Purchasing an enterprise learning solution like Degreed, is a high-consequence decision most companies only make once every five to ten years, so how do you justify the purchase of something like Degreed to your CFO?
Here are four ways Degreed is a positive return on your investment:
1. Improves learning team productivity
Degreed offers several tools for leader-led and automated curation. To see the complete list, visit 5 ways to curate learning with Degreed.
Degreed pathways, a curated collection of content from any source, can be built in as little as 20 minutes, or 8-12 hours for advanced competencies. This is a huge time saving when compared to the days and weeks it takes to build a custom course from scratch.
Don’t take our word for it. Tenaris uses Degreed’s curation tools and leverages subject matter experts to combine current content and add curated materials to create a broader learning experience.
And when Mastercard rolled out Skype for Business, instead of rolling out a custom course that would have taken 2 people at least a week to create, they curated a pathway in a matter of hours. If you apply this recipe to all of your generic learning needs, that gives your team a lot more time to spend creating custom content for topics that will move the needle in your business.
2. Improves end-user productivity
Content is everywhere and workers are overloaded. Continuous learning is now a requirement for today’s workforce to stay competitive, but who has the time?
We need simple, faster ways to find the content we need, when we need it. Degreed will save your employees time and energy searching for the learning they need to target their development. Degreed does this through personalized learning recommendations, and its ability to connect all the best learning experiences regardless of source or format. The best way to prove this point to your CFO is to demo Degreed’s universal search in action.
Intel’s Director of Digital Platform for Learning, Tim Quinlan, did just that. He told the audience at Degreed’s LENS a story of how he justified the purchase of Degreed to his CFO. “When she asked me how we calculate ROI for this thing, I asked her the same thing. I said, “Tell me something you’re interested in learning about.”
She said raspberry pi, a microcontroller. Tim’s response was “try to find it in our current system.” First, Intel’s CFO tried searching in the LMS, and didn’t find anything. Next, she tried searching in Google, which returned some ads and a product review. Then she tried Degreed. Degreed’s universal search returned several items, including a video introduction to Raspberry Pi from Lynda. And because Degreed offers single sign on, she could access the Lynda video with one click. The Degreed search saved her several minutes to find the learning she was interested in. Now multiply the minutes saved, by the number of searches done each week by each employee, by 100,000 people at Intel, which results in some serious time savings.
3. Reduces IT overhead
A special interest to the CFO, Degreed helps reduce IT overhead in several ways. Degreed offers a fast, simple implementation process in the cloud, and can reduce IT costs associated with ongoing maintenance and future learning implementations. These days, learning happens all over the place. If you’re part of a large organization you probably have at least one LMS, perhaps multiple. You likely have content from multiple content providers. You might also have Sharepoint or other custom portals to help employees find all of these resources.
Degreed can simplify all of this with one unified access point with integrations to all the learning in your organization and remove the need for custom portals.
One Degreed customer had 200 custom learning portals, which was becoming increasingly difficult for IT to manage, and cost prohibitive. By purchasing Degreed, they were able to offer employees one central location for all learning and significantly reduce IT costs. And because Degreed is a Saas solution with a simple, streamlined implementation process, it is a much easier platform to administer and maintain.
4. Streamlines vendor management
Are you spending a ton of money on content to find it only being used by a fraction of employees? Are you spending a ton of IT resources to onboard new content providers? Degreed already has integrations with most of the top content providers, streamlining the implementation hurdles of incorporating new content vendors into your organization’s learning ecosystem, while reducing the burden on your IT staff.
Degreed’s ongoing monitoring of content usage can assist you in future licensing decisions – allowing your org, and the CFO, to get the best bang for your content buck. From within Degreed, you can see analytics across all content providers (both internal and external), and you can see not only what people are taking, but also what subjects they are searching for. Now, when you go to make a content purchase or create a custom course, you are empowered to make better decisions and purchase the content that employees actually need and are using for their jobs. And you can always leverage the large selection of free and low-cost learning available in Degreed out-of-the-box.
Takeaways
These are just a few tips to help make the case with your CFO. There are a lot of other reasons to buy Degreed, including, improved employee engagement and user experience, better learning culture, more insights into learning, and a better tool for onboarding, sales enablement, leadership development, and more. If you have other tips, we’d love to hear them.
To learn more about Degreed, visit get.degreed.com/business