Um diese Fragen zu beantworten und eine effizientere Skillentwicklung zu erreichen, müssen L&D- und HR-Verantwortliche an drei Punkten ansetzen:

1. Erwartungen an jede einzelne Rolle klar definieren
2. Diese Erwartungen vermitteln
3. Informationen bereitstellen, die Mitarbeitende zum Schließen etwaiger Lücken benötigen

Genau dabei unterstützt Sie Degreed. Sie bekommen neue Funktionen an die Hand, mit denen Sie Mitarbeitende bei der Entwicklung der Skills anleiten können, die sie zum Erfolg in ihrer Rolle benötigen. 

So verhelfen Rollenerwartungen Mitarbeitenden zu besserer Skillentwicklung

Wir veranschaulichen dies am Beispiel von Cynthia, einer fiktiven Software-Entwicklerin: Cynthia tritt gerade einen neuen Job bei Acme Inc. an. In ihrem vorherigen Unternehmen war sie in einer ähnlichen Rolle als Entwicklerin tätig. Nun fragt sie sich, inwieweit die Erwartungen an sie bei Acme anders gelagert sind. 

Nach ihrer Anmeldung bei Degreed werden in ihrem Profil automatisch die Skills angezeigt, die Acme für ihre Rolle priorisiert hat – inklusive des Kompetenzlevels, das in diesen Skills jeweils zu erzielen ist. Zudem enthalten die einzelnen Skills und Kompetenzlevel eine Beschreibung, anhand derer sie nachvollziehen kann, wie sie vorgehen muss, um diese Ziele zu erreichen. Mithilfe dieser Informationen und einem Maestro Skill Review Coach kann sie nun ihr aktuelles Kompetenzlevel ermitteln und in ihrem Profil festhalten. 

Damit erhält Cynthia die nötige Ausgangsbasis, um ihre Entwicklung darauf auszurichten, bestehende Lücken zu schließen. Degreed erleichtert dies durch die Erstellung dynamischer Skillpläne. Diese sind automatisch mit den Lerninhalten gefüllt, die auf Cynthias Skill-Lücken bei den für sie priorisierten Skills ausgelegt sind. Dieser Skillplan ist individuell auf ihre aktuellen Leistungsniveaus zugeschnitten und umfasst Inhalte, die ihr dabei helfen, auf das nächste Skill-Level hinzuarbeiten.  

Möchte sie dabei nach zusätzlichen Ressourcen suchen, muss sie sich nicht mit Inhalten aufhalten, die zu allgemein gehalten oder zu fortgeschritten sind. Stattdessen findet sie schnell die Inhalte, die zu ihrem individuellen Kompetenzlevel und dem aktuellen Stand ihrer Skillentwicklung passen. 

Cynthia weiß jetzt genau, welche Skills von ihr erwartet werden, in welchen Bereichen sie sich verbessern muss und welche Ressourcen ihr die Skills vermitteln können, die am wichtigsten sind. Diese Klarheit sowie der Zugang zu maßgeschneiderten Ressourcen für ihre Weiterbildung ermöglichen ihr eine schnellere Entwicklung ihrer Skills und motivieren sie zusätzlich. 

So können Admins den Prozess skalierbar automatisieren

Bislang erfolgte die Personalisierung von Lernerlebnissen ausschließlich manuell. Dieser Prozess war viel zu zeitaufwändig und nicht skalierbar. Diese manuelle Arbeit kann nun jedoch KI übernehmen. L&D- und HR-Verantwortlichen bleibt also mehr Zeit für strategisch Wichtigeres wie das Definieren von Skills, die je nach Rolle benötigt werden, um geschäftliche Ziele zu erreichen.

In Degreed Learning können Admins eine Liste organisationsspezifischer Rollen hochladen, einschließlich Zuordnung der zugehörigen Skills und Ziel-Leistungsniveaus. Dabei lassen sich auch die Prioritäts-Skills festlegen, die im Profil der Mitarbeitenden angezeigt werden sollen. Dies sorgt für eine gezieltere Skillentwicklung.

Degreed Skills+ gibt Admins eine KI an die Hand, die den Effekt der Zuordnung von Skills zu Rollen noch zusätzlich verstärkt. Ein Beispiel hierfür sind von der KI generierte Beschreibungen zu Kompetenzlevel für die einzelnen Skills, die klar ersichtlich machen, was auf welchem Kompetenzlevel erwartet wird. Dies vermittelt Mitarbeitenden Orientierung bei der Beurteilung ihrer Skills, sodass sie das passende Kompetenzlevel gemäß Definition der Organisation auswählen können. 

Admins können Inhalte in ihrem Katalog zudem per KI automatisch mit Tags für Leistungsniveaus versehen. Prüfen und bestätigen lassen sich diese Tags ebenfalls, damit Mitarbeitende genau die richtigen Inhalte für ihr jeweiliges Skill-Level erhalten.

Geschäftlicher Wert des Skill-Rollen-Workflows und -Tagging-Features

Effiziente Administration und personalisierte Lernerlebnisse lassen sich direkt in skalierbare Anwendungsfälle mit Potenzial für größeren geschäftlichen Wert umsetzen. Zu den wichtigsten davon gehören die folgenden:

• Strategisches Ressourcenmanagement: Lücken können aufgedeckt und redundante oder veraltete Ressourcen ausrangiert werden.
• Onboarding: Neuzugängen können automatisch Lerninhalte bereitgestellt werden, die auf deren spezifisches Kompetenzlevel bei erforderlichen Skills zugeschnitten sind. Dies verkürzt ihre Einarbeitungszeit.
• Inhaltssuche und -entdeckung: Mitarbeitende erhalten personalisierte Suchergebnisse entsprechend ihren Anforderungen und Skill-Levels.
• Karrierepfade und interne Mobilität: Welche Skills für den Aufstieg in einer Rolle oder den Wechsel in andere Abteilungen erforderlich sind, lässt sich klar abstecken – ein Gewinn für Mitarbeitende und Unternehmen gleichermaßen. 

Einbindung von KI in die Mitarbeiterentwicklung

Versprechen dazu, wie KI das Lernerlebnis verbessern und den administrativen Aufwand reduzieren wird, gibt es viele. Degreed Skills+ bietet künstliche Intelligenz, die beides erfüllt. 

Mit dem Rollen-Skill-Workflow, dynamischen Skillplänen und automatischem Tagging von Inhalten versetzen wir Organisationen nun in die Lage, hochgradig personalisierte und zielführende Weiterbildungsangebote in großem Umfang bereitzustellen – ganz ohne Mehraufwand. Klarere Erwartungen an Rollen und präziseres Tracking bedeuten für Unternehmen: Sie können Skills schneller entwickeln und mit dem Tempo des Wandels leichter Schritt halten.

* Die in diesem Blog-Beitrag beschriebenen Funktionen sollen im April 2026 allgemein verfügbar sein.

The post Schnellere Skillentwicklung durch klare Erwartungen an Rollen appeared first on Degreed.

Was geschieht, wenn eines der weltweit renommiertesten Finanzinstitute beschließt, dass es an der Zeit ist, die Skill-Entwicklungsstrategie neu auszurichten?

Bei State Street fiel die Antwort eindeutig aus: Der Aufbau einer unternehmensweiten, datengesteuerten und von den Führungskräften unterstützten Grundlage für die Flexibilität der Mitarbeitenden und die interne Mobilität – fest verankert in der jährlichen Geschäftsstrategie und den Personal-Aktionsplänen des Unternehmens.

Mit mehr als 50.000 Mitarbeitenden weltweit und rund 11 % des globalen Finanzvermögens, das täglich durch die Systeme von State Street fließt, benötigte das Unternehmen einen strategischen Ansatz für die Skillentwicklung, um mit den sich wandelnden Geschäftsanforderungen und den Erwartungen der Mitarbeitenden Schritt zu halten.

„Das Unternehmen kam zu uns und sagte: Wir haben keine Möglichkeit festzustellen, welche Skills unsere Mitarbeitenden haben. „Wir haben keine Möglichkeit zu erkennen, wo unsere Skill-Lücken liegen, in welchen Bereichen wir Weiterbildungen benötigen und wo Umschulungen erforderlich sind“, so Laura Sullivan, Vice President, Talent Development.

Diese Herausforderung gab den Anstoß zur Gründung von SkillsFIRST. Es ist mehr als nur eine HR-Initiative – es ist ein entscheidender Hebel, der Skills in den Fokus von Leistung, Mitarbeiterbindung und beruflicher Entwicklung rückt. SkillsFIRST, powered by Degreed und in Workday integriert, unterstützt Führungskräfte dabei, das vorhandene Personal mit den geschäftskritischen Anforderungen in Einklang zu bringen und befähigt Mitarbeitende, eigenverantwortlich ihre Skill-Entwicklung voranzutreiben.

Von begrenzter Einsicht zu vernetzter Fähigkeit

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

Statt teure Inferenz-Tools zu lizenzieren, nutzte State Street Degreed und Workday, um eine eigene Skill-Bibliothek zu entwickeln, die mithilfe einer Kombination aus Branchen-Benchmarks und internem Fachwissen individuell angepasst wurde. In Zusammenarbeit mit Fachexpert:innen definierten die Lernteams sieben zentrale Skills für jede Rolle und entwickelten in Degreed individuell zugeschnittene Rollenpläne.

So funktioniert die Degreed-Workday-Integration bei State Street

Bei State Street bildet die Integration von Degreed und Workday das Rückgrat der Skills-First-Strategie des Unternehmens, welche die Mitarbeiterentwicklung mit der strategischen Personalplanung verknüpft.

Der Prozess beginnt in Degreed, wenn Mitarbeitende kuratierte Lerninhalte erkunden und sich mit den personalisierten Rollenplänen beschäftigen. Die Mitarbeitenden werden dazu angeregt, ihre Kompetenzen anhand der Acht-Punkte-Skala von Degreed einzuschätzen und anschließend strukturierte Gespräche über ihre Kariereentwicklung zu führen. Dabei bitten sie ihre Führungskräfte um Rückmeldung zu ihrer Selbsteinschätzung.

Die erfassten Skills werden anschließend in Workday übertragen, um verschiedene wichtige HR-Funktionen zu unterstützen – darunter die passgenaue Zuordnung von Skills zu offenen Stellen, interne Jobempfehlungen sowie die strategische Personalplanung. Grundlage dafür sind die aktuellen Nachweise zu den Fähigkeiten aus Degreed.

Durch diese Integration wird gewährleistet, dass berufliche Weiterentwicklung nicht nur angestrebt, sondern auch operativ umgesetzt, messbar gestaltet und eng mit den Unternehmenszielen verbunden wird.

Strategische Wirkung mit Skalierbarkeit

Bereits im ersten Jahr der Umsetzung konnte State Street beachtliche Ergebnisse erzielen:

• Einsparungen in Millionenhöhe durch den Verzicht auf teure Drittanbieter-Tools zur Skill-Inferenz und für Personal-Marktplätze.
• Für 50 % der Mitarbeitenden erfolgte das Onboarding mittels SkillsFIRST
• 1.200 zusätzliche interne Beförderungen in sechs Monaten
• 11%ige Steigerung des Mitarbeiterengagements in Verbindung mit der Karriereentwicklung
• 34 % der internen Einstellungen werden durch SkillsFIRST-Daten unterstützt, wodurch die Kosten für externe Einstellungen vermieden werden
• Über 21.000 monatliche Skill-Ratings liefern wertvolle Einblicke für die Personalplanung und gezielte Lernangebote

Diese Ergebnisse zeugen nicht nur von einem technologischen Wandel, sondern auch von einem kulturellen Bekenntnis zu Transparenz, persönlicher Weiterentwicklung und Mobilität.

Zentrale Erkenntnisse für Personalverantwortliche

Für HR-, Personal- und L&D-Führungskräfte, die ihre Skills gezielt in die Praxis umsetzen möchten, bietet State Street erprobte Strategien:

• Der Ausgangspunkt sollten klare geschäftliche Ziele sein, nicht bloß technische Systemfunktionen.
• Schaffen Sie eine gemeinsame Sprache durch eine einheitliche Skill-Bibliothek und standardisierte Rollenpläne.
• Nutzen Sie Plattformen, um Skilldaten effektiv in wertvolle Personalinformationen zu überführen.
• Ermöglichen Sie Ihren Mitarbeitenden, aktiv am Prozess teilzunehmen und davon zu profitieren.

Mit der Ausrichtung auf Skills als Brücke zwischen Leistung, Planung und Entwicklung zeigt State Street, wie ein komplexes globales Unternehmen Potenziale freisetzen und langfristig erfolgreich bleiben kann.

Jetzt mehr erfahren

SkillsFIRST hat bei State Street nicht nur das Lernen verändert, sondern auch die Mitarbeiterbindung gestärkt, das Engagement gesteigert, interne Mobilität gefördert und messbare Kosteneinsparungen erzielt.

Finden Sie heraus, wie ein ähnlicher Ansatz die Ergebnisse in Ihrer Organisation beschleunigen könnte. Lassen Sie uns darüber sprechen.

The post Skill-Entwicklung in großem Maßstab: Was State Street anders macht appeared first on Degreed.

That’s the missed opportunity facing many organizations. But it doesn’t have to be.

„The future of higher education is one of pluralism. It’s one of many actors, many organizations contributing powerfully, dynamically, and compellingly to a world where you as a learner are able to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve,” said Michele Spires, Assistant Vice President at the American Council on Education (ACE). “It’s about a network of organizations that collectively work together… and you get a new framework for lifelong higher education.”

Lifelong learning resonates at the core of the Degreed mission. And it’s why we’re introducing the Degreed College Accreditation Service, powered by our new partnership with ACE and Credly by Pearson. It means your people’s internal learning can go further—earning college credit, formal credentials, and long-term value.

Workplace Learning That Counts Beyond the Workplace

Let’s be clear: This is more than a new feature. It’s a strategic lever for workforce transformation, designed to help you build, validate, and mobilize skills that matter to your business.

And make no mistake: This isn’t just a benefit for employees. It’s a strategy for organizations that want to attract, grow, and retain top talent in a skills-first world.

With Degreed College Accreditation Service, your learning programs in Degreed Academies can be evaluated for college credit. The Degreed Professional Services team works with you to align content to ACE standards and issue formally recognized, transferable credits via Credly.

Your people get more than just a course completion. They get:

• Credentialed learning programs that support internal mobility and reduce attrition
• Verified, portable credentials that boost talent visibility across and beyond your organization
• Frictionless access to continuing education, with no extra time, testing, or tuition costs

“We need a future where everyone gets recognition for all lifelong learning and skills,” said David Blake, Degreed Co-CEO and Cofounder. “This partnership with ACE represents a significant stepping stone in that journey—enabling workers to gain verifiable, transferable credentials that follow them throughout their careers.”

The Business Case for Recognized Learning

Organizations already invest millions in learning and development—but without formal recognition, those investments often fall short.

Today’s savvy learning leaders seek to provide their people with verifiable credentials to boost employee engagement, strengthen the employee value proposition, and reduce attrition. They aim to transform L&D from a support function into a strategic growth engine, delivering measurable ROI across the talent lifecycle.

Skills That Stick. Credits That Count

When skills are the currency of work, credentials are a key way that currency is verified. Formal recognition gives your workforce the power to advance—whether it’s into a new role, a different industry, or a formal degree.

With ACE and Credly, you gain not only credibility but also measurable proof of performance.

And with Degreed, these credentials don’t exist in isolation. They’re fully integrated into your skill data ecosystem—making it easier to benchmark learning progress, analyze workforce capabilities, and report ROI across the enterprise.

Giving Learning the Recognition It Deserves

Your people put in the work. It’s time that work works harder for them. Let’s discuss how your company can turn internal learning into accredited pathways that drive business results and lifelong impact.

Learn more.

Let’s discuss skill building at your organization. Schedule a personalized, one-on-one call with a Degreed expert today.

The post Say Goodbye to Siloed Learning. Hello, Accredited Skills appeared first on Degreed.

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

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

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

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

1. Champion an agile work environment within your organization.

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

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

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

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

2. Get to know your employees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Design a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

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

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

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

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

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

5. Measure & iterate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Positive Enabler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Employee Appraisals: A See-Saw History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance Management Today

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

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

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

Performance Reviews: A Faulty Process

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

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

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

Performance reviews are problematic because they:

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

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

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

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

Enabling Career Mobility

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

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

Performance Previews: A Dynamic Process

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

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

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

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

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

Positive Enablement is the Way to Career Mobility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Five Job Mobility Strategies

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

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

Ladder: An Emphasis on Permanent Roles

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

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

Lattice: An Agile Mindset

People move up, around, and sometimes down.

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

Agency: Skills and Flexibility 

People move around based on their skills and preferences.

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

Outside In: Specialized Help

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

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

Reset: Moves to Meet Needs

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

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

The Relationship Between Ownership and Skills

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

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

The resulting graph looks like this:

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

According to the study:

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

Critical to Any Job Mobility Strategy is Its Purpose

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

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

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

What Are Your Goals?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Experience: Key to Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

Integration: Playing Nice Across the Board

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

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

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

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

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

Skill Data: It’s Got Your Back 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Different Kind of Talent Marketplace

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

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

With Degreed Career Mobility, your employees can:

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

People managers can:

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

Making the Connection

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

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

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

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

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

The post Introducing Degreed Career Mobility appeared first on Degreed.

He was adamant that his system shaved three or four minutes off his commute time. But as I put my hand behind the nozzle and felt the meager wisp of blown air, I knew it was useless. Though Wy-Quon’s effort was valiant, he had essentially added complexity and tons of effort with little to show in efficiency gains. In other words, he took a long bike ride for a ham sandwich.

The Inefficient Labor Market

The labor market feels very much like the never-ending journey toward that seemingly tasty, yet ultimately unsatisfying snack. Despite the billions of dollars being invested in HR Tech right now, it’s one of the least efficient marketplaces in any category in the world—and that’s with the lowest sustained unemployment levels we’ve seen since the Vietnam War. But while we’re managing to keep people employed, workplace retention remains a chief concern for HR executives, and the cost of holding onto talent is rising. 

Let’s look at the average cost per hire inside an organization, which most sources agree hovers right around $4,000. Next, consider hire rates, the latest of which is 3.8%, meaning 5.8m workers in the U.S. took a new job in October. And that’s in a single month. If you multiply the figures on an annualized basis you get a look at what I call total Labor Market Inefficiency, which today stands at $277 billion. That’s the cost to fill all those open positions in the U.S. each year.

You can look at this at the organizational level, too. Let’s do a conservative estimate. 2017 data estimates most companies lose a combined 18% of people each year, considering quit rates and involuntary churn. If your cost per hire is $4,000 and you have 50,000 employees, that means you might be spending $36m to keep your talent pool full (4k x 50k x .18). We say might because those figures are scarcely believable, even if cut by half.  

Internal Mobility is the Next Frontier

Why is this system broken? Simply put, companies have no idea what skills their people have and no structure to match open positions with people inside their companies. And employees have no way to showcase their skills and goals within the internal marketplace or see the opportunities matching their skillsets. The result: there is less friction for external recruiting than there is for internal mobility, so companies hire externally instead of internally. And the most ambitious employees look to outside job boards where they can apply new skills, grow them, and make more money. 

The cost of shuffling millions of people from one organization to another is astounding. It’s not surprising then that, based on Degreed data, “recruiter onboarding” was one of the most popular search terms in 2019, increasing by 870% from just the previous year. Companies are desperate to fill these skill gaps, but they’re relying on external recruiting to do so.

Reducing these inefficiencies requires time and effort applied to solving the problem of internal mobility. Here’s how:

1. Gain visibility into your skill supply. Understand the skills your employees and contingent workers have—every skill, at every level. 
2. Take inventory of job demand. List all the jobs your company needs to fill, including projects, open positions, and major initiatives. 
3. Mix and match in the internal marketplace. Employees can assert their skills and goals, and leaders and hiring managers can first try to match them with open internal positions.

To achieve this, historically siloed HR teams must work more closely together. Talent should be tightly connected to Learning & Development to ensure critical skill gaps are being closed and the talent pipeline is rich. Recruiting should be working more closely with Talent to expose opportunities to employees based on skills. And HR leadership should be working with the COO to show the financial savings of creating an efficient internal marketplace.

Every company is essentially its own labor market. A healthy one features more mobility happening internally rather than externally, with internal hires responsible for filling 85% of roles rather than the 15% it is today. As we head into the next decade, the companies who solve this will be the ones with the durability to adapt to change, drive better retention, and out-innovate the competition.

It’s time we push for more efficiency and treat talent mobility as a core operational opportunity rather than a sideline benefit. Want to learn how Degreed can help you gain visibility into your workforce’s skills? Contact a Degreed representative today.

The post Reducing Inefficiencies in the Labor Market with Internal Mobility appeared first on Degreed.