Degreed is a technology suite that combines lifelong learning and data-driven development to accelerate workforce capabilities. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Degreed CEO David Blake to learn more about the company.
What is David Blake’s background?
I am an education reformer by choice and an entrepreneur by necessity. I saw a need to create a lifelong education model beyond what you learn in traditional academia. In a standout moment of inspiration, I asked a woman to tell me about her education, to which she replied, “Oh! I am not educated – I never went to university.
It made me realize that we had this outdated, biased measure of ‘success’ and potential knowledge that was not only alienating a lot of people from the workplace and career progression, but also wasn’t an accurate reflection of what an employee could do right here and now.
It led me to the mission of ‘jailbreaking the degree’—to build a way of ensuring everyone’s skills, regardless of how and where they acquired them, unlocked new career opportunities for them.
How did the idea for Degreed come together?
The vision for Degreed has always centered around ‘jailbreaking the degree’ by moving away from the monopoly of a university degree as the only way to assess someone’s capabilities and potential. By looking at someone’s skills, you get a more comprehensive and up-to-date idea of what they can achieve right now in a role, and it broadens your potential talent pool from graduates to anyone who can prove they have the right skills for a job or project.
It has become my goal to build systems of lifelong education. This translated into Degreed, founded in 2012, along with my other companies, Learn In and BookClub. Initially, as a 28-year-old founder, I didn’t have that many levers available to reform education, but through Degreed I had a vehicle to make my overall vision a reality. Today, 8 million people in 200 countries learn through Degreed, and we have a third of the Fortune 100 among our customers. Degreed truly is having a global impact on so many lives and livelihoods.
What are the company’s core products and features?
Degreed is an enterprise learning experience platform that enables organizations to amplify their people’s learning and skills. It is the only learning system that seamlessly integrates skill insights with development experience you can imagine, from content-based learning, online courses, coaching, and mentoring to experiential learning. All in one simple experience for both learners and L&D/HR teams.
Organizations use Degreed for learning and development, skill analytics, career mobility, or a combination of all three to create truly empowering upskilling and reskilling experiences for their workforce.
What challenges have Blake and the team faced in building the company?
We commonly hear of two challenges among L&D leaders today: having a tangible impact on the business and transforming into a skills-first organization. The latter helps with the first challenge, since using a skills-first approach can more effectively link learning to business outcomes through increased productivity, reduce onboarding time and cost, and facilitate greater workforce agility and skills utilization.
Since a skills-first approach involves the entire organization, it can also unlock connections in other functional areas that can help L&D better understand how learning influences performance and outcomes in different departments.
There is a substantial educational element to our collaboration with customers, helping them understand the broader impact their learning strategies have on their respective businesses and how to communicate this with senior stakeholders. Alongside this, we see more customers trying to understand how to begin a skills-first transformation practically. One of the easiest use cases for this is within learning, so we’re currently providing a lot of guidance around this.
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching?
A decade ago, the learning content world exploded with different providers, platforms, and modalities, including MOOCs, Coursera, Udacity, edX, Code Academy, YouTube, TED, and more. Degreed connected these content pieces for individual learners, helping them learn more continuously and supporting organizations with their strategic upskilling and reskilling initiatives.
Now, with the rise of skills-based learning, Degreed is expanding beyond this into skills. We are building solutions to unify the emerging skills ecosystem, making it easier for organizations to collect and leverage skills data for every workforce decision, from development to career mobility, performance, and hiring.
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones?
Degreed was founded in 2012 and grew into the $1.4 billion edtech unicorn it is today through customer wins, acquisitions, partnerships, and funding rounds. Most recently, we launched Degreed Content Marketplace, a flexible, more equitable approach to offering external upskilling programs, with tools that make it easier to match employees with the right program, manage budgets, optimize spending, and align learning resources with organizational goals. We achieved Spotlight Status in the SAP Store, underscoring the strengthening relationship and trust building between our two companies.
We also opened a new office in Bangalore, India, and announced a host of new C-suite additions including Max Wessel joining as co-CEO and Sanjay Parmar as Chief Technology Officer.
Customer Success Stories
Degreed has been fortunate to work with some of the world’s most innovative and forward-thinking companies to help them build lasting learning cultures and future proof their people’s skills. We recently celebrated our 2024 Visionaries Awards at our annual conference, LENS, which really offers a great snapshot of the different ways Degreed is working for organizations in a range of industries.
For example, our Learning Innovator of the Year Gold award, Exness, was awarded Gold due to its impressive number of skill ratings and consistent skills taxonomy usage. This is enabling it to advance its skills-first learning and internal mobility strategies. Meanwhile, TD Bank was awarded Gold in the Business Performance Program of the Year due to its ‘build once for many’ approach in developing and deploying learning resources, enabling the company to create a more scalable and cost-effective way of upskilling its 104,000 employees.
On an individual level, the Learner of the Year was awarded to Brandon Konecny of Checkr. He used his annual personal learning stipend (available through Degreed Content Marketplace) to upskill in compliance and advertising law, in continuing legal education, and for supporting books. Investing in Degreed Content Marketplace, Checkr saved $50,000 and had more learners request individual licenses focused on specific skill needs. Spending is centralized, making it easy to identify and cut misaligned and underutilized resources.
Funding
Degreed received $153 million in our most recent funding round (Series D)
Future Company Goals
We have two goals.The first is to build the platform that will manage all skills data, across the entire ecosystem of HR, L&D, and talent solutions.
The world is moving toward a skills-based economy with the likes of Unilever, Ericsson, and other global companies taking more skills-first approaches to hiring, developing, retaining, and deploying talent. The skills ecosystem is exploding, with a number of solutions hitting the market for skills-based hiring, talent marketplaces, learning, and performance management. Degreed is positioned perfectly to be the unifying layer for all of this — sitting on top of the emerging skills ecosystem to help the different solutions work together strategically for an organization.”
The second is to build the world’s first lifelong university — a model where you can take a course from any university and where you get credit for all of your learning, over the entirety of your life and career.
