Championing Customers Through Internal Upskilling at Pluralsight

As a leader, I am committed to ensuring that my team fosters strong and impactful relationships with our customers. To do this, everyone must understand the value of the product we are delivering. Without this alignment, it’s challenging for an organization to reach its full potential.?

I often discuss the importance of upskilling, a crucial facet of Pluralsight’s mission, and through the years I’ve found that the key to maintaining a strong team with even stronger customer focus is found within internal upskilling. How can you be in the best position to engage in conversations with customers when you aren’t also armed with a fundamental knowledge of our products and the technologies we teach? How can you promote value from your product if you’ve never experienced that value firsthand? The answer: you can’t. That’s why I’ve made it a goal to prioritize internal upskilling with my team at Pluralsight.

When we talk to customers, we want to engage with them in ways that forge meaningful relationships and help them understand the value of our offerings. The best way to accomplish this is by having the expertise to find a deeper understanding for what exactly your customer needs. Whether that’s learning the cybersecurity principles that business leaders are focused on today or understanding AWS core services for example, offering teams the opportunity to gain this knowledge is what drives our conversations with customers.?

Implementing internal upskilling is especially integral within technology-oriented businesses; we are witnessing industry changes every day with emerging technologies such as generative AI and cloud computing, and we need to ensure that we are providing our teams with the resources they need to stay informed and tech-fluent.?

Making Pluralsight Cloud Happy

Take cloud computing and cloud adoption, for example. In our recently published State of Cloud report , we found that 70% of organizations have more than half of their infrastructure in the cloud, and 49% are continuing to move more data into the cloud. With this rise in cloud usage and adoption, I set out on a mission to upskill our Pluralsight teams - myself included - to become experts in cloud computing and form a deeper understanding of how to connect with customers as they too embark on their cloud journeys.?

We launched our Cloud Happy initiative in late 2022, encouraging our entire Pluralsight team to upskill in the cloud through our platform over the span of about four months. We encouraged this in two ways - first, by challenging all team members to complete our Tech Foundations “Cloud Computing Explained” course, and challenging team members to take that a step further and earn cloud certifications. From September through December, 95% of Pluralsight team members (nearly 2,000 people) completed the cloud Tech Foundations course.??

An additional 233 team members completed at least one Cloud Happy course outside of the foundational course, and 124 Cloud certifications were achieved. I could not be more proud of my Pluralsight team - these results are extremely impressive. On top of these new skills, the challenge also proved to be an amazing opportunity for our company to come together and participate in communal activities like study groups.?

Our Product Operations Learning & Development Manager, Abby Maulick, took part in the certification challenge as well as study group sessions. Abby said that “as a non-tech person in a tech field, this knowledge makes me feel a lot more confident and comfortable in my role when the Cloud is discussed. I didn’t realize how much I was missing in conversations prior to this course, but now that I do have that conversational knowledge, I pick up on a lot more information discussed.”?

The reason that this program was so effective for our team revolves around the fact that this was a challenge - we were calling our team members to embody a learner’s mindset to help drive more value for customers. By giving our teams a clear goal and timeline for accomplishing this challenge, we made learning more tangible and actionable.?

Upskilling for the Future

With the success of the Cloud Happy campaign, we plan to incorporate more company-wide internal upskilling programs in the future. The ultimate goal is building tech savvy teams across all functions to assist us in unlocking more meaningful connections with our customers.

At Pluralsight, we want our teams to truly embrace what it means to be lifelong learners. We are constantly finding new ways to uphold our values as a company, and internal upskilling is proof that when we all seek to learn at a higher level, we can champion the customer at a higher level as well.