Completion rates prove it got done, and compliments prove employee satisfaction, but they don’t prove learning effectiveness. Execs want tangible evidence that the investment paid off. You need to show that people retained the information and are ready to use it on the job. And if it didn’t work, you need to identify where more learning is needed. 

So, what’s the answer? Test it.

Quizzes, a new experience within Degreed Maestro, enable you to quickly create and deploy AI-generated quizzes to ensure knowledge retention and measure learning effectiveness. So, next time your execs ask if it worked, you have relevant data to support your answer.

The Old Way: Manual Quiz Creation

Seeing the value of quizzes? Easy. Executing them manually, accurately, and at scale? Difficult.

Creating and deploying quizzes at scale is traditionally manual and incredibly time-consuming. It often requires extensive input from busy subject matter experts (SMEs) to draft questions, which is an inefficient use of their high-value expertise and often delays deployment. 

Reliance on manual creation and SME availability makes it difficult to scale and maintain up-to-date quizzes. This is more true now than ever, given that the skills and knowledge employees need are constantly changing. 

The New Way: AI-Generated Quizzes

With Maestro quizzes, admins can create quizzes in minutes, drastically reducing the time and effort spent. Through a text-based conversation with Maestro, you can guide Maestro to create a custom quiz on any topic and adjust parameters, like the number of questions and difficulty level. It can also create quiz questions based on existing documentation. This is a simpler way to harness the knowledge of SMEs without having to involve them in manual question generation. 

After employees finish the quiz, in-app reports enable admins to gauge their level of knowledge retention. These reports help identify consistently incorrect answers and, therefore, knowledge gaps where more learning is needed.

The quizzes are directly connected to the Degreed platform, allowing you to manage workflows like assigning quizzes or reporting on results. That makes it easy to identify where more learning is required so you can create more effective experiences that close knowledge gaps, learning more across the business.

Create Business Value

Real-world Applications for Quizzes

Example: Preparing for a Product Launch

During a new product launch, your revenue teams are inundated with information: value props, product functionality, go-to-market strategies. It’s a lot to take in, and it’s difficult to gauge whether your people are ready. 

With Maestro quizzes, you can evaluate whether your people have a grasp on key components of your new product. You can even create different quizzes for different audiences, since the information your sales team needs to remember is different from what your implementation team needs to know. By using existing documentation, you can generate quizzes focused on these different audiences within minutes. 

Example: Checking Long-Term knowledge Retention for AI Transformation 

Many organizations have ambitious targets for adopting AI in the business. This knowledge likely doesn’t exist at scale within the business, so organizations need extensive training and upskilling. By embedding a quiz at the beginning and at the end of a pathway, you can measure how much the workforce learned about implementing AI, so you can tie learning back to strategic business initiatives.  

Example: New Customer Onboarding Process

Quizzes can reinforce process and procedure updates. If you’ve launched a new customer onboarding procedure, employees need to remember the correct process, what to do, and what not to do. You’ll have visibility into their readiness and procedural sticking points that may require extra training.

Quizzes As Part of a Larger Learning Journey

Quizzes are powerful by themselves, but are enhanced when combined with other learning initiatives, such as pathways or academies. By including quizzes at the end of these experiences, you can evaluate the effectiveness of those programs and identify where they may need new or different content. 

Embedding quizzes inside Degreed also improves the learner experience, providing a UI that is consistent across experiences. And it helps you consolidate tech, reducing cost and administrative load with fewer platforms to maintain.

The post Create AI-Generated Quizzes to Measure Learning Effectiveness 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.

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.

The race is on. As AI evolves faster than ever, learning teams are working hard to keep up. New tools, new expectations, and new risks are emerging almost daily, leaving many unsure how to turn AI potential into real business outcomes.

Since 2024, 15% of HR teams have shifted from evaluating AI to actively implementing it. How do they know which path will actually lead to better learning and talent outcomes? This comes as 35% of organizations say their biggest barrier to AI adoption is the risk of mistakes causing real-world consequences. How can they ensure people are using AI safely—and effectively?

With 59% of the global workforce expected to need skills transformation by 2030, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

You’re expected to harness AI—to do more with less. How?

Introducing Degreed Maestro Services

Our latest services are designed to help you reduce the time, resources, and cost needed to build customized, structured learning journeys, so you can efficiently upskill your people in the areas that matter most to your business.

This menu of services includes:

AI-Powered Pathway Development

Our learning experts use AI alongside their design expertise to build structured, relevant learning pathways tailored to your priorities. The result? Personalized, high-quality journeys—curated at speed and scale, without the heavy lift.

Customized AI Coach Deployment

From leadership coaching to sales enablement, we design and deploy customized AI-powered coaches tailored to help you execute your business strategy and achieve your goals.

By working side-by-side with your team, our experts help you implement and scale AI capabilities with confidence, bridging the gap between innovation and execution. We’re here to speed up results and deliver AI-powered learning experiences with faster time-to-value. 

Let’s take a deeper dive into what we’re offering:

AI-Powered Pathway Curation

Companies spend millions on broad libraries covering topics like “Getting Started with AI”, only to end up with outdated, generic material that doesn’t drive results.

Degreed Maestro Services changes that.

To stay competitive and effective, forward-thinking companies modernize curation. With our AI-powered pathway curation service, we bring in Degreed expertise and our AI stack to help you quickly—and cost effectively—create structured, high-impact learning journeys. 

In other words, Degreed AI helps you build the best pathways on topics most important to you and your people. You can amplify learning effectiveness, delivering high-quality learning pathways in days, not months.

Our experts will harness AI that automates content discovery, curation, and organization, freeing your team from time-consuming manual work.

Customized AI Agent Deployment

While out-of-the-box AI coaches and simulations can be powerful, businesses require customization to maximize their impact. Many talent and learning teams don’t have the time, bandwidth, or experience to customize these experiences.

With our Custom AI Agent Deployment Service, Degreed AI experts design, build, and implement AI-powered coaches and simulations tailored to your unique priorities. Whether you’re rolling out a new performance strategy or enabling a product launch, these interactive experiences help people build skills faster—and more effectively.

Here are some examples of what’s possible:

• Upskill managers at scale by democratizing access to leadership coaching tied to your internal strategy.
• Simulate real-world sales pitches to build confidence and readiness for your go-to-market teams.
• Target critical capabilities with guided practice aligned to your top business objectives.

We help you deliver AI-native experiences that feel personal, impactful, and scalable—without adding to your team’s workload.

How This Benefits Your Business

Adopting AI in learning isn’t just about tools. It’s about trust, speed, and ROI. But getting there often requires lengthy security reviews, complex procurement processes, and custom configuration work.

Maestro Services is designed to simplify all of that.

With Degreed Maestro Services, we’re making it as hassle free for you to get the most out of Degreed, as fast as possible.

Degreed Maestro Services is designed for:

• Less manual effort: Our teams will create custom pathways and coaches for you.
• Faster time to skill: Build and deploy impactful learning in days, not months.
• More business alignment: Target skills that directly support your strategic goals.

With Degreed Maestro Services, you accelerate workforce transformation—building the critical capabilities that keep your organization competitive, agile, and future-ready.

Find out more.

Check out our seven-part Degreed in Action webinar series, and get a clear picture of everything that’s coming from Degreed.

Choose your sessions to find out more about our innovations in AI, skills reporting, automations, Degreed Professional Services, Degreed Academies, and more.

The post Degreed Maestro Services: High Impact Learning, Fast Time-to-Value appeared first on Degreed.

The idyllic vision of hyper-personalized, always-available coaching that could efficiently scale upskilling has long been a pipe dream.

But that’s about to change. Powered by Degreed data, expanded partnerships, and AI innovations, we’re unlocking an incredible breadth of new opportunity for Degreed customers.

Starting with our July 2025 Major Product Release, a flip of the switch will put Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose-built for learning, into the Degreed environment users already know and love. 

Maestro is designed to provide people with one-on-one skills coaching conversations and more, so learning leaders can build skills across an organization at a pace we’ve never been able to support before—a speed this moment demands.

Degreed Maestro for Automatic Pathway Curation

In Degreed today, Pathways are created to serve the needs of many people, not the unique needs of each employee. For example, you might have a Pathway about value-based selling that all of your sales team completes, but you don’t curate individualized Pathways that take into account each employee’s learning preferences or skill level. For most learning teams, it’s simply too cumbersome and time-consuming to even consider. 

But after your employee has a short conversation with Degreed Maestro, that hyper customized Pathway becomes a reality. How? Maestro is built directly into the Degreed environment, so it’s incredibly easy for your people to access and use it. And it gets to work immediately. 

The process is as easy and intuitive as answering questions, starting with “What’s the topic you’d like to focus on for this pathway?” Once an employee responds with a topic, Maestro asks additional questions that tailor the Pathway, for example confirming what subtopics are of interest, whether the employee wants to use content from the Internal or External catalog, and what content types to include. 

Maestro asks for feedback along the way, so users have access to high-impact, business-aligned learning tailored to their unique needs. 

While it used to take hours to curate pathways, with Maestro it only takes minutes. Maestro makes personalizing, updating, and scaling tailored workforce development easy, empowering subject matter experts to quickly build high-impact learning programs.

Degreed Maestro for Flexible Skill Reviews

Many learning teams rely on managers across the business to evaluate employee skills like executive presence, critical thinking, communication, and conflict resolution. With Degreed Maestro, learning teams can start to take the inevitable human bias out of these time consuming skill reviews—to evaluate employees more consistently and more fairly at scale.

At Degreed Vision 2024, we unveiled our skill review agent. Since then, we’ve heard the same thing from many clients: “Skills mean something quite specific at our organization.”

And we get it. Organizations want to compose, control, and edit AI experiences just like they compose learning programs—reinforcing their values, language, and strategies. They want to assess skills on their own ways of working, their own product portfolios, and their own employee value propositions.

You probably don’t want a generic definition of leadership. You want your principles, your value statements infused. You don’t want a large language model (LLM) independently defining the rubric for your skills assessments. You want to be able to tune questions and expectations. When you’re assessing a skill, you want to choose the resources and training that Maestro recommends. 

And we hear that many of learning teams don’t want to ask people what their skill capability is. They want to set up a full-on simulation. 

Degreed was built to deliver flexibility into your learning environment. We’ve integrated with numerous types of content so companies can compose learning experiences that best suit their needs. It’s no surprise learning leaders want the same from AI experiences.

Introducing Degreed Maestro Studio for Customized AI-Native Experiences

Degreed Maestro Studio provides the customization and control forward-thinking organizations require in order to create AI-native experiences that meet unique needs. 

Let’s look at how easy it is to tailor those experiences—for example, assessing a particular skill like “innovation,” which is tricky to evaluate. 

With Degreed Maestro, you can build a completely customized Maestro experience where you can tailor and edit virtually everything about the coach. For instance, you can upload your own definition of “innovation,” your own rubric, and your own questions. You can calibrate what you consider different proficiency levels of innovation at your organization so Maestro evaluates employees according to your organization’s values and needs.

In minutes—not months—you can unlock powerful new skill-building possibilities. Imagine the possibilities with real-time, accurate skill intelligence across your workforce. How would that benefit important initiatives like strategic workforce planning? 

You might already be dreaming up scenarios about what this means for your organization, but first it has to be easy from the employee perspective, too. Let’s take a look at how your employees interact with customized experiences built with Degreed Maestro Studio.

Customized Skill Review in Action

Kat Kennedy, one of the first Degreed product leaders, used the customized Maestro coach described above to assess her own skill level when it comes to innovation.

Let’s take a closer look:

Again, Maestro asked approachable, non-intimidating questions like “What sparked your interest in innovation?” and “Do you have any specific goals or challenges you’re aiming to tackle in this area?” 

These questions prompted Kat to share critical information about the importance of innovation throughout her career, and especially the role innovation plays for her today. She shared what innovation means to her, and the important role of empathy in building innovative products. 

After the conversation, Degreed Maestro delivered to Kat a skill rating that was based on her answers and assessed according to the customized rubric uploaded when the coach was created. 

To get results like this before, a learning team would have engaged with IT, hired a consultant, or purchased an assessment library. It would have cost a lot, required a lot of human effort, and taken a long time to build.

That’s not going to cut it anymore. By democratizing skill evaluations using our AI, organizations gain deeper insight into workforce capabilities—and can act faster to close gaps, plan for the future, and drive business outcomes.

What Will You Build First? 

With Maestro Studio, you can get work done simply, on repeat, for whatever use cases matter most to your organization.

Maestro Studio opens the door to not only customized skill reviews, but also to customized tutors, role playing, and more. 

Launching a new product? Build a sales enablement coach. Need to upskill leaders on your organization’s new performance management strategy? Build a customized leadership coach. The opportunities are vast.

Find out 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 Degreed Maestro: AI Purpose-Built for Learning appeared first on Degreed.

And no matter how much learning time your workers have, it’s all too easy for learning fatigue to slow them down or burn them out.

Amid ever-increasing workforce development demands, nearly 60 % of HR professionals worry their companies can no longer rely on workers’ sense of duty—or their  investment in a long-term career path—to complete hours of online learning content. 

A big part of the problem? Information overload. 

More training does not necessarily mean better learning. But with a structured approach, employees can become encouraged and engaged.

The right workforce development technologies—powered by AI and automations—can help keep your people productive.

Outdated Learning Models & Information Overload

Many organizations still rely on outdated workforce development models that fail to engage. For example, employees quickly forget one-time intensive training events like eight-hour workshops. In fact, unengaged workers will forget around 50% of what they’ve learned in just one hour. This means they need time to process and practice new skills, through strategies like interleaving and hands-on application. They need reinforcement to transfer and retain knowledge.

Learning fatigue also occurs when employees waste valuable time and energy simply deciding what to learn instead of actually building skills. It’s like spending a Friday night searching Netflix instead of watching a great show. Without customized learning content suggestions, employees struggle to navigate an overwhelming sea of information. 

Employees more often than not don’t care what learning platform they’re using, noted Peter Sheppard, Head of the Global L&D Ecosystem at Ericsson. “What they are concerned with is, ‘Can I build my career? Can I grow my skills?’ And if you’re concerned about that, then you need the systems to work together in an integrated, open ecosystem.”

Your people don’t have time to sift through a vast content library. Instead, they need relevant, timely development that directly applies to their roles. 

AI & Automation: Making Learning More Efficient & Relevant

The good news is that organizations are recognizing the need for change, with 29% in recent months looking to adopt new learning or training technologies and 57% planning to upgrade existing systems. It’s a great start, but not the entire solution. Strategic delivery and structuring are key to a winning combination. 

More and more, innovative learning leaders are finding that structure in AI-powered solutions drive:

• Personalization. AI surfaces the most relevant and job-critical learning, reducing cognitive overload.
• Automated learning pathways. AI curates custom pathways so employees have the exact information they need
• More efficient skill-building. AI ingests employees’ learning preferences to recommend preferred content types relevant to people’s goals, rather than generic knowledge dumps.

Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose-built for learning, is designed to eliminate the burden of manual content filtering and deliver the right learning at the right time, which is exactly what your people need to overcome learning fatigue and stay productive.

Using Degreed Maestro, you can:

• Pinpoint needs. Deliver skill assessments, leadership coaching, and career coaching that help your people quickly figure out what to learn—and in turn build skills faster.
• Personalize development. Provide tailored content and learning recommendations according to each individual’s goals, proficiencies, and preferences—all designed to provide your people guidance on what to learn next.
• Measure change. Reassess your people’s skills after they complete content and experiences—to keep them on track and always advancing.

Generating Buy-In for AI-Driven Learning

Combatting learning fatigue can become part of your business case for a new workforce development solution. It helps to speak directly to key stakeholders.

• HR & Talent Development: Explain that AI-powered learning supports broader talent initiatives like strategic workforce planning.
• The C-Suite: Highlight ROI;  AI-driven learning accelerates development, unlocks agility, combats turnover, and promotes productivity.
• HRIT & Learning Tech: Note that AI-powered learning personalizes development at scale, reduces administrative burdens, and improves adoption.
• L&D Professionals: Document how AI reduces content overload by delivering structured, bite-size learning that keeps people engaged and informed.
• Employees: Position AI as a tool that respects time by cutting unnecessary content and delivering relevant and actionable learning at the moment of need.

Power People’s Learning with AI

Learning fatigue is real, and it can slow your workforce development efforts to a grueling crawl. 

Give employees targeted, personalized learning, so they’re not overwhelmed and can remember what they learn.

With AI, you can help your people home in on the right content and keep advancing—while you  measure success and align learning with business priorities. 

Learn more.

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

The post Learning Fatigue Is Real, and AI is Here to Help appeared first on Degreed.

Poor leadership damages more than employee morale. It also weakens the bottom line. 

At S&P 1500 companies, poorly managed CEO transitions wipe out nearly $1 trillion in market value each year. And employee turnover due to poor leadership costs American companies $630 billion annually. 

Leadership isn’t something that comes easy, and it’s especially difficult for new leaders. They need support and practice to navigate new challenges.

Coaches are sometimes hired to help new leaders successfully transition from individual contributor roles. But person-to-person coaching is costly and difficult to scale, effectively eliminating it as an option for most employees.

Fortunately, advancements in technology help democratize leadership coaching. With the right tools and investment, organizations can provide leaders at every level with cost-effective support—and AI is making it easier than ever.

AI Powered Leadership Coaching

Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose-built for learning, is uniquely equipped to help your leaders efficiently upskill in the areas they—and your company—need the most. 

Degreed Maestro communicates directly with your people and retains those discussions, so it understands where your leaders have been—and are—in their skill journeys. Most importantly, it knows how to help your leaders get where they need to go. 

Maestro guides your leaders to highly targeted content and simulates real-word conversations, so your people can practice addressing new challenges. This is especially helpful for learning how to handle difficult interpersonal conversations new leaders haven’t had to conduct before.

Degreed Maestro in Action: Practicing a Performance Discussion

In recent blog posts, we saw how a fictitious employee, Mark, used Degreed Maestro to uncover his skill strengths and weaknesses, fill personal skill gaps, and practice a sales pitch for a new product.

Mark now leads a team of three employees. Unfortunately, one team member consistently turns in low quality work late. 

Like many new leaders, Mark worries about the difficult but necessary conversation ahead. He knows he needs to address the problem, but he isn’t sure how to communicate the performance issues in a way that’s supportive and helpful.

Mark turns to Maestro for guidance. He explains the situation, and in turn Maestro probes for specific examples of how the employee’s performance hasn’t met expectations.

Based on what Mark shares, Maestro recommends specific learning content that teaches techniques for managing employee performance. Using this content, Mark builds a better understanding of how to communicate with the employee in a way that doesn’t come off like an attack.

See this Maestro-produced Pathway:

While this learning experience is helpful, Mark senses he could gain even more. How should he react if the employee responds with anger? With tears? With indifference? Mark wants to practice these scenarios before the meeting.

With Maestro playing the part of the employee, Mark rehearses the future conversation, practicing responses to multiple simulated reactions. Afterward, Maestro provides actionable feedback about what Mark did well, how he can improve, and specific resources he can explore to further reinforce his knowledge. 

Fast forward to the actual conversation. Mark feels much more confident and comfortable. He provides constructive criticism with tact and articulates clear steps the employee can take to improve. 

The employee appreciates that Mark shared an action plan with expectations addressing what needs to change. Adhering to that plan, the employee gets his performance back on track. 

Building Skill Fluency Through Practice

While highly targeted curation helped Mark build a strong foundation of knowledge, it was the practice that truly set him up for success. When it comes to sensitive, personal conversations like a performance discussion, the ability to act calmly and with confidence is essential. Practice prepared Mark to think quickly and respond thoughtfully.

Degreed Maestro helped Mark obtain skill fluency, which is the ability to draw on skills or expertise at a moment’s notice. For example, while a translation app is adequate to understand Spanish during a vacation to Mexico, it isn’t enough if you’re moving to Mexico. You need to be fluent. 

Mark’s sensitive meeting is the perfect example of an interaction that called for skill fluency. It required speed. Mark needed to quickly respond with compassion and also keep the conversation on track.

Beyond Practice

Of course, leadership coaching is ultimately about much more than difficult conversations. 

Effective coaches help leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses, experiment with new ideas, develop strategies, set goals, and improve communication.

Degreed Maestro handles all these needs and more, helping leaders reach their full potential, make better informed decisions, and steer the business. 

Find out more. 

Keep reading. Check out more Degreed Maestro blog posts, and see Degreed Experiments to stay up to date on our latest AI explorations.

Schedule a personalized one-on-one call with us today.

The post Degreed Maestro: Democratized Leadership Coaching with AI appeared first on Degreed.

Your product team spends a year developing a new platform. Extensive research reveals a solution that solves vital problems for the market. Your marketing team plans a creative launch campaign complete with strong messaging, email campaigns, digital ads, and social posts. A winning go-to-market strategy emerges, identifying key accounts and clearly defined buyer personas.

When launch day arrives, it’s time to pop the champagne, right?

Not so fast. Is the sales team enabled? Do your reps know less about the product than your prospects?

If you want a successful launch, your sales team needs to understand your product and practice the pitch. The team needs quick responses to key questions about how the product works and what it will do. It needs to articulate value in the context of specific client needs.

And your sales team needs to learn all this in fast and flexible ways that fit a busy schedule.

Customized Coaches for Your Business Needs

While out-of-the box AI coaches are powerful, the customization provided by Degreed Maestro amplifies the impact.

With Maestro, you can tailor AI coaches to reflect your company’s priorities, content, guidelines, brand-voice, and cultural style. This organizational context enables the coaches to converse with relevance, convey the right messages with specificity, and deliver impactful learning. 

This means that, with Maestro, you can scale activities—like personal feedback or sales coaching—previously limited by the rigors of human interaction. The use cases are numerous, but let’s focus on one example: Creating a customized coach that enables a sales team to launch a new product.

Maestro in Action: Creating a Sales Enablement Coach

In our last blog post, Mark used the Degreed Maestro Skill Review Coach while onboarding as a Sales Director—to uncover skill gaps and create a personalized learning Pathway that filled those gaps. 

Now, Mark’s employer turns to Maestro to build a customized coach that will prepare Mark and the rest of the sales team for action.

And let’s face it: Launching a new product is chaotic. Important feedback comes late. Strategies change. Features are shoved in. Messaging gets overhauled. The sales team needs collateral yesterday. 

Now imagine this isn’t just any launch.

The executive team considers this product a key differentiator for the business. Everyone needs to be extra careful about who has what information when.

It’s no secret that this very scenario—a moving-target strategy combined with need-to-know-only restrictions—is a real-life conundrum of enablement. The result has always been high stress and ineffective enablement. But creating a customized coach with Maestro* is so simple and effective that the effort is massively simplified. Forget about coordinating, for example, schedules in order to host an internal webinar series. On the contrary, all the key information the sales team needs can be uploaded into the coach at any time, even the day of the launch.

And because of the personalized nature of Degreed Maestro coaches, employees each get exactly the enablement they need, when they need it. 

Let’s say a Sales Director wants to practice a tailored pitch for a specific client before an important meeting. A coach can quickly provide helpful feedback based on the resources uploaded.

A Regional Vice President wants to understand the product’s ideal customer profile (ICP), to identify target accounts and forecast opportunities. It’s as simple as typing the question and getting an answer.

A member of the sales team needs a quick answer to an FAQ, but the product manager is in back to back meetings all day. Now, they can ask Maestro instead.

No more scrambling to create an enablement program with information that is quickly outdated. No more plans getting ruined by last-minute changes. No more fire drills.

And feel free to tweak the pitch deck right before launch.

Maestro can handle it.

Sales Enablement Coaching from the Sales Perspective

We’ve seen how the enablement team created a customized sales enablement coach, but what about the sales team experience? How was the coach received and used?

Let’s look at how Mark uses the coach to successfully close a deal. 

When the enablement team demo’d the coach, Mark was impressed with its ability to answer questions he would usually have to send to the Product Manager who built the solution. Mark was motivated to try it out. 

Because the coach was embedded into a Pathway about the new product, it’s easy for Mark to access the coach in the flow of learning. 

Mark starts a conversation with the coach to work through key questions he has about the product, and he receives important advice on how to tailor his sales pitch. 

Three days later, Mark runs into a client at a trade show. This person saw a press release about the new product and wants to meet later that day to discuss it. It’s quite loud at the tradeshow, so Mark kicks off a text-based conversation with the customized coach, quickly getting advice on how to tailor his pitch to the needs of that specific client. He’s even able to practice the pitch and receives constructive feedback on some key improvements.

When he meets with the client later that day, Mark applies the advice he got from Maestro, and the client becomes even more intrigued. They schedule a follow-up call with the client’s broader team, which ultimately leads to the first purchase of the product.

The Power of Scaled Personalized Coaching

For Mark, the customized coach proved essential. It provided him with the individualized support he needed to sell the new product. But the customized coach didn’t help just Mark. It helped the entire sales team.

By scaling personalized support according to the company’s  unique new product, its goals, and its needs, Maestro upskilled the entire salesforce and equipped all members with what they needed to help grow the business. 

The launch was a success. Time to pop the champagne!

Find out more.

Schedule a personalized one-on-one call with us today.

*The Degreed Maestro customized coach is currently in development.

The post Degreed Maestro: AI Coaches for New-Product Sales Enablement appeared first on Degreed.