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换岗
帮助企业员工轻松换岗升职，Degreed获4200万美元C轮融资
编译：猎云网 福尔摩望
当一名员工希望在自己的职业生涯中取得进步时，所处公司可能会有严格的等级路径，需要其付出许多时间和精力才能取得心目中的目标。于是，许多人选择了跳槽；但是，也有员工想要在不离开的情况下有所尝试。
与其从代理升职到代理主管，或者遵循一些现有的晋升路径，不如考虑公司其他部门的机会。想要晋升或更换部门，要么可以参考每个部门可直接比较的技能组，要么可能需要一些技能补充，那么这就是Degreed所做的事情。
作为一家在线服务公司，Degreed会识别这些技能差距，并了解如何学习和跟踪。Degreed不希望将员工锁定在一个单一的轨道上，而是希望雇主给予工具，帮助员工更好地提高他们的技能。相对的，这对雇主来说也更有价值。
近日，Degreed宣布，它已经获得了4200万美元的融资，由Owl Ventures和Jump Capital共同领投，Founders Circle Capital和现有投资者参投。该服务在企业内部启动，识别出提供诸如项目管理等技能工作机会的内容，然后向员工展示如何开始学习这些技能。在此之后，它会确定出获得这些技能的最佳途径，并帮助员工了解他们的进展。
网站：https://degreed.com/
刚被任命为公司首席执行官的Chris McCarthy说道：“真正的挑战是，无论内容来源多么大或者多么复杂，无论是更高等的教育还是正规培训，它都会变得越来越小。如果你知道努力的方向，那么你就可以构建这些技能。随着内容的普及，无论对企业还是个人，所有这些平台都是学习的跳板而已。他们在完成这一方面上做得很好。在此之前，没有任何东西可以穿过这些学习障碍。”
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McCarthy说，虽然部分人可能担心，一旦雇主帮助员工学习新技能，员工们可能就会利用这一新技能去别处求职。但是，在与客户打交道的过程中，并没有发现此类的问题。这是因为，最终雇主们将在帮助员工成长和学习的过程中，发现员工的价值，并且提供与之相符的奖励和回馈。进而，员工也觉得从中有所收获，自然愿意留在公司。
当然，Degreed面临的一大挑战不仅在于需要识别出能衡量员工学习进度的“晴雨表”，还要评估其质量。例如，一个简单的线性代数的MIT视频课程，可能最终实现的结果会优于许多知名平台的课程。那么，如何明确这个“优于”的指标，就是个问题。
虽然，最初Degreed可以作为教育内容的中心点或聚集点，但所有这些信息都帮助它创建了一个强大的数据集，以进一步帮助员工找出他们需要学习的技能，甚至是他们没有意识到的需要学习的技能。当一名员工第一次使用这一服务时，他希望Degreed能够提供公司内部的信息以及员工所感兴趣的内容，以便立即了解他们想要学习的内容。
最终，这会形成一个反馈循环。像Degreed这样的工具已经习惯了员工想要学习的东西，并开始发现公司内部需要填补的技能空白。如果所有事情都按照你所预期的方式进行，那么公司层级结构的整体概念可能就不再存在了。而员工希望挖掘出他们想要的技能，并成为真正能够绘制出真实发展路径的人。
McCarthy表示：“如果没有参与，只是有数据是不够的。你可以拥有所有最佳模型和内容，但是如果人们没有使用产品，则无法精简出有用的数据。他们通过这些数据来做决定，可能看到的只是冰山一角。但是现在公司可以坐下来说，'这是水下的学习冰川’，它将所有事情整合在一起，放在一个地方，让人们可以看到，触摸到，并看到真正的路径。”
对员工培训领域感兴趣的企业肯定有很多，尤其是那些越来越渴望机器学习的大公司，就比如两年前融资4000万美元的Grovo。然而，虽然每个平台都想杀出重围，但是，想要让企业用户们心甘情愿地买单，承认该平台的数据最好（或者最多）却并不简单。当然，这也是McCarthy希望Degreed能给100万注册用户提供的东西。
原文：
Degreed gets $42M to help build a tool to help employees learn the right skills
When an employee is looking to advance in their career, where they work might have a kind of strict hierarchical path for the role they're in and what titles come next — but there's a good chance that employee might want to try something new without leaving their company.
Instead of going from just an agent to a manager of agents, or following some existing promotion line, a company that's large enough probably has plenty of other opportunities within it across many different divisions — each with either a directly-comparable skillset, or one that might need some slight additions. That's where Degreed, an online service for identifying those skill gaps and how to pick them up, as well as track them, comes. Instead of locking employees into a single trajectory, Degreed hopes to give employers tools to help employees improve their skills even more, and in the end become much more valuable to the employer. Degreed today said it has raised $42 million in a venture financing round co-led by Owl Ventures and Jump Capital, with Founders Circle Capital and existing investors participating.
The service launches inside an organization, identifies the content that offers an opportunity to work on skills like project management (often made by the company itself), and then shows employees how to start working on those skills. And those skill gaps between roles might actually be much smaller than those employees think, and it's just a matter of identifying what they need to work on in order to grow within their company. After that, it identifies the best ways to get those skills, which can come in the form of content or potentially other avenues, and helps employees figure out how far along their progression path they are.
"The real challenge is that no matter how big or sophisticated any one content source is, whether it's higher education and formal training, that’s increasingly a smaller slice of the pie," Chris McCarthy, who was named CEO of the company today, said. "If you know where to look, you can build any skill. As content proliferates — for enterprises and for individuals — all these platforms are islands of learning. They do a good job of getting through that experience. Nothing prior to that is weaving through those islands of learning."
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McCarthy said even though the employers are helping their employees learn new skills, which might even help them get jobs elsewhere, they aren't having an issues signing up potential clients. That's because in the end, employers are going to see more value in helping those employees grow and learn new skills, and that might provide its own feedback loop where employees feel like they are getting the most from their company and want to stick around.
Of course, one of the big challenges for Degreed is not only identifying content that can serve as a barometer for learning a new skill, but also gauging its quality. For example, an online MIT course on Linear Algebra — just a series of videos and problem sets — could potentially end up superior to the other online course next to it on some well-known online course service.
While Degreed may have initially served as a kind of hub or aggregation point for educational content initially — or at least, that's what people thought it was, McCarthy said — all that information coming in has helped it create a robust data set that it can use going forward to further help employees figure out what skills they need to learn, or even skills they didn't realize they want to learn. When an employee comes in the door for the first time, the hope is that Degreed will have enough information for what's inside the company and what the employee is interested in to gauge right away what they might want to learn.
That, in the end, provides a neat feedback loop. A tool like Degreed gets used to what employees want to learn, and starts to spot skills gaps inside a company that need to be filled. If all that plays out the way you might expect, then the whole notion of a hierarchy in a company might be a thing that might not exist for much longer — and employees, who are hopefully digging up the skills they want and would be good at, are the ones that chart out the real progression path inside a company as it tries to achieve its goals.
"Without engagement, just having data is insufficient," McCarthy said. "The data you need only comes from engagement on a platform. You can have all the best models and content, but if people aren’t using the product, you can’t reduce the data that’s helpful. They’re making these decisions looking at the data, and they might see the tip of the iceberg on the surface of the water. But now companies can sit back and say, 'here’s this glacier of learning under the water.' It’s a combination of putting a place in the individual where a person can touch it and see it and see a real pathway."
There is definitely a lot of interest in the employee learning space, especially as it makes sense for larger companies who are increasingly aching for niche talent like machine learning are looking to find the best people — who might even be at their own company. Grovo, for example, raised $40 million about two years ago. But as is the case with any platform looking to win, it's going to be a race to get the best (and most) data to convince employers that they can quickly and efficiently identify the the best people to learn a skill, something McCarthy hopes Degreed has with a million licensed users.
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