“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide songs being sung by the choir …”

“Oh wait, hang on one sec, I just need to check in on work real quick.”

“Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow …”

“Oh, you know what, I should post this to Instagram. That mistletoe is just perfect.”

“Will find it hard to sleep tonight …”

The holidays are a special time filled with family, friends, old traditions and new memories. It is a special time filled with the opportunity to connect with one another, to share meals, to share conversation and laughs, to share gifts and the moments that matter.

Something is lost though. Something is lost when the flicker of a screen replaces the flicker of a fire. Something is lost when the bright red alert of a new email consumes our attention instead of the bright red noses of kids coming in from playing in the snow. Something is lost when instead of time spent with family making dinner, our attention is with work, with our technology. Something is lost when we are physically present but mentally remote and connected to our tech.

This isn’t news. We already know this. There are countless articles on the benefits of disconnecting from technology. We already feel the pang of guilt when we check in instead of focusing on our family and friends. We already know that social media detracts from our real-life social lives. We already know that the moments we spend checking in are moments stolen from our families, stolen from our friends, stolen from the memories we will one day wish we had.

We have all sorts of excuses. It’ll be quick. I need to stay on top of it so I don’t have 100 emails when I get back to work. It’s just one short reply. My family likes it when I post photos. It won’t take that long. We all have our excuses and they are just that: excuses.

So this year, drop the excuses and celebrate yourself. You need a break from the totally connected life, we all do. You understand the value of turning off. And the end of the year is a perfect time to power down and to give yourself a mental break. It will do wonders for you. It will do wonders for your career. It will help you to recharge, to refresh your energy, to reignite your creativity and imagination, and help you start the new year inspired. 

The holidays are a special time. Or they can be. This year, unplug. Give yourself, give your family, give your friends something truly special: the unplugged version of yourself. The disconnected version. The full color, fully present, fully in the moment version of yourself. Give yourself time away from the screen. Give yourself permission to fully experience your holiday. In real-time. There is no better gift. There is no better time.

From all of us at Degreed, we wish you and yours a peaceful, relaxing holiday.

Sorry to break the bad news. Your degree doesn’t matter. Your BA or BS doesn’t mean I should hire you. Your MBA doesn’t mean you know how to run a business. The name of the school you went to … meh. Your degree doesn’t matter. At least not as much as you think it does.

As a former HR Professional and veteran of HR tech industry, Degreed crystallized something I have always felt but didn’t put words to – your degree simply doesn’t matter. It is true your degree is an important record of your training on the fundamentals (math, history, language, bowling, etc.) and learning how to think critically. It is an important step in lifelong learning but it simply doesn’t matter as much as what you have learned since you graduated. Your BA isn’t as valuable as your recent learning in determining readiness or qualifications for a job. Your MBA doesn’t make you a better manager than someone who has helped grow a business and stays current with reading on entrepreneurship and leadership.

Simply, your degree doesn’t matter as much as your lifelong learning. Jeff Weiner summed it up well at a recent conference, “increasingly I hear this mantra: skills not degrees. It’s not skills at the exclusion of degrees. It is just expanding our perspective to go beyond degrees.” Degreed is “jailbreaking the degree.” Degreed is offering a way to demonstrate the learning that does matter.

Having started my career in Human Resources and having built and scaled global Customer Success teams at several fast-growing companies, I have had the opportunity to interview thousands of people. One of my favorite questions has always been, “Why did you go to college, what did you study and how did that lead to where you are today?” A three part interview question? Cue eye roll, I know.

For me, it had nothing to do with the school, the level of degree or even the subject. That’s interesting, but candidly, has never mattered to me that much. What I do find interesting is the insights into the individual and how they have leveraged that foundation to learn and grow through their career. “Oh… I have a degree in history because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I have always been interested in the Civil War. But after graduating, I …” or “I have a degree in math because I love technical analysis but after graduating I found that I hate being stuck in spreadsheets all day so I ….”

The honesty in many of the answers can lead to an interesting discussion. The way candidates connect higher education to their career and lifelong learning is a great indication of what they are bringing to the table. It is an interesting insight into the Why of their career. It is almost rare anymore to find someone who went to school and received a degree in the same area as their current profession. Art History majors celebrate! There is hope.

Even if your degree is perfectly aligned with the job you want, I want to know what you have been doing since.

The problem? Many recruiters and HR organizations are still measuring you by your college degree because that’s the standard they have had to measure learning. I know I am not the only HR professional or hiring manager that knows the degree isn’t an effective measure of your skills and capabilities. I doubt any effective hiring manager is making offers on a degree alone. But that is all most of us have known. Or it was anyways. Now we have Degreed.

Imagine if you could demonstrate everything you learned since your degree. All of the relevant articles, papers, and books you have read that equip you to succeed in your job. Imagine a record of the conferences, webinars, and workshops you have attended that have helped you prepare for the job you want. If you could represent that to your organization, or future employers, wouldn’t that be more valuable than saying you have a history degree from 10 years ago? Wouldn’t you want that Corporate Recruiter to understand what you have learned in since? That’s meaningful and something that I would want to hear about when interviewing you. Meet Degreed.

So what have you been learning since you graduated?

In an effort to continuously honor our commitment to delivering our clients the best experience possible, Degreed recently hired a new Vice President of Client Experience, David Verhaag.

He will lead the post-sale teams including Client Engagement and Client Support. Prior to his employment with us, he partnered with Degreed for 8 months in an advisory capacity. During that time, he learned “first hand about this amazing company and the mission-driven team leading a transformation in the way we think about education. When the opportunity to consider the next step in my career came, joining the Degreed team was an obvious choice.”

He will become a regular contributor to the Degreed blog through the “field notes”  series, sharing both career and client lessons learned. Degreed is proud to have this strong addition to not only our organization but also our client success efforts. A round of applause for his debut:

Start with Why

“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” The message is simple. Simon Sinek’s incredibly popular TED talk and framework is an important way of thinking about sales and marketing. Like many people, I love the simplicity and clarity of “Start with Why”. It makes immediate sense the first time you hear it. Until recently though I didn’t apply this thinking to my own career.

Following Simon’s model, from the outside in my career looks like the following: “I build and manage high-performing Customer Success teams. We deliver exceptional product adoption, industry-leading Net Promoter Scores and customer retention. Want to hire me?”

As Simon would say, “Meh…”

This time around, I reversed my thinking to the following: “I change the status quo. I lead customers and my teams to a new way of thinking and operating. I do this by building high performing Customer Success teams that challenge the old ways of learning and managing talent and we provide the partnership and expertise to drive change. We do this by driving production adoption with industry leading NPS and customer retention. Do you want to change the status quo?” That feels better.

Challenging that status quo in talent management has been a big idea for many years. It is the exciting opportunity I was looking for when I moved from my career from being the HR Guy to a focus on HR/Learning Tech and Customer Success. When I originally joined SuccessFactors in 2004, software as a service (SaaS) for HR and the digital performance review was still a relatively new idea. We moved customers from the status quo of paper-based performance management to the innovative idea of digital talent management and ultimately to the breakthrough of SaaS.

In 2013, I joined HireVue to challenge the status quo in recruitment by moving talent acquisition from expensive and time-consuming in-person interviews and sales training to video-based interactions and assessments. The result was millions of people connecting with career opportunities in a way that enabled them to have their story heard.

The idea at Degreed is even bigger! I could not be more excited to be a part of the Degreed team to work with our industry leading customers to challenge a legacy status quo that negatively impacts far too many people and organizations: learning as measured by the college degree.

What are some ways you have challenged the status quo? Let us know.