Degreed was founded with a simple premise – education is too important to stay the way it is. Co-Founders, David Blake and Eric Sharp, wanted to make sure that skills should develop people’s opportunities, rather than their degree or connections. Degreed is now the workforce upskilling platform for one in three Fortune 50 companies. Dan Hayward, CCO at Degreed, tells Intelligent CXO more about the company and how it has grown since it began in 2012.
Tell us a bit more about your business.
Degreed is the workforce upskilling platform for one in three Fortune 50 companies. It was founded in 2012 and was the first of its kind in the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) sector. Since then, it has remained at the forefront of upskilling and reskilling, empowering people to develop their skills and ensure they remain in front of workforce and technology changes.
It connects all learning, talent development and internal mobility opportunities to intelligence on the skills that a business needs next. And this is done through one, simple and intuitive skill-building experience. Learning opportunities are tailored to people’s interests and aspirations, while work opportunities (in the form of permanent roles, secondments, stretch assignments, project-based work, volunteering and more) are offered based on skills, learning and career goals. Every Degreed user has a skills profile that tracks all of their current skills, experience and formal and informal learning, to give an up-to-date view of what they can do.
Degreed is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with additional offices in Salt Lake City, New York, London, Amsterdam and Brisbane.
How has the business grown since it first started and how did you ensure growth?
Degreed was created in 2012 on a simple premise: Education is too important to stay the way it is.
Co-Founders, David Blake and Eric Sharp, set out to ‘jailbreak the degree’ with the conviction that the traditional degree is an exclusionary tollgate to success, which refuses to acknowledge there are other ways to learn. Skills, irrespective of how or where people develop them, should be what determines an individual’s opportunities.
Initially, Degreed was offered as a B2C product, but in 2015 its strategy shifted to become a B2B product aimed at organisations with thousands of employees. In 2016, the product developed by Degreed started to be known as a learning experience platform (LXP).
Degreed grew quickly to become the LXP for one in three Fortune 50 companies. In 2019, it acquired London and Brisbane-based, Adepto, a total talent platform that positioned Degreed to excel at career mobility. In 2020, Degreed surpassed 500 employees globally and launched its Career Mobility product.
Degreed has just raised US$153 million in Series D funding and is now valued at US$1.4 billion. It has expanded to three core products: Learning Experience, Career Mobility and Skill Analytics. In 2020 alone, Degreed more than doubled its active user base.
How did the business start?
Degreed started with the premise that education is too important to stay the way it is. It began its existence as a consumer product, before pivoting to a business solution in 2016. The product and team have grown quickly since then.
What’s the business’ approach to management?
Degreed is powered by its people – we have a highly ambitious, intelligent team who we trust to get the job done. We don’t dictate how it’s done; we’re only interested in results. This means our people are very autonomous – they can choose how they work, where they work and when. This enables them to shape their work environment to get the best results. It also gives greater flexibility because work is but one aspect of a fulfilling life. We understand that people work best when they can work around their other commitments and passions, whether that’s doing the school run, caring for others, studying or charity work.
Every Degreed employee also understands that they can take time out to recharge, to spend time with their families, to take care of their health, to care for others and to pursue interests and passions.
What is your company’s vision and goal?
Degreed was created to jailbreak the degree. It gives individuals ownership over their learning and career growth, by helping them transact on their current and future skills. Ultimately, the vision is to make skills the currency of work, not credentials or connections. Empowering people to build careers and work on roles and projects that truly align with their skills, learning, interests and aspirations.
What kind of clients do you serve?
We serve large organisations, usually with over 10,000 employees, which want to empower people to learn. Degreed works across many industries including finance, manufacturing, professional services, FMCG, technology and healthcare/pharma.
What has your career looked like so far?
Fresh out of an internship, I started out in the UK in Learning and Development and was fortunate enough to work for some amazing people centric companies where I got a great grounding in HR, working across various areas of HR, Global Career Mobility, Talent Acquisition and Employer Branding. Over the course of my career, I became evermore engaged with the technologies that were being established and which enabled us to support our teams at scale; and this shift led me to join LinkedIn to help establish its first ever Customer Success Team. I have had the pleasure to work with LinkedIn for the past eight years working in their London, Dublin and San Francisco locations and developing teams that eventually supported over US$2bn in revenue. Early this year, as I was looking for a new challenge, I was lucky enough to learn about the CCO opportunity at Degreed and since this business was high on my watch list. I was excited to find out more and have been blown away by the people, the product and the fantastic clients that we have the pleasure to serve.
Which market do you provide services for?
Degreed’s main audience is HR and learning leaders in large organisations (of over 10,000 employees). To a lesser extent, we also work with IT teams and other business leaders (and people managers) as stakeholders.
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge?
Every Degreed employee is provided with a flexible budget to spend on any kind of skill-building. We call it FlexED (flexible education) and we’ve had people spend it on everything from language lessons to coding, to leadership training and even an acrobatics class. We see every kind of upskilling and reskilling as valuable to Degreed, and everything is tracked through an online, learner-owned profile that follows someone through their career. This gives an accurate, up-to-date picture of someone’s current skills and can inform discussions with their managers about next steps and skills to work on to grow their career. It also informs the internal work opportunities that they are offered, which reinforces their new skills and gives them an incentive to learn.
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard?
I have been incredibly impressed by the collaborative and customer centric approach that the C-suite adopts here at Degreed. While in the role of Chief Customer Officer, one of my core functions is to advocate for our clients, I have to say that this is a shared key focus and responsibility of the whole team. In terms of making my voice heard, in my career I have always sought to add value first rather than speak up for the sake of doing so. In this vein I seek to listen, learn and drive the conversation forward through relevant insight, input and questions.
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together?
Effective collaboration is underpinned by clarity of purpose and open communication. We don’t want efforts to be duplicated, so everyone needs to be on the same page when it comes to owning a project, driving progress and who is completing what task. So, Degreed uses the DACI framework to ensure that every decision has a clear driver, approver, contributor and that everyone who needs to be informed is regularly kept in the loop. Similarly, we use the RACI model (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) for our projects. It’s even more essential that we are clear on who is doing what and who is responsible, as Degreed is a remote-first company with over 550 employees working in six continents and multiple time zones.