Weekly dose of HR Tech Simplified #1
Launching HR Tech Simplified (HRTS) to simplify the complexities in HR Tech and make sure everyone understands the latest and greatest in HR Tech.
Capability Academies: Personalized, cohort-based, interactive e-learning platforms
Lack of relevant skills is a huge challenge for majority of organizations. While organizations have been offering plenty of online trainings to employees, most of these have proven ineffective for skill development. The key problem with them is limited relevance to business challenge at hand, lack of learner engagement, and low (3-6%) completion rates.
A new model of learning delivery has emerged to solve these challenges related with self-directed learning and provide mastery driven content to employees. Josh Bersin has coined the phrase “Capability Academy” to categorize these ‘Mastery-based learning platforms’.
A capability academy can take many forms, such as GrowthSpace, which offers coaching and mentoring sessions with experts, or creation of courses using collaborative learning as in 360Learning. Another example is CoRise, which offers cohort-based learning with pre-defined sessions. Most of the vendors in this space claim an NPS of 70 and 80%+ completion rates; however experiencing their platforms in action raises following concerns:
Many vendors offer pre-developed content through external experts. This questions their claim of baking in business relevance in the training.
High completion rates might be a result of colleagues taking expensive courses in cohorts as opposed to outcome orientation as highlighted by these vendors.
Manager and employee feedback are used as KPIs to measure the effectiveness of such programs which might not be objective.
Workday’s Super Bowl appearance and recent layoffs
Workday, an enterprise software company, is running its first-ever ad at the Big Game on Sunday, February 12. With this add, it will become one of the few enterprise software companies to advertise on the biggest advertising stage. It will be interesting to see how Workday’s ad fares vis-à-vis some of the famous ads by tech companies including Coinbase’s clever QR code ad which temporarily knocked out its app during the broadcast.
Workday has a clever concept that it hopes will make people more aware of the software it licenses to corporations that helps manage finances and human resources. In a minute-long spot slated to air during the third-quarter, Joan Jett, Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Clark Jr. will be among the colorful musicians touting its wares.
In another news, Workday is laying off 525 people, majorly from its product and technology teams.
According to Workday’s Co-CEOs, “These moves are not the result of over-hiring and in fact, we plan to increase the size of our global workforce in FY24. Based on what we know today, we have no plans to take similar actions of this size in the foreseeable future.”
Fundraising news
Cleary, the digital employee experience platform for distributed teams, has closed a $4.5 million seed funding round led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from Liberty City Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Seachange Fund, and Quiet Capital, among others. This seed round follows an initial capital raise of $3 million as part of Cleary’s pre-seed fundraise.
While employee experience platform sounds a bit fancy, these platforms generally have integrations through APIs with different tools that employee uses on a daily basis and they provide access to all these tools in one place. Big players including ServiceNow, Microsoft Viva, Applaud and others are defining this space for now.
UK-based Gigged.AI announced a $1.95 million Seed Round led by Par Equity, bringing its total raised to $2.93 million. You can see their CEO’s interview here to understand why they have raised this round.