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LXPs Are Here to Stay — and They’re Driving Business Strategy

At Degreed, we believe one thing was crystal clear when industry analysts evaluated the 10 most significant learning solutions for The Forrester Wave™: Learning Management Systems and Experience Platforms, Q4 2021 report.

Learning experience platforms, or LXPs, wield hefty influence across the elearning technology marketplace.

Why? Because what people experience as they build skills is at the heart of a strategic and successful learning solution.

It’s a belief that’s transcended the history of Degreed dating to when we pioneered the LXP. And it’s a belief that guides our decisions today, in pursuit of innovations designed to simultaneously benefit workers and the companies they work for.

To quote our Co-Founder David Blake: “You will learn more over a lifetime of learning administered by the hands of HR and L&D than you will in your lifetime administered to you by a university or professors… It should be our skills, irrespective of how or where we develop them, that should be what determines our opportunities, and I wanted to be part of the solution.”

Recently, Degreed joined select companies Forrester invited to participate in The Forrester Wave™: Learning Management Systems and Experience Platforms, Q4 2021 report. In this evaluation, Degreed was cited as a Leader and its top scores came in the talent ecosystem integration, product vision, execution roadmap and commercial model criteria.

In the Degreed vendor profile, the Forrester Wave stated: “Degreed is investing in adding select learning management system (LMS) functionality while doubling down on its commitment to bring opportunities to ‘learn by doing’ and ‘signals’ about learning from all parts of the work ecosystem to craft the learner experience and provide robust workforce data to the employer.”

5 Ways LXPs Have Influenced the Learning Tech Market

The marks made by LXPs are undeniable. Let’s explore some of their significant contributions to new standards for learning — and how Degreed fits in. 

1. Applying the science of learning to structure, capabilities and user experience:

Degreed engages and instructs in all the ways people learn. It promotes diverse learning experiences and content (user-generated content, social learning, articles, videos, classes and more). This includes the ability to create, syndicate, and consume content. Our research consistently shows people learn in a multitude of ways, inside and outside of work, structured and unstructured, yet it’s not always tracked and displayed. 

Degreed also provides ways to give feedback on people’s progress, offering both guidance for workers and visibility for the organization. And it motivates people with clear career paths and relevant development opportunities (see more on this below in No. 2).

Another critical piece? The ability to utilize behavioral science to recommend and connect users with relevant resources, experts and experiences.

2. Delivering personalized, relevant learning in the flow of work:

Today’s world of work incorporates multiple learning modalities including in-person, virtual instructor-led, video, self-paced, experiential and social learning. Any one of these options can prove crucial to someone learning a new skill or role.

Even though there are now many ways to deliver learning, choosing learning and career development opportunities that fit the needs of individual workers remains complex. To cut through this, Degreed uses skill inferences, or “signals” as referred to by Forrester Wave, to deliver a personalized learning experience. This enables us to recommend relevant content based on a learner’s needs and goals to match them to the right on-the-job opportunities (see more on this in No. 4). 

Our most recent How the Workforce Learns report found that workers who rate their learning cultures as positive are more likely to practice all three types of learning experiences in the 70|20|10 model: experimental, interactive, and instructional. And they’re more likely to get diverse perspectives inside and outside their organizations, proving that learning can happen on or off the clock.

Our platform runs on demand in the cloud, and it’s available anytime, anywhere on the Degreed mobile app. With our Google Chrome browser extension, learners can dig deeper into topics they come across on the web and access relevant learning content immediately. And we integrate with Microsoft Teams

3. Integrating tools that empower L&D:

Now more than ever, the future of L&D means delivering personalized learning remotely at less cost. At the same time, expectations that were once the province of HR have now landed squarely on the modern CEO’s agenda. 

Traditionally, L&D teams have been responsible for the performance of workers, legal compliance requirements and general workforce readiness to meet business needs. Those old expectations remain, joined by new initiatives. Learning leaders are now increasingly responsible for making the workforce more agile, innovative, healthy, inclusive and more — often amid talent shortages.

Degreed helps learning leaders be strategic business partners who have a huge stake in business performance and resiliency. Our strategic integrations now streamline platform admin and provide data that allows leaders to make better decisions about their programs, set and understand success measures, pinpoint resources most needed and anticipate the future.

4. Providing experiential learning opportunities to practice new skills: 

Career mobility and experiential learning are already seen as benefits for workers. But what if learning leaders instead focus on helping people build and practice new skills that can deliver measurable impact across an entire organization?

When you hire people, you’re making a long-term investment in their success. That investment is about more than finding the right fit when you’ve got a role to fill. It’s about encouraging and supporting people’s development over time — to cultivate mutual trust and help them grow with internal opportunities. 

Learning and HR leaders have always understood the high cost of employee turnover, but recent research from Gallup shines a bright light on just how significant it can be: the impact on productivity for disengaged employees is equal to 18% of their annual salary. By Gallup’s math, for a company of 10,000 employees with an average salary of $50,000 each, disengagement costs $60.3 million a year.

The Degreed experiential learning solution creates a dynamic opportunity marketplace that connects your people to the projects, gigs, stretch assignments and mentorships that matter most to your business right now.

5. Igniting targeted skill building with intuitive, data-powered tools:

Today’s complex world of work requires a proactive emphasis on resiliency. As a result, every company needs more sophisticated ways of looking at the skills and capabilities of workers to better plan and pivot.

Degreed Intelligence provides a suite of tools designed to help workers, managers and learning leaders understand and build skills they need across the organization. It’s a cost-effective way to turn learning and skill-building activity into insights you can use to understand skill supply and demand and make smarter decisions. 

For example, Skill Coach gives people managers an intuitive toolkit for discovering, building, and rating team skills — to set development goals and target learning where it matters most. Skill Review uses machine learning and skill insights to provide real-time skill intelligence on the skills your business needs as well as who has them, who needs them and who wants them.

We generate our analytics from that data and then structure them as in-app dashboard reports, visualizations and insights.

Our new algorithms pull skill data from Degreed and package it into simple and intelligent dashboards. This purpose-built software enhances the Degreed platform and takes the complexity out of data science.

When advanced skill analytics give you the bigger picture, you’re ready to plan, respond and be a better strategic business partner.

The Future of Learning Looks Brighter Than Ever

We’re excited about where the market’s going. And we’re bullish on continued developments at Degreed that will strengthen choice of content, personalization and machine learning capabilities.

These innovations and more promise to deepen the learning experience and lift the burden of curation and tracking, so learning leaders can step into a more valuable role and become business superheroes — supporting a skilled workforce that uses continuous learning to meet personal goals as well as key business objectives. 

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