Who are Degreed? Vendor Profile

Degreed is one of the better-known names in learning experience and workforce skills technology, and its shift from a learning content aggregator to what it now positions as an AI-powered system for workforce transformation is worth understanding beyond vendor marketing alone. Viewpoint Analysis is a Technology Matchmaker, helping businesses to quickly find and select new enterprise technology. Our aim is to be the place enterprise buyers go to understand the software and technology market before speaking to vendors. Read on to learn more about Degreed.

Who Are Degreed?

Degreed was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with additional offices in Salt Lake City, New York, London, Amsterdam and Brisbane. The business is led today by David Blake as Chief Executive Officer.

The company has raised close to $ 437 million in funding over its lifetime and, in January 2025, announced it had reached profitability, a notable milestone given that funding history. That announcement came alongside the appointment of Erik Lossbroek, a twenty-year SAP revenue leader, as Chief Revenue Officer, part of a wider rebuild of the executive team around an AI-led product strategy that continued through 2026 with the appointment of Elizabeth Tan Levy as Chief Product Officer.

Degreed describes itself today as an AI-powered system for enterprise workforce transformation, a considerably broader positioning than the learning experience platform category it originally helped establish, and one that reflects how much of its recent product investment has shifted toward AI-driven skills intelligence and coaching. That shift has also brought a change in who the platform is sold to, with conversations increasingly involving heads of talent and workforce strategy alongside the traditional learning and development buyer.

What Does Degreed Do?

Degreed's platform connects everything an employee learns, whether that is a course, an article, a podcast, a mentoring conversation, or on-the-job experience, to the skills a business actually needs. Rather than replacing an organization's existing learning management system, it is typically positioned alongside one, aggregating and curating content from millions of external sources and internal systems into a single, personalized learning experience. This sits within the wider HR Technology market, spanning learning, skills and internal mobility.

Underneath that content layer sits Degreed's skills intelligence capability, branded Skills+, which gives an organisation visibility into the skills it actually has across its workforce and the skills it needs for the work ahead. This is where Degreed has invested most heavily in recent years, and where its positioning has shifted furthest from its original content aggregation roots.

Maestro, Degreed's AI coach, moved into full production use during 2024 and has been expanded considerably since. At its LENS 2026 conference the company introduced Solution Accelerators, pre built programmes running on Maestro that package assessment, content and guided practice around a specific business outcome rather than leaving a customer to configure everything from scratch. The first two cover leadership transformation and AI fluency, with more planned.

Degreed has framed this investment around what it calls a human readiness gap, citing McKinsey research that 92 percent of companies plan to invest more in AI while only 1 percent consider themselves mature in adopting it, and arguing that most workforce AI programmes stall on behaviour change rather than on the technology itself. A Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Degreed found a potential return on investment of 312 percent over three years on the core learning platform. As a vendor-commissioned study, that figure is best treated as an indication of potential impact rather than a guaranteed outcome, and any prospective buyer should ask Degreed for the underlying methodology.

In practice, most organizations run Degreed alongside rather than instead of an existing learning management system, using it as the layer that pulls content from that system, from external providers, and from informal sources together into one place. The platform's value therefore depends heavily on how much content an organisation already has spread across different systems, and how much appetite there is to give employees a genuinely open choice of what and how they learn, rather than a fixed curriculum assigned from above.

Degreed Technology Areas

Degreed's platform spans several distinct product areas, each addressing a different part of the learning and skills challenge.

Learning Experience: aggregates and curates learning content from millions of external sources and internal systems into a single, personalised pathway for each employee.

Career Mobility: connects an individual's skills profile to internal job and project opportunities, supporting internal moves rather than external hiring.

Skills+: the skills intelligence layer, giving organisations visibility into the skills they have and the skills they need across the workforce.

Maestro: an AI coach supporting coaching, scenario practice and personalised development, now extended through packaged Solution Accelerators for leadership transformation and AI fluency.

New Tenant Workspaces: enterprise infrastructure introduced in 2026 that lets large organisations segment users by team, region or business unit while keeping centralised governance.

Degreed Alternatives

Degreed competes for the skills led learning budget against several other established platforms, and the right choice depends heavily on whether an organisation's priority is skills intelligence, collaborative content creation or native integration with an existing HR system. The competitive set here has matured considerably, and few buyers now choose on learning content volume alone, since most established platforms can now claim access to a broad library of third party content.

Learn more about this sector and the key players in our Learning Management Software Options report.

•      Cornerstone OnDemand: combines learning management with a much broader talent suite covering performance, recruiting and core HR processes. It suits organisations that want learning managed inside one HR and talent platform rather than a dedicated layer sitting alongside their existing systems, and it remains one of the largest installed bases in the category.

•      Docebo: has built a strong reputation for AI assisted content curation and a cleaner, more modern learning experience than many legacy platforms. It is frequently shortlisted by mid market organisations that find Degreed's broader skills and AI ambitions more than they currently need, particularly where the requirement is closer to straightforward course delivery.

•      360Learning: differentiates through collaborative, peer created learning content rather than aggregating from external providers. It appeals to organisations that want to capture and scale internal expertise directly rather than license third party content, and is often considered by businesses growing quickly and needing to onboard people at pace.

•      SAP SuccessFactors Learning: the natural default for organisations already committed to SAP as their HCM backbone. It trades some of Degreed's skills intelligence depth for native integration with the rest of an SAP HR estate, which for some buyers outweighs the benefit of a more specialised standalone platform.

If you are exploring the learning and skills technology market and want to understand who else you should be considering alongside Degreed, the Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder is a good place to start. Answer a few questions about your requirements and we will come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth considering for your shortlist.

If you are at the stage of running a formal selection process, the Enterprise Software Selection Playbook covers how to review the market and run a professional evaluation to find the right option for your organisation's needs.

Degreed Customer Examples

Degreed publishes a number of customer case studies directly on its own website, several with independently reported outcomes attached. The four examples below are drawn from that published case study library and give a sense of the range of organisations using the platform, from large technology and financial services businesses through to industrial manufacturers, spanning both mature learning cultures and organisations earlier in that process.

Cisco: used Degreed to build a skills first, centralised learning strategy across the business, tying continuous learning directly to business objectives and reporting higher employee engagement as a result. The move away from a more traditional, department led approach to learning was a significant part of that shift.

Cognizant: used Degreed to support rapid, scalable upskilling across roughly 250,000 employees, illustrating the platform's capacity at very large enterprise scale. Consistency of the learning experience across such a large and geographically distributed workforce was a core requirement.

Mastercard: used Degreed to build what the company describes as a genuine learning culture, embedding continuous development into everyday ways of working across its global workforce rather than treating learning as a separate, occasional activity.

Tenaris: the global steel pipe manufacturer, reports having doubled learning engagement and achieved a return on investment of 119 percent after modernising its global training approach with Degreed, replacing a more fragmented, regionally managed training setup.

Suggested Next Steps

•      Further reading. If you want to understand the wider learning and skills technology market before going further with any individual vendor, the Viewpoint Analysis HR Technology page covers the market in detail, including the different categories, key vendors and what to look for when evaluating your options.

•      Build your initial longlist. Not sure who else you should be considering alongside Degreed? The Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder asks you a few questions about your organisation and requirements, and we come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth putting on your list. It is a straightforward way to make sure you are not missing a strong option before you start shortlisting.

•      Have your selected vendors come and pitch to you. Take a look at our Technology Matchmaker, where we will bring the leading technology vendors to pitch their ideas to you. It is a super quick way to learn what is on the market before shortlisting them.

•      Run a quick selection process. If you are ready to move to a formal evaluation, the Viewpoint Analysis 30-Day Technology Selection service takes you from a standing start to a preferred vendor decision in a single month. It combines the best of our Rapid RFI and Rapid RFP processes, and we run the whole thing for you, writing the brief, managing vendor engagement, and guiding your team to a scored, defensible decision.

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