We get it: You’ve got big business goals—and need to make sure your people can meet them.
And chances are you have lots of questions about the Degreed learning platform.
We like answering them.
Some of the best questions came our way after Degreed Vision, where we shared our product roadmap. Posed during Vision in Action, a follow up webinar series you can watch on demand, they probed our latest innovations in AI, skills, and automations.
Let’s take a closer look.
Degreed & Artificial Intelligence
Degreed uses AI to personalize the learning experience for each employee. It helps assess skills, tailor content recommendations, and reassess skills after learning.
AI also powers Degreed Maestro, a virtual coach that orchestrates executive coaching, targeted skill review, and career development. Pre-programed Degreed coaches retain past conversations and apply that personalized context each time a user engages with them. Maestro’s functionality can also help users find skill-related content, update their skills, curate a Pathway, and recommend content.
What does the future of Degreed Maestro look like?
We’re already planning a few key enhancements, including the ability to:
- Create custom virtual coaches according to your organization’s needs and serve expanded use cases.
- Embed Maestro into Pathways and Academies.
- Adjust the coach’s persona including voice, tone, and coaching style.
In addition, we plan to expand Maestro to the Degreed mobile app.
How will Maestro use proprietary content to teach an AI model?
In the future, you’ll be able to train a company-specific AI model (also known as Coach Builder) on internal content. You could train it on your latest product release notes or strategy updates to make it more useful in answering company-specific questions. All training data will be used according to the Degreed Privacy Policy.
When Maestro recommends courses, does it provide links within Degreed to the content?
Yes. For example, recommendations point directly to applicable content or curated Pathways.
What tone and dialect of English does Maestro comprehend?
Maestro has been able to comprehend various dialects of English spoken by Degreed employees across the world. In the future, we expect it will support additional languages.
Is it possible to monitor the quality or satisfaction of Maestro dialogues?
We’re deeply interested in understanding the quality of conversations with Maestro and ensuring high satisfaction. In addition to qualitative feedback, our product team takes a rigorous approach to reviewing the interactions witih Maestro and refining our use of AI to improve user experience.
How much insight will admins have into the questions or conversations their users have with Degreed AI?
This is one area we are exploring with our early-release program. Our intent is to protect individuals’ privacy while providing meaningful insights to leaders that help drive their workforce development efforts. Administrators will have insight into general Maestro usage, and most likely into the skills users are working on just as administrators would have with other learning content via Degreed.
Will reporting be available for Maestro?
As we learn more about which types of insights are meaningful indicators of value, we’ll add these to our reporting capabilities for administrators.
Degreed & Skills+
Degreed helps organizations home in on the skills that drive success. Skills+ helps you manage the complexity of skill data from across your ecosystem so you can pinpoint skill needs; use skill data to power highly personalized, impactful learning; and measure change.
When it comes to skills language, is Degreed the single source of truth?
Skills+ can be—but does not have to be—the single source of truth for skills at your organization. If you aren’t using another tool as your single source, the features in Skills+ will help you manage skills in numerous ways. However, we understand that many organizations store their skill data somewhere else, often in a human resource information system (HRIS). Our focus is not on being the single source. It’s to help you take skills and put them to work within Degreed, so you can achieve your desired business outcomes through efficient, impactful skill-building that transforms the workforce you have into the workforce you need.
Will Degreed be able to ingest third-party skill assessment ratings?
Yes. We’re close to opening our ratings integration to accept data from other providers. We will accept assessment scores and also ratings (integer or label provided by the assessment partner).
Can I customize skill descriptions and skill level descriptions?
Yes. We make suggestions, but as with all things AI at Degreed, you are the driver. Feel free to edit the skill labels, skill descriptions, and skill level descriptions
How are users notified of skills rating changes?
When organizations change skill labels or merge synonymous skills, employees receive a bell notification to inform them their organization has made changes to skills on the platform. This notification encourages them to review their profiles.
Besides uploading, are there going to be other options for auto integration (e.g., APIs)?
Yes. Uploading is just the first step. APIs will be added to support populating skill sources with settings, proficiency level descriptions, and more.
Can proficiency level descriptions be unique by skill?
Yes. Skill-specific proficiency level descriptions allow for organizations to either define or infer appropriate examples of what it means to be, for example, a novice in agile vs. a novice in coaching. This is helpful for improving the outcome rating process by contextualization and also improving the quality of inferred proficiency on skills tagged to content.
I remember seeing custom rating scales, so it sounds like we could now customize the descriptions at each rating scale per skill. Is this correct?
Yes. You can customize your skill scale at the generic level. That means you can select the number of levels, level names, and level descriptions. Then you can flesh out skill-specific proficiency levels for the skills that matter to your organization.
Degreed & Automations
Degreed Automations helps you deliver the right learning to the right people at the right time by automating personalized messages and nudges that remind employees to return to the Degreed platform. And by automating admin tasks like adding people to groups or changing permissions, you can free up valuable time to focus on high-impact work.
Using Automations is a no-code process, which means you can deliver more impactful learning experiences without consulting IT, and that translates to more free time for your learning and IT teams to drive the business forward.
Is there any plan to allow administrators to preview which learners an automation will impact?
Yes. This is on our roadmap. Please note that the preview will be an estimate because certain triggers and conditions are dependent on future data or actions.
What are some of the key, common use cases for automations?
Key use cases include:
- Onboarding users using hire dates or assigning content due date
- Increasing engagement with nudges
- Personalizing learning by sharing Plans and Pathways with the right user population
- Rolling out a program and seamlessly notifying all impacted users
- Sending reminders and deadlines for upcoming assignments
- Streamlining management of users within groups
- Managing access and visibility through permission roles and visibility settings
- Running L&D marketing campaigns
Can I assign content, a Plan, or a Pathway with a due date to a new user based on a future start date? For example, let’s say I set an automation today to assign a Pathway to a user. Can this automation apply to a user who joins next month?
You can assign content, Plans, and Pathways using a specific date or X days in the future. This can push out the due date based on when the user is assigned. Please work with your CX partner to configure a rule that meets your needs.