A few weeks after launching Degreed Open Library, one of our clients, a leading global tech company, told us exactly what happens:  

“Usage is already higher than LinkedIn Learning.”

They didn’t promote it heavily. They didn’t roll out flashy campaigns. Instead of offering employees a sea of content to wade through, they launched a set of targeted, AI-curated learning pathways tied directly to the skills their people needed to succeed.

What is Degreed Open Library?

Degreed Open Library is an AI-curated, ready-to-deploy content library of structured learning pathways designed to help people build in-demand skills faster, with less friction, less noise, and more relevance.

With skill-based learning pathways, Degreed Open Library gives you a smarter way to activate your content. And because each pathway is bite-sized and easy to launch, learners stay engaged, without needing a roadmap or a long list of prerequisites.

The problem: Traditional content libraries are expensive and high maintenance

Large content libraries promise more–more variety, more access, more engagement. But what learners often experience is the opposite: more friction, more confusion, and less actual learning.

As L&D and IT teams juggle growing responsibilities, they need a smarter solution, one that gets people learning faster, with content that’s relevant and purposeful.

The solution: AI-curated learning pathways 

Degreed launched Open Library in April 2025 with 100 curated learning pathways focused on the most in-demand skills. In July, we expanded that offering with 100 more “Language Bundles” in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German, removing barriers for learners in global teams.

And we’re just getting started.

Coming this October, Degreed will release 150 new pathways aligned to high-growth industries, including:

• Consumer Retail
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing
• Customer Experience
• Finance
• Media & Telecom
• Professional Services

That’s 350+ AI-curated pathways, included with every Degreed Learning instance—no extra license required.

These ready-to-go pathways are designed to give employees a strong starting point, covering the foundational skills your workforce needs now. But every business is different. That’s why we also offer AI-curated pathway services as an add-on: to help you create highly targeted learning aligned to your unique goals, roles, and workflows.

Our AI-curated pathway services can help you create role-specific learning experiences aligned to your workflows and strategic goals. We’ll handle the heavy lifting. You get a smarter, faster way to deliver value.

From confusion to clarity: the power of curation in your content library

Degreed Open Library isn’t just another content library. It’s built to reduce friction and guide learners to exactly what they need, when they need it.

Instead of endless search results or generic playlists, AI curates the best content into structured pathways made up of articles, podcasts, videos, and courses. These pathways are always up-to-date, aligned to in-demand skills, and relevant to real roles and workflows.

Here’s what that unlocks:

1. Faster time to value

Instead of spending months designing programs, you can deploy ready-to-go pathways in minutes. Employees start learning immediately, without needing a map.

2. Less friction, less time, more focus

Employees don’t want to browse an endless catalog, they want to build skills. When learning is buried in lengthy search results or buried under generic playlists, they tune out.

AI-curated pathways remove that friction. Learners get clear, role-aligned recommendations that feel immediately relevant. They know exactly why it matters, how it connects to their job, and what comes next. That clarity leads to higher engagement, faster completion, and better on-the-job application. 

Degreed Open Library offers bite-sized learning within each pathway making learning more achievable during natural downtimes like lunch breaks or between meetings. This flexibility boosts engagement, accelerates completions, and enables quicker on-the-job application.

3. Smarter content spend

With targeted, curated content that people actually use, organizations can reduce their reliance on expensive library subscriptions and stretch their L&D budget further.

In fact, some of our customers are already exploring ways to eliminate or reduce their content subscriptions. The excitement is palpable as they explore how to redistribute their L&D budgets to higher value technologies or programs.

“My team will explore the library of resources to assess if we can match the learning content we get from [a leading content provider]. If Open Library is good enough for our learning needs, we might consider unplugging [a leading content provider] or at least reducing our number of licenses.” 

Takeaway: Stop paying for content people don’t use

L&D and IT leaders don’t need more content. They need more impact.

Degreed Open Library helps you deliver that with:

• High-quality, relevant content curated from trusted sources
• AI-powered pathways built for your business and your people
• Clearer learning journeys, higher engagement, and measurable results

The post The Content Library Hack Every Learning Leader Needs appeared first on Degreed.

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

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

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

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

Purpose-Driven L&D

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

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

The new strategy consisted of six pillars:

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

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

Degreed: More Than a Fancy UI & Content Search Engine

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

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

Aligning Learning with the Business

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

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

Building the Right Content 

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

Personalizing Learning at Scale

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

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

Degreed: Learning for the Business and Careers

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

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

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

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

A New Way Forward

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

Does Watt have advice for other L&D organizations?

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

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

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

Strategy + Degreed = Success

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

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

Find out more.

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

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

Xilinx came to the conclusion that a new learning strategy was the best way to build that bridge and develop their employees. So they called Degreed and started putting a plan in place.

Read our case study “How Xilinx Optimized L&D with Degreed and Mind Tools” to learn all about how Xilinx was able to change its culture by creating a new development approach that focuses on transformational learning.

The post How Xilinx Optimized L&D with Degreed and Mind Tools appeared first on Degreed.

Hot off the press: You now have the ability to make that time worthwhile, with the new Podcast feature in Degreed. As an admin, you can now enrich their library with audio content by adding it to their catalog. Track the Podcasts you are learning from and listening to and…

…add Podcasts to your Organization’s catalog for your team to learn from, share with others and build their skills.

Why this matters: Degreed believes you should be able to track all your learning, no matter what it is or where you are. So join us by listening and sharing your favorite Podcasts to Hack your Learning (and commute).

Learn (and Track!) Podcasts and More Anytime, Anywhere at

www.Degreed.com

The post Hack Your Team’s Learning with Podcasts appeared first on Degreed.