That’s the question that is top of mind for HR, learning, and IT leaders alike. Technology is shifting faster than teams can operationalize it. The result is that company goals and workforce strategies often are no longer fixed destinations. In fact, employees are experiencing approximately ten “planned change programs” per year, according to McKinsey, which is five times more than a decade ago. 

Traditional development methods can’t keep up with that. It’s time for a perspective shift.

How to Strengthen Adaptive Change Management and Employee Development

We should be asking, how can we keep pace with a moving target?

Before AI started driving technology innovation at a furious pace, it made sense to determine a goal to support your strategy, adjust work to meet that goal, and continue on that path until it had been achieved. That’s not what work looks like anymore; the world is evolving too quickly to see the process through from beginning to end. 

Employees are noticing the lack of effectiveness in how these shifts are handled. In 2025, only one fourth of employees surveyed felt their organizations effectively managed change rollouts across the business, and nearly half said it increased their workload.

At that rate, change isn’t sustainable. In a modern workplace, the only way to manage the current pace of change is to enable your workforce to continually adapt. Then, instead of missing targets, you’ll be looking for the next ones and feeling confident you can keep up.

That’s the shift. But knowing you need adaptability isn’t the same as operationalizing it.

To make change stick, you need a way to move individuals through it. It isn’t enough just to launch initiatives and hope adoption follows.

Apply the ADKAR Model to Drive Individual Change

Adaptive change fails because people aren’t ready to act on it.

That’s where the ADKAR model comes in. Built on the idea that organizational change only happens when individuals change, ADKAR gives leaders a simple way to identify where progress is breaking down, and what to do about it. It focuses on five outcomes every individual needs to move through:

• Awareness: Do people understand why this change matters right now?
• Desire: Do they actually want to engage with it?
• Knowledge: Do they know what to do differently?
• Ability: Can they apply those changes in real work?
• Reinforcement: Are those behaviors being sustained over time?

Most organizations stall somewhere in the middle. They communicate the change (awareness), maybe even provide training (knowledge), but never confirm whether employees can apply it under real work conditions. Or they skip reinforcement entirely, assuming once a behavior is introduced, it will stick.

In a world where priorities constantly shift, those gaps show up faster at scale.

The ADKAR model works because it gives you a diagnostic lens. Instead of asking, “Why isn’t this working?” you can pinpoint the exact barrier. Is it a lack of clarity? Resistance? Missing skills? Or simply no reinforcement?

Once you know where individuals are getting stuck, you can respond with precision, whether that includes targeted communication, hands-on practice, or ongoing feedback loops.

This approach helps turn change from a one-time rollout into a repeatable, scalable system. It’s not enough to introduce new ways of working. You have to ensure people can adopt, apply, and sustain them as conditions evolve.

How to Address Change Business-Wide

Understanding how individuals move through change is only part of the equation. The next challenge is scaling that across the business, so strategy translates into consistent behavior. Your workforce doesn’t need better planning to make this happen. Not only do they need the organization and leadership to help provide stronger change management. They also need more in-the-flow opportunities to help them develop the required emerging skills.

To keep pace, you need a system that connects what people know, how they feel, and what they actually have the capability to do right now. That means moving beyond static training programs. It means building a repeatable way to activate and accelerate always-on readiness.

Here are the steps to addressing big workplace shifts:

1. Set the baseline. Don’t make assumptions about skill proficiencies. Knowing what employees know (and don’t know) is an essential part of effectively enabling them throughout a transition. Without this knowledge, you’re operating blind.
2. Find out what’s blocking adoption. When adoption of a new method, process, or technology stalls, you can’t fix the problem until you know what’s causing it. Too often, organizations rely on surface-level learning data like completions or logins. But that doesn’t tell you whether employees feel confident, understand the shifts they need to make, or believe the  changes apply to their role. Once you have a better grasp of these factors, you can help employees develop in the right areas.
3. Provide experiential learning opportunities. According to McKinsey, nearly 90% of leaders are seeking a significant change in how to develop employees. And this is now possible, because AI capabilities have illuminated an entirely new learning landscape. Employees can access one-on-one coaching and participate in skill rating sessions in real-time to meet personalized development needs as they arise.
4. Pick up the speed of transformation. The longer it takes to build, update, and deploy learning experiences, the more likely your approach will fall out of sync with current reality. To keep up, organizations need to reduce the operational drag around development by automating content creation, simplifying pathway design, and delivering the right learning to the right people without manual effort.

Successfully managing these four steps is what most organizations are aiming for in this AI-driven era. 

Prepare for Constant Workforce Transformation with AI-Powered Learning

Even the best laid business plans and strategies fail if the workforce doesn’t have the capabilities needed to execute them. And in a world where priorities shift constantly, stalled progress is a huge risk. The organizations that keep up are the ones that can continuously:

• Understand workforce readiness in real time
• Identify and remove friction early
• Build capability through practice, not just exposure
• Adapt faster than the pace of change

That’s the shift. Change isn’t something you manage once. It’s something you execute continuously.

Degreed Maestro, our AI tool that’s purpose-built for human learning, is designed to help you do exactly that.

The post Driving Change Management When Change Never Stops appeared first on Degreed.

This isn’t a surprise to most HR professionals experiencing the transformation in real time. 89% of surveyed HR senior leaders told CNBC they believed AI would reshape HR job roles in 2026.

At Degreed LENS 2026, Claudio Muruzabal, Board Member, Global Business Transformation Advisor and Former Chief Business Officer, and Erik Lossbroek, CRO at Degreed, discussed “The End of HR (As We Know It).” While the session made it clear that HR continues to be essential and is not going anywhere, it also underlined the fact that the HR function is undergoing a deep overhaul as a result of emerging technology and larger-scale organizational shifts.

Automation is Redefining HR’s Role

More and more HR tasks are being automated or turned over to AI. In 2025, 66% of HR teams used generative AI and approximately 77% of HR organizations had a technology initiative in place to improve efficiency, according to The Hackett Group.

But this effort isn’t new.

“HR has been ahead of the curve in terms of bringing AI to the business,” Muruzabal said. He went on to explain that HR has often been one of the first business functions using AI—for hiring, recruitment, assessment, and more. 

Now, AI tools are getting sophisticated enough to truly automate some of the repetitive tasks that bog down HR teams. Muruzabal said that this kind of automation is making many HR functions much more self-service for employees, while reducing the load for HR from that type of work. 

But when that happens, the work HR teams do isn’t eliminated; it’s extended into new areas. And that work is increasing. That same study from The Hackett Group found that HR workloads were actually set to rise 10% in 2025. As more menial tasks disappear, HR professionals can focus on more strategic, large-scale business initiatives, like capability building.

“If we can envision that model, in which we use automation even more in all of the traditional functions, and we focus our resources on the future and development, we’re talking about a function that is very different from the function we’re all used to,” Muruzabal said. “And it’s up to us—the ones who we believe that we need to focus in the learning space to make that happen—to create the capabilities and the affordability to invest more in this continuum.”

That focus on learning and workforce development is what will make organizations successful long-term, because that is what will allow businesses to better adapt to change.

Moving From Development Programs to Capability-Building Systems

The new mandate to adapt is falling to HR, talent, and learning teams. To meet these growing development needs, it’s not enough to curate and launch programs semi-annually. 

According to Financial Times, traditional learning programs can take three to six months to roll out. AI capabilities and tools change significantly in the time it takes to research, build, and launch initiatives like those.

“What you need is to be focused on developing talent every day,” Muruzabal advised.

In another LENS 2026 event session, Zoe Botterill, Head of Learning and Development at Pearson, shared the need for learning and development teams to move to more of a product mindset. Through that lens, the team would develop programs in shorter sprints, continually iterating and building on learning experiences while they are operating in the organization.

But this is a huge shift away from traditional training models. Creating a learning solution that’s iterative and responsive means moving from program-based talent development to a comprehensive system that continuously adapts to develop workforce capability. Such a system will connect skills to business priorities in real time and evolve as roles change. It will grow with the business.

This is where HR can step in and activate their experience in setting up org-wide, people-centric systems to support strategic initiatives for the business. But transformations of this scale don’t come without barriers or cross-functional impact.

AI Raises the Stakes for HR

The rise of AI tools, trends, and capabilities will inevitably create winners and losers—companies that will thrive in the new world and those that won’t be able to keep up. Regardless, the work of HR teams is not going away. If anything, work is more intense and demanding than ever, though it will affect business functions differently.

“There will be some segments and markets that will be more impacted than others, but in the longer run, there is a much bigger opportunity to really create a bigger pie for everybody,” Muruzabal said. “I’m not afraid of AI.”

As part of this transition, there has to be a growing focus on technological organization, access, and structure, which will bring in IT, legal, and compliance into the mix. 

“Governance is as important as technology itself,” Muruzabal said. “Making the right governance decisions in terms of technology will become even more important in the future.”

The weight of governance will likely also become an increasingly important element of HR responsibilities. This is especially true as talent development technology becomes more integrated and personalized, and the sensitive human data those systems contain is shared across your ecosystem to leverage emerging AI capabilities like Model Context Protocol (MCP).

According to a 2026 survey of CHROs, the top cited barriers to AI adoption are organizational concerns, such as employees’ fear of job loss, budgetary pressures, and security and compliance needs. Not the technology itself. 

HR Transformation In 2026

HR is feeling the pressure to ensure the workforce keeps up with an ever-evolving workplace while also adapting and evolving their own HR models and systems with new technology.

 Through this transition, we’re seeing:

• A shift in the focus of HR from small-scale, day-to-day tasks to more strategic, business-critical initiatives, thanks to automation and AI.
• A move from one-time training programs to more holistic, responsive systems for always-on capability building.
• A rise in the importance of human work and tech governance, even as more tasks get outsourced to AI.

This unique convergence with technology will be HR’s new operating model for 2026. 
For more great insights, sign up for our six-part Degreed In Action webinar series.

The post HR + AI: A New Operating Model for 2026 appeared first on Degreed.

The rise of AI tools has led us to demand more from the same people. But they’re struggling to keep up. All the focus has been on implementing the tools, with much less emphasis on enabling the humans.

It’s a paradox and a reality for HR, learning, and tech leaders right now. The company needs to show ROI on their AI investment, but the missing ROI isn’t a technology problem, it’s a human readiness gap.

Last week, Degreed CEO David Blake took the stage at LENS 2026 to put a name to this new era of highly demanding work: The Age of Intensification.

In this new age, work, learning, and talent development has to change. At LENS, industry experts and Degreed clients and leaders touched on these changes and how to adapt. Here were some of the highlights:

Humans can still win in the Age of Intensification

The world is compressing and the rate of change is accelerating. Yet, AI hasn’t reduced human workload. It’s expanded what’s possible and raised the base level (and the bar) for performance. 

Now, the ask is for people to do more in the same amount of time. Humans have to learn to use AI, and use it well. All without an over-reliance on the technology. It’s demanding. Intense.

Yet, having access to AI tools doesn’t inherently make them useful. It’s only when those tools are elevated by people and embedded into processes that the real ROI will emerge. And after the massive investment businesses made on AI, leadership teams expect that measurable return. 

“Your CEOs need to see a return on it, and that pressure and that mandate is coming to you,” Blake said.

Transformation isn’t optional. The only question is whether it’s intentional and effective. And technology alone can’t drive that kind of transformation. We know because the technology is here, but the return isn’t. Only 25% of AI initiatives deliver expected ROI, according to IBM.

In this Age of Intensification, there’s also a persistent fear that AI will displace human work. But the message from LENS was more nuanced. Not only can AI not replace human work, but it was never designed to. According to the world’s first Chief AI Officer, Sol Rashidi, it was meant “to facilitate, to accelerate, to amplify the magic that we bring to the workforce.”

Although it’s easy to fawn over the capabilities AI has to offer, it’s missing critical logic, novelty, leadership, and judgment. Anyone can access AI tools, but your company is the only one with your unique workforce characteristics and skill sets. That’s what defines your business.

Or, as Rashidi reminded LENS attendees: “Technology is amazing. We’re more amazing. Don’t lose that.”

Learning must become as dynamic as change

When change is continuous, development can’t be episodic. Static learning content isn’t going to cut it when the entire world is becoming responsive and personalized.

During his session on Degreed AI Labs, Taylor Blake described what an AI-native development model could look like: “I’m going to propose that the AI Native Model is going to look something like this. Learning experiences are going to be more specialized to the task. They’re going to be more personalized to the individual. They will be more situational to the moment.”

This principle also applies more directly to the process of creating and distributing learning content. As pointed out in Financial Times, traditional learning programs can take three to six months to roll out, and AI can change entirely in that time. That’s why, although learning teams are masters at traditional content authoring and curation, this new age is calling for something more dynamic: a product mindset that plans for a fast launch and regular adjustments. 

Learning can no longer be a one-time program rolled out annually. 

“We’re going to iterate and learn as we go,” Zoe Botterill, Head of Learning and Development at Pearson, said.

Efficiency alone isn’t enough

When pressure increases, most organizations add more—more programs, more tools, more initiatives. In fact, McKinsey has found that employees now experience 5x more change programs than they did a decade ago. But the reality is that 59% of change initiative value is lost between the initial idea and the execution of these initiatives. This explains in part why 89% of leaders are looking for a drastic change in how their organizations develop employees. They understand that this is where the value will be created or lost when it comes to AI investments.

“When pressure goes up, most organizations respond by adding something. My challenge to you is, as a high-performing team: Pause. Think through how you can simplify. Focus on the capabilities, the skills, and the workflows,” Jennifer Sutherland, Global Head of Learning Enablement at ZS, said.

More isn’t always better. In fact, sometimes, it’s detrimental. Rashidi told LENS attendees that the endgame isn’t to be more productive, it’s to be more effective: “We’ve got to help our organizations to stop being overly obsessed with productivity and efficiency, because this just measures ‘more.’ But what if we are doing ‘more’ of the wrong things?”

Efficiency for the sake of efficiency isn’t returning the dividends many leaders think. In fact, in some areas, it’s weakening your overall strategy.

“Efficiency doesn’t create strength in your workforce,” Blake said. “Think about it. If you can automate away a job, you’ve probably already done so.”

Safe experimentation and practice are key

Another critical piece of agility is having the curiosity and courage to experiment is becoming more and more important, especially as technology continues to evolve at high speed.

“You have to be able to fail because it’s in the failure that you find the gold, the treasure, and the lessons,” Antonia Jackson, Learning and Technology Partner at HubSpot, said.

And part of that experimentation means pressure-testing your systems and tools. If you’re trying a new technology, Carlo José, Global Head of Learning and Development from GSK, said pilots are exactly the right time to challenge the system.

“Break it now while we’re in testing stages so we can figure out how to evolve,” José said.

Another way this principle comes into play is in learning itself. New AI tools, like Degreed Maestro, give users the ability to practice, receive feedback, and even fail at new skills like presentations, sales pitches, or business-critical conversations. And with AI, they can do so without judgment.

TEKSystems, for example, used Maestro to deliver personalized practice opportunities to their sales teams at speed and scale.. And here is some of the feedback they received: 

“Their confidence grew,” Stefanie Kuehn, Senior Program Manager, Organizational Development at TEKSytems said. “They were able to role play in a safe environment, and that meant not having a leader or a mentor over your shoulder listening in. But they were able to do the Maestro experiences multiple times until they felt that they were good enough to then go ahead and approach that call or test out their ability.”

Human Readiness Drives the Future

The biggest takeaway we kept hearing over and over again? Technology alone isn’t enough for AI transformation. You can have all the AI tools in the world, but if your workforce is unprepared, you won’t see that ROI.

“It’s about people and how people use technology for the business,” Ingrid Urman, Global L&D Director at Tenaris, said.

Businesses aren’t seeing the ROI from AI because even though they got the tools, they didn’t focus on upskilling the people. If we expect people to do more work in the same amount of time during this Age of Intensification, then we have to empower them to be proficient and effective using these tools. 

This is the real work of transformation: building human capability to match technological ambition.

The insights from the LENS stage are an indicator of what’s coming, but amidst all of that, it’s crucial to remember our role as humans in shaping that future. 

“Find your edge,” Rashidi said. “Continue to be creative. Connect the dots where machines cannot. Be accountable for your organization. You have a moral responsibility.” 

Technology will keep accelerating. Expectations will keep rising. Human transformation is what determines whether businesses keep up or fall behind.

For more information on the Degreed product announcements and updates made at LENS, please register for our six-part Degreed In Action webinar seriesor read our product announcement press release.

The post Workforce Transformation in the Age of Intensification appeared first on Degreed.

That’s the learning efficiency paradox. AI is meant to create greater efficiency and productivity, but employees have to be able to use it well. If they can’t, they may not make any gains and AI may even become a blocker. 

Businesses are not yet seeing the ROI on their AI investments, and this is why. Speed isn’t everything. AI works fast, but unless we reimagine work and learning, that speed comes at the cost of people, processes, and real innovation. Without guidance and intentionality along with it, people can become overwhelmed, processes can descend into chaos, and “innovation” is limited to whatever commoditized knowledge and ideas AI has to offer.

The tension between scale and substance, speed and depth, activity and impact, is reaching a fever pitch. It’s not enough to create and complete training quickly; people need to absorb and apply knowledge effectively.

It’s time to redefine efficiency in a way that’s sustainable for long-term business success. In most organizations, AI transformation initiatives are targeting speed and productivity above all else. But that can’t last because people won’t be able to keep up. 

Efficiency is not just about moving faster, it’s about doing things better. And it starts with people, not technology. 

The Efficiency Paradox and the Human Side of AI Transformation

Getting AI transformation right may seem like a technology problem, but it’s also a people problem. AI was supposed to increase efficiency, but many businesses aren’t seeing the results yet. In fact, nearly 95% of businesses saw zero return on in-house AI investments and only 15% of Gen AI users report their organizations see significant ROI from it.

Perhaps understandably, the tendency is to view the lack of progress as a technological issue, so companies are continually funneling money into AI initiatives. After 85% of leaders increased AI investments over the last year, nine out ten enterprise leaders still expect to spend more on Gen AI next year, according to Knowledge at Wharton (88%) and Deloitte (91%).

Yet, despite the sharp uptick in AI spending, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that in the last year, AI use at work has only risen from 33% (2024) to 37.5% (2025). Similarly, a global PwC report found that 14% of respondents are using Gen AI daily, compared to only 12% in 2024. The increases in use are not yet aligning with the massive spending on these initiatives.

The bottom line? To recognize the deep value AI promises, employees will need to upskill both faster and more effectively, as the number of skills they need and the speed at which they need them continue to grow. To do that, businesses need to invest in the human side of AI transformation. In the end of the day, AI initiatives need to be effective for the people who will use them to innovate, to find new ways of working, and to ultimately drive business growth.

AI’s Role In the Learning Efficiency Paradox

While AI is certainly driving the urgent change that businesses are grappling with, it’s also contributing to the solution. That’s the other piece of the paradox.

How? 

AI’s capabilities, when used correctly, open the door to untapped potential in enabling the fast and thorough skill development people need to keep pace with AI. You need learning efficiency. Static learning content libraries and self-service development won’t do the job any more. AI unlocks opportunities for personalization, interactivity, and innovation. 

Personalization

When your employees have access to the most relevant content possible, it means they don’t have to waste precious learning time looking for the right content. AI can use skill data and the foundations of learning science to ensure content is always relevant for the learner’s role and skill level. 

Interactivity

AI allows for more responsive content than has ever been possible before. This goes beyond personalization: You can practice real conversational scenarios, practice for key interactions, and get immediate feedback. This is an unprecedented way of learning that helps cement capability. 

Innovation

Innovation comes in many forms, and AI has a lot of potential to drive creative improvements to existing processes. According to McKinsey, half of AI high performers expect to use AI to transform their businesses, mostly through redesigning workflows. Reimagining traditional processes and procedures can be the key to greater efficiency, with human and AI capabilities operating in tandem. 

The learning efficiency paradox is both an opportunity and a new challenge. Take the opportunity to join in-depth, expert-led discussions on solving this efficiency paradox at Degreed LENS 2026 in Orlando, Florida. From an agenda filled with workshops, roundtables, and sessions rich with insights, you’ll learn from and network with the best in the business.

The post What Is the Learning Efficiency Paradox? appeared first on Degreed.

As the gap between business needs and workforce capabilities persists, people need more control over how they develop. The knowledge they pursue needs to be hyper relevant.

Moving your people from Point A to Point Z in today’s world of work is more than a project. It’s bigger than a pilot. And that’s why workforce transformation is more than a buzzword.

We think about workforce transformation as changing your company’s structure and skills—to align your people with business strategy. Done well, it can have a profound effect on their ability to perform at their best.

The Importance of Shared Leadership

Like many other worthy business endeavors, workforce transformation requires collaboration among HR, Learning, and IT leadership.

Some organizations have created dedicated roles to lead the charge: Organization & Transformation Officer, Development & Change Management Lead, and Vice President of Workforce Planning, among other titles.

Innovative leaders know that transformation isn’t about repackaging L&D. It’s not about more training. It’s not even just about reskilling. 

Structuring for Change

To keep pace with shifting demands, successful organizations are rethinking how they build, organize, and support talent at scale. 

These organizations are:

• Establishing a language for skills that’s consistent and organization-wide.
• Identifying skill gaps through accurate, connected data.
• Helping employees adapt to new ways of working.
• Delivering personalized, business-aligned development at scale.
• Measuring whether skills are actually being built—and where.

These actions represent strategic changes that affect workforce planning, promote internal mobility, advance recruiting, and grow careers. They require clear ownership and coordinated execution.

The Critical Role of the C-Suite Stakeholder

At many companies, CHROs are defining workforce strategy. CLOs are making learning more relevant and aligned. CIOs are responsible for delivering infrastructure that supports flexibility, security, and interoperability.

None of this comes together in isolation. That’s why leading organizations are aligning their people systems and strategy around a shared foundation: skills.

Creating a Common Skills Language Across the Business

One of the biggest blockers to transformation is inconsistent skill data. Different systems define and track skills in different ways—or not at all. The result is duplicate effort and unclear decision-making.

Clarity is key. That’s why Degreed Skills+ eliminates roadblocks by integrating skill data from across your HRIS, LXP, LMS, and talent marketplace—and then cleaning, normalizing, and organizing it using AI. It  suggests and resolves synonyms, defines proficiency levels, and enables customization based on your unique organizational language.

With a shared skills framework, your cross-functional teams can finally work from the same data and unify how skills are defined and tracked—so you can identify gaps, measure progress, and plan with confidence.

Delivering Personalized, Scalable Growth

Once skill gaps are identified, the next big step is delivering meaningful development.

What makes learning meaningful? Relevance. With Degreed Learning, content, mentors, and pathways are tailored to each employee’s role, goals, and skill profile. Instead of navigating overwhelming content libraries, learners are guided toward what they need when they need it. Further personalizing the experience, Degreed Automations handles assignments, updates, and nudges automatically—triggered by employee actions or milestones.

And to make employee development even more adaptive, Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose-built for learning, uses role, context, and historical data to recommend content, coach employees, and assess progress. It reduces wasted time, boosts platform engagement, and improves learning retention.

Supporting Change as Your Strategy Unfolds

Transformation doesn’t end at go-live. As priorities evolve, systems need to support continuous adaptation.

As your organization adopts new technologies, embraces internal mobility, or rethinks how teams are structured, employees need to understand what’s changing—and how to keep up.

Degreed supports change readiness with features like skill-level descriptions, coaching, and role-specific Learning Plans and Pathways. Employees can see where they stand, what to focus on next, and how to grow into evolving roles.

What Leading Teams Are Doing Differently

What sets successful teams apart is not only vision, but also execution.

Forward-thinking organizations are: 

• Standardizing skill definitions across teams and systems.
• Prioritizing development aligned with business needs.
• Reducing friction in how people access and apply learning.
• Measuring progress in terms of actual skill growth.
• Using real-time data to make decisions about talent development and deployment.

A system like Degreed connects the dots across these workflows, reducing manual effort and creating visibility across functions—without adding complexity.

What comes next depends on the steps you take now.

Preparing for AI. Improving retention. Boosting employee performance. Whatever the goal, the pressure to adapt is no longer theoretical—it’s operational.

With tools like Degreed Skills+, Degreed Learning, and Degreed Maestro, you can define the skills that matter, develop them with purpose, and track progress with clarity. That’s how transformation becomes operational—and sustainable.

Learn more.

Get a clear picture of what’s coming from Degreed. Check out our seven-part Degreed in Action webinar series and choose your sessions to find out more about our innovations in AI, skills reporting, automations, Degreed Professional Services, Degreed Academies, and more.

The post What Workforce Transformation Actually Requires appeared first on Degreed.

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

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

The Program: A Skills-First Approach to Learning

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

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

Choosing Degreed

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

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

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

Managing Skills

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

The Results: More Engaged Employees, and Lower Costs

The results have been impressive, including: 

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

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

Lessons Learned: Turning Executives into Deans

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

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

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

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

Your company can reskill at scale too.

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

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

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

Find out more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose-Driven L&D

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

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

The new strategy consisted of six pillars:

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

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

Degreed: More Than a Fancy UI & Content Search Engine

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

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

Aligning Learning with the Business

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

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

Building the Right Content 

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

Personalizing Learning at Scale

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

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

Degreed: Learning for the Business and Careers

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

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

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

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

A New Way Forward

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

Does Watt have advice for other L&D organizations?

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

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

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

Strategy + Degreed = Success

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

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

Find out more.

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

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

This content strategy directs how Regions Bank L&D builds and offers learning to more than 20,000 employees. 

But what if nobody knows how to find that content? L&D success requires more than flipping the content on-switch. Indeed, the internal marketing of learning opportunities to employees plays a huge role in making their development happen.

Have you ever wondered why people aren’t engaging with your curated content? They might not know it exists, the analysts at Training Industry recently noted. “Unfortunately, this is a common question among many L&D professionals and training departments. They invest time and money to design and develop the training without a marketing plan or strategy to ensure participation.”

At Regions—a Degreed client and member of the S&P 500 Index serving customers across the South, Midwest and Texas—L&D leaders made sure their people knew where to find the learning they needed. In a campaign that won a 2024 Degreed Visionaries Award, the Regions team took home Silver for Learning Marketer of the Year. Join us for our Q&A with Lanie Jordan, Learning and Development Curator, as we take a look at why ten times as many Regions employees as expected participated in the bank’s Degreed 5-Day Challenge. 

The Regions Bank Story: Wildly Successful Employee Engagement

Degreed: Congratulations on your award! Your story and incredible results will help other organizations looking for ideas on how to boost employee engagement. Let’s start with an overview of the campaign. What was the main objective? 

Jordan: Thank you. The Degreed 5-Day Challenge was a week-long campaign designed to promote the benefits and features of Degreed. We focused on how to leverage the platform in your personal upskilling and development, whether that meant upskilling for a current role, preparing for a next role, or solving problems in the flow of your daily work.

Each day began with a podcast interview with active Degreed users who shared their positive experiences with Degreed, followed by micro-learnings explaining how to navigate key functions, and finally tailored exercises for completing key tasks and activities designed to support career goals. Each day took roughly ten minutes to complete, helping our associates to use the platform for upskilling and reskilling, personal development, and career planning. 

At Regions, we really see a culture of continuous learning as essential to our organization’s long-term success. And that means providing our associates with upskilling and reskilling opportunities in a variety of options such as articles, podcasts, videos, courses—but they need to know about all those opportunities.

Degreed: Let’s go a little deeper. How was The Challenge conceived? What was the thinking behind how it was designed? 

Jordan: We wanted it to be a fairly light lift. The goal was to make each session brief but also impactful. The sessions focused largely on how to use Degreed in effective ways, the idea being that familiarity with the platform translates to ease of use, which in turn makes the actual learning that follows easier to accomplish. In that sense, our goal was to help reduce any initial friction people might feel after logging in. 

To deliver the campaign content, we created a Skill Plan in Degreed that contained welcome material as well as a Pathway for each of the five days, and each of those days had a different theme.

Day 1 discussed career-building resources including our Degreed Featured Page, which connects associates with relevant learning content and resources that support organizational objectives along with their professional growth. It enables them to take charge of their own development.

Day 2 discussed leveraging skills in Degreed, so in other words a look at creating and rating skills as well as focus skills and skill targets.

Day 3 focused on content recommendations, personalization features, and “making learning uniquely yours” to reinforce the idea of self-directed development.

Day 4 looked at using Degreed to upskill with an emphasis on finding content.

Day 5 discussed leveraging Degreed for social learning, in other words ways our associates can join Groups, follow each other, and share content to learn together using the platform.

Degreed: That makes a lot of sense. With your goals in mind, how did you go about pulling it together? What did the planning process look like?

Jordan: We socialized our plans to HR business partners and our learning architects in advance of the launch date, and those teams helped to refine and support the program through feedback, communications, and more. To reinforce and ensure alignment, we created and delivered a one-page overview and postcard to all of them, which was helpful.

Importantly, we partnered with our Head of Learning and Development, who was our executive sponsor and advocate for the campaign. And we featured her twice, first in an introduction to the program entitled Growing Your Career at Regions, a podcast in which she shared several key resources, including Degreed, that are designed to help associates in personal and professional upskilling. She also was featured in an inaugural, Day 1 podcast. 

We also partnered with Corporate Communications to market the campaign via internal news channels and email. As part of that, a midweek reminder was sent to all associates in which colleagues from across the bank shared success stories and best practices using Degreed. In addition, Jen Stewart, our Degreed Client Success Manager, participated in our final review. She helped to ensure that our daily themes, program flow, resources, and Challenge activities were aligned. 

Degreed: Now this all leads to, hopefully, good results, right? And this is one area where the campaign really shines. Your results were tremendous. Can we break it down a bit? 

Jordan: Yes, we were really pleased. Our initial goal was to have two hundred learners participate. However, over 2,000 associates participated in the campaign. Degreed usage increased by over 50% after the campaign.

Moreover, we saw sustained usage and engagement with the campaign. Both new and long-term associates still access it as a resource. And we had another really great outcome. Continuing Professional Education completions increased by 1,150%. CPE credits are offered for designations in SHRM, HRCI, PMI, CPA and other areas. And this is beneficial because when our associates leverage internal resources for CPE it reduces the need for external spending on travel, conferences, and other out-of-office activities.

Degreed: And our understanding is the program was so successful you replicated it specifically for your people leaders? 

Jordan: That’s correct. Given the success, we launched a campaign for people leaders one month later. It focused on leveraging Degreed Skill Coach to support the career and development of direct reports. The impact was consistent with the initial launch, with 20% of our people leaders participating. And data shows that Skill Coach usage skyrocketed.

Degreed: What are some of the key lessons you learned deploying this campaign? Or put another way, what advice would you give other L&D professionals hoping to do something similar? 

Jordan: By breaking Degreed key features into bite -size learning and having associates share their stories and experience and how they benefit from engaging with the platform—whether that be how they upskill in their current role, solving issues in the flow of daily work, or preparing for their next role—it really resonated. 

Sharing associate successes with Degreed can be done in countless ways from internal news channels, promotion announcements, and, in our case, how organizations provide learning on how to leverage the platform. The ideas are endless. 

We are thrilled that a large percentage of Regions associates accepted The Challenge! Associates invested in themselves, became engaged during the week, devoted their time, added skills, requested feedback, set goals, and shared the Pathways and content with their team members, making those that participated the real winners.

Learn more.

Let’s explore how Degreed can help you know, learn, and grow the skills your business needs. Get a Degreed demo.

The post The 5-Day Challenge: How Regions Bank L&D Aced Platform Engagement appeared first on Degreed.

The idea? Put skills first, and make Ericsson a skills-based organization that puts skills to work. The strategy? Approach learning in ways that are no longer programmatic but instead systematic—to maximize potential, improve outcomes, and excel at adapting to change.

An impressive Ericsson success metric reveals the power of this path: Five years ago, the telecom giant began upskilling a relatively small group of 300 scientists to use artificial intelligence. Now, more than 30,000 of the company’s 100,000-plus employees are considered very proficient in AI.

Skills First: Advancing with Purpose

The next time you use your cell phone, there’s an outsized chance the data you send and receive will be traveling on an Ericsson network—but it wasn’t always this way.

A leader in 5G technology, the Stockholm-based company’s infrastructure, software, and services span the globe. The company’s origins are more humble, however, dating to its founding as a telegraph repair shop in the 1800s.

“​​We’ve been reskilling, reimagining, and reinventing for a very long time,” said Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer and Global Head of Learning & Development. “We’re 148 years old. . . We refuse to act our age.”

Skills First: A Journey with Two Key Goals

The skills-first journey at Ericsson has been unfolding in two parts. In part one, Krishnan said, “we want to build skills, build future-critical skills, and we want to do that systematically company-wide, which means we have to sense what skills matter, and we have to connect skills to [business] strategy, and we have got to make sure … that we build future critical skills with speed, with scale, and with accountability.

“Part two is putting skills to work. We need to be equally systematic, equally reliable, and even more inclusive than we’ve ever been about putting skills to work in high impact areas, in growth areas, by being skills-based increasingly across all of our people practices.

“If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that the people we have must continually become the people we need,” Krishnan said. “The companies that are going to outperform other companies will do so by out-learning them and being able to put the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time, again and again and again.”

Readying the Foundation: Efficiencies & Infrastructure

To put skills to work, Ericsson has been creating an environment in which skills-first strategies can thrive. The effort dates to 2019, and Degreed has been a key partner, especially helping the organization to pinpoint the skills it needs, to personalize development, and to measure change.

Internal skill and job architecture frameworks had become stagnant. In some cases, job profiles hadn’t been updated since 2013, fueled by inefficiencies in workforce planning and skill assessment. This led to a lack of career transparency. Employees faced uncertainties about career progressions and lacked clear visibility into the skills required for future roles.

“When people wanted to think about, ‘Well, what do I do next?’, it wasn’t clear,” said Peter Sheppard, Head of the Ericsson Global L&D Ecosystem, describing missteps. “We’d spend a lot of time assessing people, understanding people, and then we threw away the receipts.”

Tactical needs overshadowed strategic workforce planning, limiting the company’s agility. Key processes weren’t automated or optimized.

“We hadn’t updated our old competencies catalog for three or four years. We needed it to be more automated,” Sheppard said. “Do that, and we deliver more value.”

Making Change

Ericsson introduced a new digital job architecture and integrated skills deep into job profiles, aligning them with a new and dynamic skill taxonomy. In doing so, leadership embraced automation whenever possible and, moreover, generated momentum for a skills-based approach to business.

The company moved from ad-hoc training programs to a systematic approach of identifying and developing critical skills aligned with strategic business objectives. This included defining a set of global critical skills—a vital few—essential for the company’s future, irrespective of job roles or functional areas.

New approaches to governance made room for change in the flow of work. For example, business units were empowered to enhance job profiles as needed without waiting for HR.

A pivotal shift came when Ericsson embraced a skills-based approach to people practices—from recruitment to learning and development and more.

This included:

• Integrating skills into job advertisements.
• Creating a talent marketplace called Career Hub based on skill matching.
• Enhancing career mobility through project-based learning initiatives.

It all added up to a dynamic, skills-first ecosystem. And through it all, data collection and sharing were prioritized.

The company now has data that acts like a window, providing leadership with a clear and useful view of the organization’s skills supply and demand. It also helps L&D to regularly update leaders and employees on what is happening with skills across the organization.

Putting Skills to Work—and the Good Reasons Why

Putting a skills infrastructure to work drives several benefits—including higher employee retention and more inclusion, Sheppard said, adding the number one reason people leave Ericsson is a lack of personal growth.

“Secondly, it helps with what I call visible simplicity,” Sheppard said, describing a dynamic in which employees can easily see all the same skills across talent and learning platforms from a talent marketplace to Degreed.

Third, embracing skills enables an organization to pivot, Sheppard said. “If you don’t have dynamic skills, then how can you pivot quickly as a company?”

Putting Skills to Work—Grow, Match, & Deploy

Ultimately, putting skills to work at Ericsson was about more than creating a skills-based infrastructure.

“It’s about solving pragmatic problems,” Sheppard said. “It’s about putting it to work in different processes for the value of Ericsson and for the value of yourself as an employee.”

With a system like the Career Hub talent marketplace, Ericsson is able to put skills to work by matching and deploying critical skills into strategic areas.

“We want to enable people to fulfill their ambitions and fulfill their growth through our Career Hub, by ensuring that we match people to project opportunities, to job opportunities, and so on.

“This is the fundamental element of making all this practical,” Sheppard said. “It comes down to matching technology. Can you match the skills needed—that are defined in those job roles, that are defined for your business—with the skills that I have as an individual?”

Maximizing, Improving, & Adapting

Systemic skill building through massive targeted upskilling positions Ericsson to maximize employees’ potential. The company is improving outcomes by aligning career mobility with skills development while boosting employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction. Likewise, Ericsson is adapting to change—responding to new business needs and market trends—by enhancing agility and increasing efficiencies.

By putting skills to work using data-driven insights, Ericsson future-proofs its workforce, clearing a path for continuous innovation and sustainable growth.

At Degreed, we’re reminded that—in a world where change is constant—the future indeed belongs to organizations willing to embrace the power of putting skills to work.

“We all know 5G is not the last G, right?” Krishnan said. “Technology is inherently upgradable, and so are we. And we’re proud to say that we have this sacred duty to get our 105,000 employees in 180 countries to change themselves, their skill sets, and their mindsets, because we know that we’re creating connections that can make the unimaginable possible.”

Take the next step.

Let’s talk about skills at your organization. Request a Degreed demo today.

The post ‘We Refuse to Act Our Age’: How Ericsson Puts Skills to Work appeared first on Degreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Skills to… Pinpoint Needs

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

1. Inferring Skills

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

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

2. Assessing Skills

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

3. Managing Skill Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Skills to… Personalize Development

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

Degreed helps you. . . 

Orchestrate learning using skill data. 

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

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

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

Degreed also helps you. . . 

Connect learners based on based skills.

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

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

And Degreed helps you. . . 

Curate experiences for skill growth.

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

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

In addition, Degreed helps your people to. . .  

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

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

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

Using Skills to… Measure Change

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

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

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

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

What This All Means for Your Business

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

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

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

Find out more.

Start using skills to transform your workforce.

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

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

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