

As L&D has evolved, so have the available tools and functions to help support learning and skill-building efforts. A typical enterprise company’s learning ecosystem may include an HCM, learning experience platform, LMS (sometimes multiple), and a content provider.

Want to Learn More?

Reach out to a Degreed representative today. We’d be happy to chat.

The post What’s a Learning Experience Platform? Learning Tech FAQs Answered 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.

L&D teams around the world have done the same in recent years, striving to get more from learning solutions while elevating the LXP platform to prominence, according to a new Degreed-commissioned report by industry analyst Josh Bersin, President and Founder of Bersin & Associates.

“As companies focus heavily on employee experience, wellbeing, and self-development, more and more energy is focused on making learning easy, accessible, and relevant,” Bersin says. “The LXP is now at the heart of this crusade.”

That’s certainly true at Ericsson, Verizon, and a global energy services company that remained anonymous — three more Degreed clients that put Degreed firmly at the center of their learning tech stacks. Not only is Degreed used to find, discover, and recommend learning content, but at times it’s used to create a “place of liberation,” as Bersin says, where any expert within the organization can share content and teach new skills.

Ericsson: Optimizing Learning

When Vidya Krishnan started in the CLO role at the 140-year-old telecommunications company, she found an academy structure in place. It was sponsored by the business, filled with valuable technology and leadership content, and highly regarded. But people still struggled to find the learning content they needed.

As soon as Degreed was rolled out, the system started to intelligently recommend learning. 

“Ericsson now uses Degreed’s front end to identify an employee’s role, tenure, and learning history and then recommend and suggest content relevant to his or her job,” Bersin says. “Vidya also believes that the “unit of learning” is not an individual but a team. So she is working with Degreed to build more team-based learning functionality in the platform. She is also advancing tools to create more credentials, certifications, and demonstrated capabilities. In the telecommunications industry, this is critical.”

Verizon: Delivering on Needs

Learning needs at the wireless network operator are vast, with the company training people on every possible technology as well as sales and service, management, and leadership.

Not only did Degreed make it easy for employees to find the learning they needed, but the company also tapped the power of custom learning Pathways so employees all over Verizon could build custom journeys.

Amid myriad learning management tools at Verizon, the LXP is now core to delivering solutions. And as the company implements Workday, “Verizon is now rationalizing its job architecture to simplify and streamline jobs across the company. Once that work is complete, Verizon plans to look at the skills data in Degreed and integrate and coordinate it with the Workday Skills Cloud, which aligns skills to every employee HR transaction,” Bersin says.

Global Energy Services Company: Supporting All Major Functions

In the 1990s, a global energy and oil services company invested in Saba, a pioneering LMS. Following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company refocused workforce development on operational training, skill-based training, and rigorous safety and compliance instruction.

Originally, Degreed was intended to be the “front end” to the LMS. Over time, however, Degreed has become the core of the company’s learning solution, and Saba is only a node. And as Bersin notes, Degreed is now used by all major functions in the company.

Citibank: Providing Smart Solutions 

The LMS at the financial services company still has a place and continues to be important, but it no longer manages or tracks learning programs now enabled by the Degreed LXP.

The LMS only houses old-fashioned SCORM-compliant courses (typically compliance programs) and is also used to schedule events, classroom training, or in-person conferences. “Degreed has become a ‘marketplace’ for all sorts of content,” Bersin says. And the LMS is only one source behind it.

This solution has become amazing. For example, if someone puts “agile methodology” into the system, Degreed can figure out who is an expert in this skill, what content and programs are most useful and popular, and eventually what adjacent skills are needed. “Citibank leaders understand that once a company selects a technology platform, it’s very hard to change,” Bersin says. “The company’s investment in Degreed has paid off well.”

Want to see more? Download the full report to read more about the Verizon, Ericsson, and Citibank LXP stories. Think you’re interested in an LXP as well? Contact a Degreed representative to get started.

The post A Look Inside the Citibank, Verizon, & Ericsson LXP Blueprint appeared first on Degreed.