My Hopes for Degreed 2.0

I was an early employee at Degreed and helped build it for 7 years before leaving and starting Learn In. Now, as we're joining forces through acquisition, I’ve been reflecting on what I hope we can accomplish in this next chapter. And I’d love for all of you to be part of it.

First, disclaimer. I’m just a small part of Degreed. I don’t speak for Degreed. These are just my 2 cents of what I’m hoping for.

The Goal

Degreed wasn’t started to solve corporate learning problems or be an LXP. It was started to:

• Make all learning (and learning paths) count
• Make learning more inclusive, effective, and lifelong

However, we soon realized that the most meaningful place to solve these problems was inside companies because:

• We will work for most of our lives
• Companies and employees share incentives to learn, grow, and drive better performance together
• Learning is most powerful in the context of the work that we do
• The rewards of learning (purpose, higher pay, promotions, better performance) are usually realized at work

If you look at all the learning vendors in the space, it’s getting more crowded. But, if you look at what we’re trying to accomplish, the work is far from done. And by partnering with exceptional leaders and companies, we’re going to keep finding ways to achieve our goal.

Clients

It was such a big change to leave a company with hundreds of happy clients to start a company with no clients.

For large, enterprise clients, each one is a ton of work, especially as a startup. And getting those first handful of clients… So. Much. Work.?

Now, I definitely do not take our clients for granted. We exist because of them. I will do anything I can to make them successful. And I now appreciate even more the power and opportunity of Degreed’s client base of hundreds of the world’s largest, most innovative, learning organizations.

The clients who jumped on with Degreed over the years (vs. waiting a decade to see if their LMS would catch up) are incredibly invested in solving these same problems. They are the companies who will help define what best-in-class learning organizations will look like. Our job is to make them successful, co-create new solutions together, and make buying Degreed or Learn In one of the best decisions of their career.

At the same time, I’m realizing that a lot of companies are just getting by when it comes to L&D. I want to make it easy for these companies as well, not just the mature organizations, to get great results from investing in their employees’ learning and growth.

Competitors

We have competition and it sucks when we lose a deal to them. But, big picture, I hope we have lots of successful competitors. Here’s why:

• We can’t successfully serve every type of client and use case. Companies are different, different needs, different preferences. If Degreed tried to serve all of them equally well, we’d turn into a slow and complex product and company. We don’t want to be that. We want to be pushing on the latest and greatest.
• Competitors increase the reach and impact of good ideas. If our goal is to improve learning outcomes for individuals, we accomplish that when the whole ecosystem improves, including competitors.
• It keeps us pushing forward. I won't be surprised when things we build today will make it into the big HRIS and LMS systems a decade from now. Our job is to stay in front of solving the biggest problems for companies who can’t afford to wait ten years.

Collaborators?

We aren’t smart enough to figure everything out by ourselves. We need lots of people (whether you’re a client or not) to share their experiences, challenges, and help refine what we’re building.?

If you find this space interesting, or the problems compelling, I’d love to connect and find ways to collaborate and learn from each other. Working with smart, passionate people on hard problems is one of my biggest hopes for Degreed 2.0.

And regardless of company or vendor, I hope we can all advocate for solutions that help make learning more inclusive, effective, and lifelong.

I'm looking forward to all of exciting and challenging work ahead and want to say thank you to everyone who has been a part of the journey! Hope you'll continue to build the next chapter with us.