Degreed Enhances Targeted Development™ Capabilities to Help Employers Close Skill Gaps Via Personalized, Mobile Learning Experiences

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18, 2017 -- Degreed, the world’s first career-long learning platform, today announced new features aimed at improving L&D leaders’ ability to personalize learning experiences, and to embed development activities in people’s everyday work and habits.

According to Association for Talent Development (ATD) research, almost 60% of the workforce’s current skill sets do not match shifts in employers’ strategies, goals, markets or business models.  As a result, more than three quarters of CEOs recently told PwC that this lack of expertise is a threat to their businesses’ growth. Degreed, on a mission to make all learning matter, is announcing three significant new developments focused on enabling corporate learning and development (L&D) teams to be more agile, more responsive and more cost-effective:

• Unique, New Targeted Development™ functionality
• Key hires to enhance data science and customer success capabilities
• Major upgrades to iOS and Android mobile apps

To help Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) better target their L&D investments at both individual career goals and organizational priorities, Degreed released a major upgrade to its personalization engine. Leveraging BurningGlass labor market data and proprietary machine learning, Degreed’s innovative Targeted Development™ platform automatically aligns the world’s best learning resources with the skills relevant to each employee’s job as well as their professional interests and career goals, and then recommends a daily feed of learning resources focused on building that expertise.

The company’s data science initiatives are already improving personalization and relevance. As Atlassian’s former global head of talent development, Sam Haider, recently told TechTarget, Degreed is helping the collaboration and productivity software developer to improve engagement and knowledge sharing among teams, as well as employees’ perceptions of career growth opportunities.

To support these ongoing efforts, Degreed has also hired James Denmore to lead Degreed’s growing investment in analytics, which includes a team of data scientists with substantial experience applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to L&D. Denmore, Degreed’s Director of Data Science, joined from O’Reilly Media and Safari Books, where he led business intelligence, insights and analytics. Degreed also hired David Verhaag as VP of Client Experience to enhance its ability to help clients drive transformation. Verhaag has previously scaled-up client success operations for SAP SuccessFactors, HireVue and, most recently, Kahuna, a customer engagement platform backed by Sequoia Capital.

Degreed has also launched a substantial update to its iOS and Android apps, bringing more of the full functionality of its award-winning web service to mobile users. With its mobile usage already doubling year-on-year, Degreed’s enhanced mobile apps now enable users to search, browse and access their employers’ learning catalogs alongside Degreed’s 4+ million open learning resources anywhere, anytime, helping organizations fuel their learning cultures every day.

Degreed CEO and co-founder David Blake commented, “Resolving the persistent gap between the skills employees have and the ones they need to move into new roles requires sophisticated personalization and change management capabilities. Our recent product upgrades and the accompanying additions to our team are a giant leap forward in Degreed’s ability to help our clients and users build and recognize the expertise they need for the future.”

About Degreed 
Degreed is an award-winning learning platform built for the way today's workers really build their expertise. Degreed integrates organizations' internal talent systems with the world's largest ecosystem of open learning resources — millions of courses, videos, articles, books, podcasts and more from thousands of sources. As a result, organizations and their people can discover, curate, share and track all their learning and development, however and wherever they learn. Founded in 2012, Degreed is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Salt Lake City and Amsterdam.

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Media Contact:
Todd Tauber
Degreed
[email protected]