How is it possible to deliver more results with shrinking resources?

What’s blocking transformation initiatives? 

Change is no longer a phase. It’s the environment we operate in. Employees are experiencing approximately ten “planned change programs” per year, according to McKinsey, which is five times more than a decade ago. Business priorities evolve before initiatives are complete, and the workforce is under pressure to adjust as change occurs. It is falling on HR, learning, and IT leaders to create a system, rather than another one-time rollout plan, to address this by consistently building new capabilities and confidence to meet the moment. 

But most traditional development processes still treat change like it’s episodic, whereas what is really needed are systems built for continuous adaptation. It’s about building adaptability. Fast.

To support a growing need for continual development alongside change management, we are developing a number of new functions within Degreed Maestro, our AI that’s purpose-built for learning. At LENS we announced these latest innovations** which will be launching soon. They make up a suite of AI-powered experiences designed to turn change management into a repeatable, scalable process.

Driving Skill Proficiency, Alignment, Performance, and Efficiency

To drive effective workforce transformation, L&D and business leaders must find a way to move  from the status quo to a system for continual development that supports the organization’s strategic goals. This will take more than innovative thinking. It will take proficiency, alignment, performance, and efficiency.

Here are four ways to address this challenge, and how new Maestro features** which will be available soon can help. 

1. Proficiency: Identifying the Status Quo

Before you can move toward a goal, it’s critical to understand your starting point. In the case of large-scale transformation initiatives, you must understand the skill profile of your workforce. Traditionally, capturing high-fidelity skill data wasn’t scalable, often taking 10 minutes to assess just one skill.

Maestro Skill Check-Ins allow you to assess 15 skills in 10 minutes, all calibrated to your organization’s unique definitions of proficiency. This allows you to build an accurate picture of workforce skills, moving more quickly from guessing to knowing.

2. Alignment: Synchronizing Strategy and Sentiment 

Transformation often fails due to “friction” or a lack of buy-in that usage data alone can’t explain. Low usage tells you there is a problem, but knowing why a program isn’t working starts you on the path to a solution. Are people confused? Do they feel like the change isn’t relevant to them? Are they running into specific challenges?

With Guided Conversations, Maestro conducts nuanced interviews to uncover the “why” behind the data, asking employees what’s blocking them or where they are hesitant. It then turns those conversations into structured, actionable insights so you can more easily identify and address barriers to transformation.

3. Performance: Closing the “Know-Do” Gap 

Knowledge is only valuable if it is applied. The “Know-Do” gap is where training often fails. To bridge this, employees need to move beyond passive content consumption into interactive practice.

Maestro Roleplays now include custom rubrics. This allows you to define the exact criteria for success and gives employees immediate, structured feedback and coaching. It ensures they don’t just “know” the material, but can execute on it under pressure.

4. Efficiency: Doing More with Less 

The administrative burden of managing a transformation, especially with shrinking resources, can be overwhelming. You need ways to do more with less, and do it faster.

Ask Maestro is a conversational interface for eliminating manual hurdles and navigating Degreed. Whether it’s instantly transforming a PDF into a rich, interactive quiz, finding content in seconds, or building a complex pathway in minutes rather than hours, Ask Maestro automates the L&D “busy work” so your team can focus on high-value strategy.

Maestro in Action: Navigating a High-Stakes Sales Pivot

Let’s consider two common business challenges:

1. Your sales team needs to roll out a new methodology to boost revenue. This is a business-critical change because last year, 70% of B2B reps fell short of their quotas as market complexity outpaced traditional training.

2. You need to develop strong, new leaders with the skills for today’s challenges in a world where leadership has never been more important. But research shows that 60% of new managers fail within their first 24 months.

Here’s how Maestro works in action for these real transformation moments:

Driving Transformation with AI Innovation

As we closed out LENS, one theme was clear: Driving transformation is more important than ever. And transformation fails in the moments when people hesitate or where skills don’t translate into action. 

“Although we don’t know what the future of an AI world might look like, there isn’t a positive outcome that doesn’t involve human development,” Zoe Botterill, Head of Learning and Development at Pearson, told LENS attendees.

To meet this challenge, organizations can’t rely on static programs or one-time initiatives. They need a systematic way to:

• Understand workforce readiness in real time
• Identify and remove friction before it compounds
• Build capability through practice, not just exposure
• Keep people aligned as priorities evolve

Degreed Maestro is designed to support that shift by connecting skill data, real-time insight, and guided development. Instead of wondering if a new methodology is sticking or if your new leaders are prepared for their first challenging conversation, you have the data to prove it. The shift is moving from managing the library to managing the movement, ensuring that every employee is equipped to pivot as fast as the business does.

Because the goal isn’t to get ready. It’s to stay ready.

Join our Degreed in Action webinar series for a deep dive into these announcements, or reach out to your account team for a personalized walkthrough of the new Maestro features.

**The functionality described in this blog is coming soon.

The post Driving Measurable Transformation with Degreed Maestro appeared first on Degreed.

Learning budgets are often bogged down by overlapping libraries, under-used subscriptions, and content that no longer aligns to today’s skills needs. The result is high-cost, low-signal skill development, and growing frustration from learners and leaders alike.

At the same time, expectations are rising. HR and L&D teams are using limited budgets to support AI transformation with fewer resources than before. This pressure leads to a growing search for savings. One easy place to find these is in learning content.

The Content Cost Problem for Corporate Learning

The current, endless sprawl of learning content didn’t happen overnight. Over years and years, organizations layered new content providers on top of old ones to support new roles, skills, and initiatives. As the workforce and ways of working changed, so did the content needs. The result today is a fragmented ecosystem where:

• Multiple libraries cover the same foundational topics.
• Learners face choice overload (and often disengage as a result).
• L&D teams spend time managing vendors instead of building capability.
• Finance questions the ROI of recurring content subscriptions.

According to Degreed’s analytics, many leading content providers had 55% or higher overlap with Degreed Open Library content, which is included for all Degreed customers. This means that Degreed customers who are also relying on external content vendors are paying multiple times for similar content.

This overlap isn’t a content quality issue. It’s a strategy issue.

A 3-Step Approach to Content Optimization

Degreed helps organizations move from a state of content over-accumulation to streamlined capability-building through a simple, proven, three-step model.

Step 1: Assess Content Libraries for Cost-Savings

The first step is understanding what content you already have available in your libraries across various platforms and where redundancy exists.

Using semantic matching, Degreed’s auditing tool evaluates overlap between existing providers and Degreed Open Library to identify where foundational content needs can be met by Open Library (already included with Degreed Learning). . Many Degreed clients have discovered that their most-used content is already covered by Open Library. Identifying and eliminating redundancies can lead to significant cost savings. 

This creates an immediate opportunity to rationalize vendors and redirect budget.

Step 2: Enable Degreed Open Library

Degreed customers have access to quality learning pathways on the most in-demand skills in the market, simply by enabling Degreed Open Library. Our most widely used pathways include: AI Readiness, Data Analytics, and SQL. 

Open Library includes:

• 500+ ready-to-deploy learning pathways across today’s most in-demand skills
• Pathways curated by AI agents trained to identify high-quality learning resources
• Expert review to ensure accuracy, relevance, and bias mitigation
• Continuous updates as skills and priorities evolve

Open Library allows organizations to replace or reduce foundational learning content from external subscriptions. At the same time, there is an analysis to be done around different types or registers of content. There is a place in any library for top tier catalogs, as well as those that are specialized by role or industry and meet a specific need. But it’s likely there is also a lot of mediocre or unnecessary content in place that is no longer needed.

For many enterprises, this approach alone can unlock seven-figure savings. Enterprises using Degreed Open Library are already realizing meaningful business and cost-savings results:

• A Fortune 100 company reduced content provider spend by more than $1M annually.
• A global energy company off-boarded two premium providers and saved approximately $1M in a single year.
• A U.S. research and manufacturing organization expanded access to critical business skills while reducing L&D workload and increasing learner trust and adoption.

Savings can be achieved not only by eliminating duplicative, off-the-shelf content, but also by cost reduction on custom engagements that may no longer be necessary, like services, programs, and reimbursements. Customers who created these outcomes didn’t do so by cutting learning. Instead, they did it by spending smarter.

Step 3: Customize with AI Pathway Curation Services

Foundational coverage is essential, but it’s rarely enough to transform a workforce by itself. By working with our in-house experts, Degreed’s services team can curate and deliver content to extend Open Library with pathways based on:

• Specific roles and job functions
• Industry and regulatory needs
• Strategic initiatives like AI adoption or digital transformation

AI rapidly assembles pathways at scale, while Degreed’s instructional design experts refine them for quality, accuracy, and cultural fit. The result is AI speed with human precision, but without the cost or delay of traditional custom content development. This approach can take content development time from months or weeks to days.

Degreed Open Library vs. AI Content Curation Services: How They Work Together

Degreed Open Library and our in-house AI Curation services work hand-in-hand to help organizations through this three-step process to achieve more strategic spending. 

• Open Library delivers immediate, broad, and always-on learning coverage with immediate cost saving opportunities.
• AI Learning Content Curation Services build on that foundation and create bespoke pathways aligned to business strategy, so you can deliver learning on the topics that are most important to your business.

Together, they help organizations reduce spend while accelerating time to capability and performance.

From Content Spending to Capability Investment

The future of learning isn’t about buying more content. It’s about curating the right pathways, aligning learning to real skills and business needs, and using AI to scale what works.

Degreed Open Library and AI Pathway Curation Services give HR and L&D leaders a way to reduce redundant content spend and streamline the learning experience. This process allows you the tools and programs you need to build adaptable, AI-ready workforces, all without sacrificing quality or impact. If you’re being asked to do more with less, optimizing your learning content spend is a great place to start.

The post 3 Steps to Spend Smarter on Learning Content with Degreed appeared first on Degreed.

• Healthcare
• Finance
• Manufacturing
• Technology
• Professional Services

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

How Is a Learning Pathway Created?

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

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

The Industry Edge: Pathways Built for Workforce Readiness

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

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

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

What Are the Results? 

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

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

In total, Open Library drives measurable value:

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

The Future of Open Library

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

By 2026, Open Library will feature:

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

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

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

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

Instead, that skill-building depends on context. AI needs information like:

• Who’s the learner and what is their skill level?
• What does “ready” look like for their role?
• What are the foundations of learning science and how are they applied in this situation?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) brings that context and relevancy.

Think of it like this: You could use an old school map without a GPS. But it’s more difficult and less personalized to where you are. 

Think of MCP as the GPS for AI learning. 

Instead of adding “AI features” into a portal, MCP simplifies integrations, giving AI access to information in other tools and databases and providing a consistent, governed way to tap into the right context from Degreed and connected systems—wherever those AI models live, whatever platform they’re built on. In the GPS analogy, this allows for real time rerouting to avoid traffic, recommendations of nearby attractions, and overall route intelligence. 

Through the MCP interface, AI has access  to broader contextual information to provide more targeted, personalized learning in real time.

With MCP, AI can move from generating content to providing learning context that helps drive capability, so that employees and businesses can develop and apply new skills more quickly.

What Is MCP? What Role Does It Play in Learning?

MCP, is the connective layer inside Degreed, built to make AI learning assistants truly useful at building capabilities. It gives any approved AI agent—like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or an internal assistant—a governed, real-time snapshot of what matters for learning and performance, including:

• The learner’s skills, goals, and role
• Historical learning and skill data from Degreed 

Think of Degreed MCP as a “context envelope.” With that envelope in place, AI becomes a much more accurate support in the learning process. It can analyze all data related to the employee to provide the right learning at the right time.

How MCP Works in the Flow of Learning

On Tuesday morning, a sales manager opens Copilot and types: “Help my team get ready for Friday’s product pitch.”

Without MCP…

Copilot can find sales decks, playbooks, and pitch documentation, but it can’t tell who’s presenting, what skills they are missing, or how to help them improve.

With MCP…

Degreed and Maestro to bring missing context into view: who’s on the team, what each person already knows, and where they need coaching to tune up their skills.

Together…

Copilot surfaces the right materials, messaging, product overviews, and client data, while Maestro adds AI-native coaching conversations that guide each rep through practice modules and feedback loops that strengthen their delivery.

The manager then assigns everything directly in chat, and MCP writes the updates back to Degreed—so every skill, coaching activity, and readiness metric stays governed, current, and measurable.

There’s no extra portal needed or re-prompting required to remind the AI who’s who. The context and personalization from this exercise follow the learner from tool to tool, so the assistant stays helpful across technologies and the data remains secure.

What MCP Does for L&D, HR, and IT

Faster time to readiness: Onboarding ramp plans automatically adapt to each role, person, and deadline.
Higher adoption: Learning appears inside the tools people already use and is tailored to their needs.
Auditability: Every learning and skill action is governed and explainable.
Data you can trust: Degreed remains the single source of truth; MCP simply surfaces that data in real time.

Built to Fit your Tech Stack, Not Replace It

MCP works across your tech ecosystem, connecting signals from platforms like Workday, Salesforce, and any LMS, without duplication. It’s vendor-neutral and least-privileged by default, which means that MCP only accesses the minimum data and permissions necessary to perform its function—nothing more. Use your AI of choice, and your governance and security rules will still apply.

As Nikki Helmer, Chief Product Officer at Degreed, shared during Vision, “MCP doesn’t just make AI sound smarter. It helps it make smarter decisions—ones that align learning to business goals, reduce risk, and build real readiness.”

The post Announcing Degreed MCP: The Moment AI Learning Gets Its GPS appeared first on Degreed.

That is how Degreed Founder and CEO David Blake set the scene for Vision 2025, our annual, product-focused event. And it’s true. This rapid tech evolution doesn’t just change the way we work and live, it changes the way we learn now and in the future. 

To adjust to the scope of the AI transformation at hand, learning needs to become as adaptive as your people and your technology. It needs to be personalized and relevant to maximize skill-building. It has to be responsive to the needs of your people and your business at scale. That learning and adaptive resilience is going to be critical for the AI era. 

“As we navigate the shift, there are going to be consequences—winners and losers—and we want to make sure that we all end up on the winning side,” Blake said.

What is Adaptive Learning?

Adaptive learning is highly personalized and responsive. It’s customized with learner-specific paths and real-time feedback, making it highly interactive and tailored to individual work.

“[Adaptive learning] is learning that adjusts automatically to the needs of the individual based on their skills, their role, their level of proficiency, and their goals,” says Nicole Helmer, Chief Product Officer at Degreed. “It’s contextual, it’s dynamic, and most importantly, it eliminates waste. So every moment of development is useful.”

Here’s what we’re doing inside Degreed to make that happen:

Automatic Quiz Generation

Skill-building in the age of AI can’t only be about efficiency, it also has to be about effectiveness. It’s no longer just about content completion, it’s about content comprehension.

Are your people really learning and able to apply new skills? Where are the gaps? Now, Degreed Maestro will be able to automatically generate quizzes so learners can test their knowledge. 

With quiz results, admins and leaders can also see summaries of the results to pinpoint, then target, critical skill gaps.

Skill Proficiency Tagging and Role-to-Skill Mapping 

For personalized learning to be effective, it needs to consider skill proficiency, not just what skills are on an employee’s profile. 

That’s why we’ve enabled bulk skill proficiency tagging, which lets users automatically tag a large volume of content with specific skills and proficiency levels. AI will analyze content titles, descriptions, and metadata, then combine it with your company’s skill taxonomy to ensure tagging accuracy.

From there, the new role-to-skill workflow will come into play. It offers a simple, scalable way to define role expectations and suss out skill gaps. It provides a structured, easy way to map skills and target proficiency levels for every role, and then it uses that data to guide employees toward targeted learning.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) 

AI that’s operating without context is about as useful as your favorite maps app without the GPS. In a learning system, it’s the context (e.g., skill data, organizational goals, role details) that will take AI from offering generic information retrieval to providing personalized learning experiences.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives AI a consistent, governed way to tap into the right context from Degreed and connected systems wherever those AI models live, whatever platform they’re built on (yes, including other MCP-enabled tools like Gemini and Copilot). Through MCP, AI has access to the skill data, roles, learning history, and guardrails that matter. That way, it can better personalize development and guide your people to what’s next.

Experimental Innovation

In the face of AI, learning will continue to evolve rapidly and the Degreed AI Experiments Lab is already prototyping the development of the future. 

Among these experiments are several multi-step, AI-native learning experiences, including mini coaching moments, AI scoring on learner practice projects, and even smart questions and feedback loops that are woven into learning and aggregate response data.

On top of that, we continue to refine Maestro for real, in-the-flow-of-work learning experiences. We’re also growing Degreed Open Library, our repository of learning pathways on the most in-demand skills in the market. These pathways come at no extra cost to Degreed Learning clients. 

All of this is only the beginning of an era of dynamic and responsive learning that’s personalized like never before. You can lean into these adaptive learning experiences to prepare your workforce for the AI transformation and beyond. 

The post The First Steps to Dynamic, Adaptive Learning at Work appeared first on Degreed.

This becomes easier with the right tools, integrated to meet your needs. Take Degreed and Workday. Together, Degreed and Workday create a unified skills ecosystem that turns insight into action. The integration helps you close skill gaps faster, adapt to change, and align development directly with business priorities.

Turn Skill Gaps into Growth Opportunities

In many organizations, skill data is scattered across multiple platforms. That slows workforce planning and creates a mismatch between talent and business needs. The Workday and Degreed integration solves that by connecting skill data in both directions, creating a single, reliable source of truth.

It also replaces generic, one-size-fits-all learning with highly personalized experiences. By combining Workday’s role and performance insights with Degreed’s AI-powered curation, personalized experiences, and 80+ content providers, employees get the right learning at the right time.

Whenever the market shifts, agility becomes a competitive advantage. Shared taxonomies, labor market intelligence, and real-time skill validation make it possible to pivot quickly and confidently. Most importantly, every learning activity can be tied directly to measurable outcomes—linking Degreed activity with business targets in Workday, like retention, productivity, and promotion rates—so you can prove ROI, not just report on activity.

Proof in Action: State Street

State Street uses Degreed to assess and grow skills, then syncs validated skills to Workday only when proficiency is met. The results:

• Employees who spend 5–10 hours/month learning in Degreed report higher engagement.
• 300K+ Validated Skill Ratings powering internal mobility
• 97% User Activation, driven by integration into internal mobility
• 72% Monthly Active Use (and growing)

Your Advantage

Our Skills and Learning integrations have a Workday Design Approved badge. That means they are reviewed and approved by Workday, built in close collaboration with the Workday Product team, and guided by real client use cases. Together, we deliver one source of truth for HR and L&D, a connected and personalized employee experience, and the agility to pivot quickly, measure impact, and invest in what works.

Don’t wait for skill gaps to slow your growth. Discover how Workday + Degreed can help you close them. Imagine the impact you could see in just 90 days.

The post Use Workday and Degreed Data to Fill Your Skill Gaps appeared first on Degreed.

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.

Degreed Maestro is purpose-built to close this gap—delivering intelligent, personalized, and scalable learning experiences that convert Gen AI potential into productivity gains, innovation, and competitive advantage. Think of it as AI that can be used to build AI skills.

Here’s how:

Maestro Drives Precision at Scale.

• Automatically generates personalized learning pathways aligned to job roles, skills, and business needs.
• Maps Gen AI proficiency goals to learning moments—supporting roles like AI Trainers, Prompt Engineers, and Analysts.

Maestro Delivers Personalized Coaching for Confidence.

• Delivers AI-powered coaching prompts and role-specific simulations to build Gen AI fluency.
• Reinforces confidence through contextual support and feedback—key to sustained behavior change.

Maestro Embeds Learning in the Flow of Work.

• Orchestrates learning moments based on individual user actions, roles, and preferences.
• Promotes continuous learning habits by embedding recommendations and nudges into everyday workflows.

Maestro Has Measurable Impact on Skills & Business Outcomes.

• Tracks confidence growth, skill proficiency, and learning behavior over time.
• Integrates with Degreed Skills+ to provide real-time analytics and link Gen AI learning to business strategy.

Strategic Outcomes

• Accelerated Gen AI proficiency across the workforce
• Increased engagement, retention, and internal mobility
• Reduced time-to-impact for Gen AI use cases
• Alignment of learning investments to workforce transformation goals and business performance metrics

Your Next Move

Let’s explore how your organization can build Gen AI learning strategies—for faster innovation, smarter operations, and lasting business impact.

Schedule a personalized, one-on-one call with a Degreed expert today.

The post AI for AI Skills: How Degreed Maestro Accelerates Gen AI Fluency appeared first on Degreed.

Traditional learning systems aren’t built for this complexity. But Degreed is. With Degreed Maestro, we’ve built AI that is purpose-built for learning and that amplifies workforce development. Degreed Maestro helps organizations pinpoint skill needs, personalize development, and measure change, so you’re always building the right capabilities at the right time no matter how fast or unexpected the change.

Using Degreed AI to pinpoint needs: clarity in the chaos

Knowing your destination is critical, but so is understanding where you’re starting from. Fragmented data, outdated taxonomies, and a lack of standards make it nearly impossible to identify workforce skills with confidence. And that’s a major risk when talent is your most valuable asset.

Degreed Maestro’s Skill Review Coach provides a conversational method to validate individual skills in a consistent, unbiased way. The result? A dynamic, data-rich map of your organization’s skill landscape that makes strategic planning finally feel well-informed.

Degreed also helps untangle chaotic skill data. With skill level and label normalization, Degreed standardizes skill data across systems, providers, and languages by removing duplicates, correcting inconsistencies, and enabling a single, usable view of workforce capability.

From there, role-to-skill inference uses AI to identify the skills each job requires and maps them to your people. This is complemented by inferred skills for content, which tags every piece of learning content with the relevant skills it builds, making it easier to find relevant content for your role and goals.

Using Degreed AI to personalize development: At scale at last

Personalizing learning has always been the gold standard, but it’s notoriously hard to do at scale. Most organizations are stuck delivering generic training that doesn’t match employee roles, goals, or readiness. The result? Wasted learning, disengaged employees, and minimal business impact.

Degreed Maestro changes the game. Its suite of AI-powered experiences, including a Leadership Coach, Career Coach, and intelligent pathway curation, guides every employee with just-right resources for their unique goals, skills, and challenges. Employees don’t have to hunt for the right content. It finds them.

Meanwhile, Degreed Maestro’s AI-assisted pathway curation builds structured, targeted development journeys in minutes, saving time and driving deeper engagement.

Need something even more tailored? With Maestro Studio, you can build custom AI-native learning experiences—from onboarding bots to role-plays—purpose-built for your workforce. Now every employee can have a coach in their corner, and your L&D team can finally scale personalization at a fraction of previous cost.

Using Degreed AI to measure change: Making progress visible

Many organizations invest heavily in development, yet struggle to answer a simple question: Is it working? Traditional learning metrics (completions, hours logged) can be helpful but don’t show whether people are actually building the skills the business needs. And without clear measurement, it’s impossible to prove ROI or adjust strategies.

Degreed bridges that gap. We suggest using the Degreed Maestro Skill Review Coach again after learning completion to identify improvements in skill level that came from learning.  This helps teams validate what people know, not just what they’ve clicked.

Paired with profile skill suggestions, which recommend relevant skills based on a person’s role, learning activity, and aspirations, organizations can continuously calibrate and update each individual’s skill profile. This ensures data stays current and actionable.

Together, these tools create a live snapshot of your workforce’s capabilities, so you can track improvement, close gaps faster, and align development with strategy.

Smarter workforce development with AI for learning

AI is changing everything about the way we work, and now it’s changing how we learn. Degreed puts that power in your hands, helping you identify critical skill needs, deliver development that matters, and measure progress with clarity. Whether it’s through Degreed Maestro’s guided coaching or dynamic skill inference, AI for learning gives you the tools to lead workforce transformation. By connecting skill data to learning and business needs, it helps you solve the problems that matter.

Because in the end, it’s not just about training. It’s about building capabilities that fuel transformation. If you’re ready to connect learning to outcomes with intelligent precision, get a demo and see what Degreed can do for your business.

The post Pinpoint, Personalize, Prove: Degreed AI for Learning 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.