Written by Kelly Tracy,

Greater Atlanta ATD member and Technology Committee member

Degreed, our chapter’s Technology Partner, recently held its signature event, LENS 2023, here in Atlanta. Leaders from Degreed as well as organizations like Google, Cigna, Deloitte, HP, and Pfizer “spilled the [sweet] tea” on research and practices for driving employee engagement and business results through talent development.

Among the case studies, recommendations, and data shares at Degreed LENS, key takeaways for attendees included three major themes.

Focus on skills

We are in a transitional time when organizations are shifting from being “experience-based” to being “skills-based”, said Degreed CEO David Blake. Skills-based hiring, he explained, leads to higher retention, effectiveness, and employee impact compared with experience-based hiring.

Michael Griffiths, Workforce Development Practice Lead at Deloitte, also emphasized the critical role of skills in today’s businesses. Deloitte’s research shows that skills-based organizations are 98 percent more likely to retain high performers, 57% more likely to anticipate and respond efficiently to change, and 52 percent more likely to innovate. From the standpoint of the individual employee, 65 percent say that required skills for their jobs have changed in the past two years. 

Facing the urgent need for skill development, companies are using Degreed to innovate their learning and development strategies. Learning can be passive, but skilling is action-oriented, pointed out Jen Grubich, CLO at Cigna. Her organization is boosting talent mobility by empowering employees to compare their current skills with the required skills for desired roles and get personalized learning paths within Degreed. At Allstate, the learning and development team is addressing the impacts of emerging technologies on the insurance industry by upskilling their entire tech workforce on foundational skills for transformation, with an impressive 33 percent average increase in proficiency in targeted skills. And Degreed is supporting this focus on skills by adding customizable skill scales as well as skill normalization for consistent data.

Leverage learning data

We’ve all heard the saying “What gets measured gets done”, and learning is no exception. Degreed VP of Product David Platt described data as “an organization’s currency of value” and encouraged L&D professionals to collect and maximize it to not only to reinforce business value but also to improve products. Michele Beane Ricchiuto, Director of Global L&D at Allstate, described how robust qualitative and quantitative measurements lent credibility to their latest initiative. That data also provided insight that allowed for midstream corrections, making their learning experiences more useful to employees. Sonia Mooney, former talent leader at Rolls Royce, encourages gathering not only the learning data that you know you need today, but also data that might prove useful in the future. She focuses on metrics around engagement, productivity, efficiency, and profitability. Degreed is making it even easier to optimize use of learning data with upcoming new features like in-app charts, configurable reports, advanced analytics, and data portability.

Market learning to employees

A final theme throughout LENS 2023 was the importance of a marketing mindset for L&D. After all, the best-designed learning experiences only bring value to an organization if employees engage with them, and convincing them to add learning to their busy schedules can be a challenge. “A brand…is what customers tell each other it is”, pointed out Brian Ciccotelli, Learning Experience Designer at HP, quoting Intuit co-founder Scott Cook. Ricchiuto also spoke of treating employees like customers of L&D, adding that some L&D teams even have dedicated marketing and communications staff. At Allstate, for example, the same humorous approach from their “Mayhem” ads is applied to internally promoting learning opportunities.

Overall, by pivoting to a skills-based approach to employee roles and learning, maximizing the value of data, and taking a marketing approach to presenting learning to employees, L&D teams can position themselves as increasingly valuable partners to their organizations’ leadership.

Many thanks to Degreed for their continued support of the Greater Atlanta ATD Chapter as Technology Sponsor.

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