When I first stepped into management as a millennial leader, I didn’t have decades of leadership experience to lean on. What I did have was curiosity and a willingness to try new tools. I experimented with platforms that helped me onboard faster, understand my team’s strengths, and keep projects moving. That openness to technology wasn’t just convenience. It became a way to fill in gaps and lead with confidence.

It got me thinking, is the flexibility of the millennial generation the key to bridging the gap between traditional ways of working and the new tech-first tactics? We’re digital natives who’ve grown up making technology second nature. We introduced our workplaces to Slack and Zoom. And yes, we showed them all–probably more than once–how to export that doc as a PDF. Now, we’re ready to champion AI-powered learning. 

This is my call: L&D leaders, use us to ease the AI transformation. When L&D leaders make us partners, adoption won’t trickle in through slow rollouts. It will spread like a wildfire. We’ve done it before and we can do it again. Here’s how to activate your millennial managers so you can personalize learning better than ever before:

Lesson 1: Adoption Starts With People, Not Platforms.

Corporate learning has always chased personalization. For years, it meant nothing more than a recommended course list based on your department. Today, AI has changed the game. Platforms can identify current skills, map them to career goals, and adjust learning pathways as people grow.

But here’s what I’ve learned as a manager: technology doesn’t drive change by itself. People do. My team was never excited about “a new system” just because it came from HR. They got on board when they saw me using it, sharing results, and showing them how it made their work easier.

Millennial managers are uniquely positioned to spark that kind of adoption. Why? We:

• Make up the largest share of the workforce, many now in leadership roles
• Are more comfortable experimenting with AI tools than other generations
• Value growth, work/life balance, and want to create career opportunities for our teams

When managers use AI for learning, they normalize it for their employees.

Lesson 2: AI Removes Barriers and Elevates Coaching for Personalized Training

The first time I piloted an AI learning tool, I noticed something right away. My team didn’t spend hours searching for resources anymore. The platform pushed exactly what they needed at the moment they needed it.

AI in learning looks like this:

• Onboarding that clicks: New hires get pathways built for their role from day one.
• Skill gaps closed in real time: When regulations change or a new system goes live, people can upskill immediately.
• Personalized growth: Employees see learning tied to their individual career paths, not just generic compliance courses.
• Retention through relevance: People stick around when they see their manager investing in their future.

For me as a manager, the biggest shift was that Degreed Maestro, our AI purpose build for learning, helped me coach better. Instead of guessing what my team needed, I had insights into their skills and progress. That made my 1:1s more meaningful and our work more effective.

Lesson 3: Managers Multiply the Impact of AI

Here’s the difference I’ve seen first-hand:

• Without managers leading, AI feels like another HR initiative. Adoption is slow, and employees are skeptical.
• With managers leading, AI feels like a team advantage. Employees see real benefits in their day-to-day work.

When I shared how AI helped me conduct competitive intelligence research in half the usual time, the rest of the team leaned in. It wasn’t about me “selling” them on technology. It was about showing them what was possible.

This is why millennial managers are multipliers. Our willingness to test and share gives AI in learning credibility across every generation we lead.

Lesson 4: L&D Leaders Can Activate Millennial Managers Now

So how can you activate millennial managers to accelerate AI learning adoption?

1. Start small: Invite a group of millennial managers to pilot AI-curated pathways in areas like leadership or digital skills. [Degreed Open Library]
2. Give us a platform: Encourage us to share wins and stories with peers. A quick case study or team success story builds trust. 
3. Equip us with context: Don’t hand us scripts. Instead, show us how AI connects to skill growth, retention, or productivity. We’ll translate that for our teams.
4. Recognize us: Highlight millennial managers who lead adoption in company communications. Visibility motivates us and validates the effort.

Quick Assignment: Identify five managers in high-change roles. Give them access to an AI-powered learning pilot. Ask them to present outcomes like faster onboarding or higher team engagement at the next leadership meeting.

AI has made personalized learning possible at scale. But adoption depends on people, not platforms. As a millennial manager, I’ve seen how quickly teams respond when they see technology making their work easier and their future brighter.

That’s why companies can’t overlook this generation. We’re not just comfortable with AI, we’re confident with it. And when organizations empower millennial managers to lead the way, AI in learning won’t just be implemented. It will be embraced.

When millennials are empowered and set the tone, organizations don’t just keep pace with change. They set the pace of change.

The post Personalized Training 201: Millennial Managers can Unlock AI Adoption 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.

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.

To minimize cost, training is frequently done in a one-size-fits-all fashion, leaving employees uninspired and without deep learning.

Personalized learning can be a real game changer, as it allows companies to deliver effective, adaptable workplace learning that contributes to achieving specific business goals. To fully take advantage of this, however, business leaders must understand what personalization is and the benefits they stand to gain from it.

Capturing the Power of Personalized Learning

By definition, personalized learning refers to a learning experience that’s customized — both in content and delivery method — to suit the needs of every learner. When done right, personalized programs have the power to drive employee engagement, identify and plug skills gaps and support business growth.

Think about this in terms of learning styles. Some of your more visual learners probably prefer to get their information via videos, while your more auditory learners prefer a podcast. Whichever way your employees prefer to learn is the right way for them. Giving them the right methodology for their optimal learning can increase their engagement and retention, helping you reach your learning program goals faster and more effectively.

Whatever learning methods you choose, consider your investments. 

Using spreadsheets and disjointed systems to implement your L&D programs can complicate learning and limit its effectiveness. However, a learning experience platform (LXP) can advance learning by taking into account a range of data points, such as employees’ job roles and skills and how these correspond to specific business goals and objectives. 

Your system should also be flexible enough to recommend tailor-made career pathing, which can help your people prepare for future promotions. In addition to a robust LXP, also carefully select your learning management system (LMS) and content authoring tools, which will dictate how engaging your content is. 

Encourage employees to share resources or courses and tools they’ve found useful. Let them allocate a specific amount of time in the week dedicated to perusing these materials and sharing key takeaways. 

In addition, implementing gamification and reward systems can further drive interest and improve completion rates, transforming learning from something employees have to do into something they want to do. 

The Benefits of Personalization

There are myriad benefits you can gain from personalized learning programs, both in business performance and boosted morale among your employees. Taking the time to tailor learning programs to the individual needs of each employee can help you build an agile workforce while keeping engagement and retention high.

Future-Proofing Your Business

Skills are rapidly changing and becoming outdated as businesses rush to digitize, automate and innovate in an increasingly competitive market. In fact, Gartner has found that 58% of the workforce will need new skills in the coming years to be effective.

Personalized learning can be a powerful tool for bringing everyone up to speed with the skills they need.

Imagine you have a team of 10 engineers who need upskilling in Python. Not all of them will have the same starting point when it comes to their existing knowledge, so offering one-size-fits-all materials can expose you to skill gaps and poor product development. Adapting content to what each employee needs can help them be confident.

Building a Strong Employer Brand

A Gallup study found that 65% of people consider upskilling opportunities crucial when it comes to assessing potential new jobs. A personalized learning environment that caters to the individual needs and aspirations of potential employees can help you stand out against your competition and attract the best talent for all the right reasons. 

Not only that, but delivering effective training to your employees also means they are far more likely to refer your organization to friends and family the next time you’re hiring — and businesses want to work with companies that appreciate and invest in their workforces, which can make your clients happier as well. 

Improving Employee Retention

Prioritizing learning can also help with employee retention as you support individual growth and development. A recent Deloitte study found access to learning and development opportunities is the second-highest reason an employee chooses to stay with a company, right after work-life balance. 

Personalization, in this context, can respond directly to this need for upskilling and deliver it in a more effective way for your people and your business. Since the content will be adjusted to the needs of every learner, employees will be able to learn more in less time. Instead of going through materials they already know or taking courses that are far too advanced for them, employees can follow a learning program that pushes them out of their comfort zones just enough to develop their skills. 

Transform your business with personalized learning.

Oftentimes, when it comes to gaining a competitive advantage, businesses focus on building the next big thing, whether it’s a product or a service. This is like building a house from the roof. You can’t have great products and services without a great workforce that stands behind them. 

Focus on your foundation — your people — first. Acknowledge that each individual is unique in their capabilities and aspirations, and create a training program that reflects that. Personalization has the power to truly transform your business by respecting the needs of each employee while reaching toward your higher purpose.

The post What Is Personalized Learning? appeared first on Degreed.

Smart investment that boosts employee engagement and retention and ensures the content your people consume is applied back on the job is more important than ever. According to one recent survey, 67% of HR managers saw training budgets growing in 2022.

How can talent leaders be sure they’ll get a good return? To get the most from your L&D, it makes sense to double down on employee-driven learning.

What is employee-driven learning?

Employee-driven learning is a model of self-directed development that empowers people to make their own choices and take responsibility for their own progress. It does this by helping people focus on their own interests and ambitions.

Unlike traditional learning models such as classroom sessions or prescribed courses, self-directed development encourages people to evaluate their needs, set goals, choose the resources most helpful to them and formulate their own strategy.

Ultimately, it means giving people options — including how and when learning occurs.

Employee-driven learning is more effective.

Letting your people take control helps you build a culture of learning that motivates and enables — supporting a workforce of people skilled for the jobs they have today and those they want for tomorrow. The advantages are numerous:

• Employee-driven learning accommodates every type of learner.

One-size-fits-all solutions aren’t effective for everyone. Some people learn best from traditional lectures. Others from infographics or video demonstrations. Still others prefer reading articles or taking a hands-on, experiential approach.

When you give employees options and a variety of resources — and the freedom to choose what and how they learn — they can engage in ways most effective for them. Choice promotes engagement. You’ll be inspiring your people to be curious and, perhaps more importantly, responsible.

• Passion drives effective learning.

When people form an emotional connection to a piece of content or educational material, they’re more likely to retain information about it. According to neuroscience research, people remember information better when it’s connected to something they already know and care about. This is why marketers use storytelling to sell products and services. 

In this age of broad information access, people  are accustomed to searching for and consuming information on topics they’re passionate about — like  baking, day trading and countless other subjects — using sites like Google and Youtube. 

Giving employees the latitude to pursue professional topics in the same manner they pursue their hobbies  — whether it’s leadership skills, time management or new programming languages — is just as effective as the learning they do in their free time.

• Buy-in boosts retention.

Employees are more likely to be loyal to an organization that values their development. Indeed, a lack of learning opportunities regularly ranks as one of the top reasons people leave one company for another. 

Employees want training, and they want that training to be geared toward their individual needs. Over 75% of employees say they want training that is tailored to their personal career goals. 

Let learners tell you what matters and you’ll reduce costly employee turnover.

4 Tips for Facilitating Freedom

Incorporating autonomy and choice into your training strategy might seem tricky. But with the right approach, you can help in a few key ways:

1. Employ the 70-20-10 model.

Only 10% of learning happens during actual coursework. The rest happens with ongoing coaching and mentoring (20%) and on-the-job experiential learning (70%).

Make sure your strategy reflects the 70-20-10 model.

In addition, help managers understand their direct reports’ goals. This will ensure managers can coach people as needed. Incorporate action plans into development so employees consciously prepare for how they’ll apply new skills on the job.

2. Find the right technology.

Seek a dynamic learning solution that supports tailored learning paths. A good learning experience platform (LXP) can integrate other learning platforms and all their content. The right platform will also track learning progress and make recommendations.

When Cisco leadership wanted to boost employee-driven learning, the company used Degreed, which tracked employee learning across multiple platforms. One centralized login made it intuitive for people to see all the options and for Cisco to recommend curated learning paths. The right platform gave employees access to the right content and increased learning engagement.

3. Use your existing content.

As companies transition to virtual learning programs, they have greater flexibility and access to more content. Expand your course offerings by tapping into existing online training materials. 

A lot of quality content exists out there already, developed by L&D experts and ready to roll out. Give employees more dynamic choices by bringing together different learning platforms and making relevant topics available. 

4. Give people options.

People learn differently, so offer content across a range of media. 

ATB Financial wanted to connect employees with relevant learning and resources that fit their personal workflow and learning patterns. Using Degreed, the company’s L&D team gave people courses as well as videos, articles, podcasts and more. This boosted engagement and got upskilling efforts on track.

Inspiration doesn’t happen on its own.

The right LXP will provide your people with the resources they need to learn, remember and apply.

Want to learn more? Schedule a personalized Degreed demo today.

The post Employee-Driven Learning: 4 Tips for Facilitating Freedom appeared first on Degreed.

Traditional learning management systems were good at making sure that employees and managers completed required training, which was usually in person. This is what HR needed, but it didn’t really address the full learning and development needs of the workforce. 

Today, we not only have multiple formal learning modalities, including in-person, virtual instructor-led, video, and self-paced, but we also need to include experiential and social learning. They are crucial for learning new jobs or roles. In addition, we need data about the skills people need and those they have. And we need to provide access to opportunities that let employees apply new skills, practice them, and grow.

Even though we have many amazing ways to deliver learning, choosing learning and career development opportunities that fit the needs of the individual worker has never been more complex. To cut through this complexity, we have to start with the right data and use that data to deliver a personalized learning experience.  

Personalized Learning Starts with the Right Data

Building a personalized learning and career experience for the worker requires a variety of different types of data, including:

• Employment information: job role, organization, work location
• Work experience: years of service or in job, previous employment history
• Performance data: specific metrics, ratings, goal achievements
• Talent profile information: current skills and levels of mastery
• Personal interests: skill and career goals, desire to relocate

But, how do we get the right data and maintain it over time? Basic personal and employment information is maintained in the system of record, but other types of data require more work to find and keep current.

First, the system requires the worker to fill out a talent profile. Most organizations do not do a great job of leveraging all of the data they collected as part of the recruiting process to enrich the talent profile. Even fewer have good ways to keep the data in talent profiles fresh. According to Human Resource Executive, 75% to 80% of workers don’t complete their HR system’s talent profile. 

Many leverage third-party data sources like LinkedIn to make it easier, but the quality of that data can be suspect. And a growing source of insights exists outside of corporate systems altogether, in consumer learning apps like the Pluralsight Skill IQ, digital badges, micro-credentials, and in unstructured data on niche professional networks like GitHub. Today’s systems of record, which were all built primarily to standardize and automate HR processes, can’t possibly keep up.

So what does work? Providing an experience for the worker that not only enables enrichment of the talent profile, but provides value to the worker as they provide that data.

Let’s use the example of Laurie. She’s worked at Acme Corp for a little over a year in a customer service role.

Laurie gets a message asking her if she would do a quick self-assessment of her skills, so Acme can suggest learning and development opportunities for her when she has time.

Laurie answers yes and now she proceeds to answer a question about the five most important skills for her current customer service job. 

Based on the self-assessment, the system suggests personalized learning and development opportunities to help Laurie become better at her job. 

This is a value exchange between Laurie and Acme. Laurie spent time between calls to self-assess her skills, which is valuable to Acme. And Acme provided value to her by suggesting learning and development that can help improve her performance. Using this type of approach to gathering data — asking for information and delivering value back — is critical to starting with the right data.

Using Data for Upskilling to Drive Career Growth

In our example, Laurie’s talent profile was enriched by doing a basic skills assessment. Now the system will use data to provide additional value to Laurie and, in turn, capture more data. In addition to suggesting personalized learning and development opportunities, a modern talent solution should use Laurie’s personal, employment, and skill data to make recommendations on possible future roles by comparing her data to other people in the organization that have similar backgrounds, experiences, and skills. Modern talent solutions use machine learning, or pattern recognition, to provide these kinds of personalized recommendations.

Let’s take it one step further and say that there are three future jobs or roles that are recommended to Laurie. Laurie can drill into more details about the jobs. She can find out more about the roles and responsibilities, the paths that others like her took to get to those future roles, coworkers who have experienced similar transitions and could be good  mentors, and more. The system can also ask another basic question at this point: “Are you interested in any of these future jobs/roles?” If there is an interest, that is data to be collected and used to continue to personalize the experience.

Let’s say that there was a future role Laurie was excited about. The system can continue to do more. For example, the system could ask Laurie to self-assess additional skills to suggest additional learning and development opportunities. This is a great example of upskilling. Those learning and development opportunities for Laurie could be specific training, but they also could be social: become a member of a specific community or subscribe to a specific learning content channel. Or they could be experiential: take on a gig that enables the worker to gain specific skills or work with someone who has gone down a similar path.

That’s a Wrap

This is the last post in our series. We started this series discussing designing for the workforce vs. HR. We laid out some of the fundamental differences between systems that were designed to automate HR processes vs. ones that were designed for the worker first. In the second blog post, we delved into designing for the workforce — if you truly do that, then systems of record are not the center of the universe (or your spaghetti diagram), they are really just another point solution that needs to be considered designing the experience. We also provided an example of a sample persona and journey to illustrate the point. Finally, in this blog post, we went a little bit deeper into using data to personalize the experience. We illustrated the symbiotic relationship between asking for a little data and providing value back before asking for a little more data to provide even more value back.

This is all possible today. Modern talent solutions are designed for the workforce instead of HR. They enable you to better leverage your solution portfolio to deliver better experiences to the workforce. They also leverage data to personalize and add value to the employee while gathering more data. If all your current talent solutions are only capturing data in forms and routing them for approvals online (or in your mobile device), then you are missing out on the art of the possible. Download our full playbook on Aligning HR With Career Experience below!

The post Personalized Learning: The Data Deep Dive appeared first on Degreed.

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

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

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