One of the biggest advantages of an open learning ecosystem is the opportunity for L&D teams to generate — and use — a wealth of employee skill data.
The most innovative L&D teams use skill data to create personalized learning experiences, because understanding what skills people have and want makes for better, more relevant content recommendations, mentorships and on-the-job experiential learning. At a more macro level, learning teams use skill data to understand the supply and demand for skills across their organizations.
The more skill data your open ecosystem generates, the more opportunity there is to make smart, informed talent decisions.
And this is why we’re so excited about our new partnership with Workday. Degreed is now a Select Partner in the Workday Software Alliance Program — enabling people to have more relevant learning opportunities and deeper skill profiles and learning teams to understand workforce skill supply and demand better.
Via a bi-directional information exchange, skill data from Workday HCM, Workday Learning and Workday Skills Cloud will be pulled into the Degreed platform (and vice versa), complementing the Degreed skills data and taxonomy. More specifically, the two-way data exchange will influence Degreed user profiles, recommendations, opportunity matching, Skill Coach, reporting and every other Degreed function that uses skills natively. Profiles will be the most noticeably impacted area, with user skills being added and updated.
The ultimate goal is to make the lives of learning and people leaders easier.
“The Workday and Degreed partnership will bring richer skills insights to the market with customers getting the best of Workday data plus Degreed,” said Tiffany LaBare, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Degreed. “Given that over 7 million individuals rely on the Degreed learning platform to continuously improve, there is a constant stream of skills data being generated that complements the data collected by Workday. This ensures that learning and people leaders can capture all forms of skill data and make it actionable in areas like learning, productivity, performance management, and talent planning.”
Meeting and Exceeding Business Goals
Senior executives and CEOs want their teams to lead with advanced analytics, according to Deloitte. “The amount of data available to organizations every day continues to proliferate at a staggering volume… But not every organization is optimizing the opportunities available.”
In that same study, organizations that reported having the strongest cultural orientation to data-driven insights and decision-making were twice as likely to have reported exceeding business goals in the prior 12 months. Findings from the Degreed report State of Skills 2021 show advanced data analytics rank among the top ten in-demand skills among HR professionals.
More Really Is Better
This means more data points, and it also means a more diverse set of data points. Diverse data sets can ensure you’re getting the most accurate and comprehensive view of the skills your organization has and those it needs.
Companies that take a wide-angle approach to data collection — looking at inputs from a diverse range of sources and systems — cultivate what’s called a “signal advantage.” The result is a more expansive view of patterns, risks and opportunities to act on. A signal advantage allows you to build alerts around big shifts in your skill data to keep you ahead of change.
Skill Data Doesn’t Have to be Overwhelming
If you want your organization to create real business value by connecting workforce learning to more holistic — and more helpful — information, it’s time to embrace an advanced skill data strategy. Whether you take it fast or slow, understanding what skill data is, where it comes from, and how to get it in abundance can open up a world of new information to your organization. Our new partnership with Workday is designed to help open up that world too.
To further understand skill data, download The Ultimate Skill Data Handbook from Degreed. Or contact Degreed to discuss skill data with us in more detail. We’d love to answer your questions.
With skill data, you can make informed decisions and support dynamic talent initiatives that personalize learning, engage your people, provide new career opportunities and help meet your most important business goals.