Elevating Growth with Degreed’s Badging & Credentialing
TEKsystems partnered with Degreed to create "Level Up," a comprehensive badging and credentialing program that promotes employee development and career transparency. The initiative enabled TEKsystems to boost recruiter productivity, reduce onboarding time by four weeks, and significantly improve revenue generation.
Summary
TEKsystems Builds Expertise as Degreed Powers Badging & Credentialing
TEKsystems, an Allegis Group company, delivers IT services and staffing solutions worldwide, serving 80% of Fortune 500 companies. Employees wanted clarity on role expectations and accountabilities, a clear path forward for promotion and growth opportunities and more coaching and more coaching on how to be successful. Learning leaders sought to boost transparency of opportunity, elevate role specialization, reward accomplishments and visually represent what people learn. L&D created Level Up, a program designed to define career paths and award employees with digital badges that recognize their professional development. The company used Degreed to tie it all together.
COMPANY SNAPSHOT
Industry:
IT Staffing and Services
Headquarters:
Hanover, Maryland
Company Size:
9,700
The solution
Badging & Credentialing
To reinforce and advance continuous learning at TEKsystems, L&D created Level Up, a program designed to define career paths and award employees with digital badges that recognize their professional development. The idea was to “learn, earn and share” — and for the Degreed open technology ecosystem to tie it all together.
To ensure the program is valuable and effective, the learning team methodically aligned the program’s framework to other key facets of an evolving L&D structure. Specifically, the team created dozens of foundational “success profiles” and aligned them to role plans shared with employees in Degreed. These success profiles describe jobs at the company role by role, outlining the competencies, communicating expectations for behaviors and mapping the skills needed for success in each position — all the while reflecting TEKsystems business objectives as well as industry norms. Importantly, the profiles also established baselines learning leaders can use to evaluate L&D programs and custom tailor learning.
“We have a lot of great initiatives, and we wanted everything to connect,” Leonard said. “We use the success profile as a starting point to look at how we develop these badges. When we ask people to learn things or do things, we want it to always go back to that success profile for the role.”
In addition, “we evaluated our current learning and mapped it to the skills we’d identified,” Leonard said. “If something was missing, we needed to create it. So, we developed new, relevant learning as well for the badging program. Then we created a credentialing framework and included badges that validate skills and competencies for each specific role.”
The program rooted in the Knowledge, Skills and Ability (KSA) job qualification framework employs Credly, a leading digital credentialing solution that’s closely partnered with Degreed and integrates into the Degreed platform. Learning leaders have focused first on two employee populations critical to the TEKsystems business — its recruiters and salespeople — who comprise 80% of the company’s workforce.
Participants can earn a mix of three types of badges — Knowledge, Milestone and Experience. In combination, these lead to a Role badge.
Knowledge badges, supported by learning in Degreed, focus on completions and comprehension. Earning this badge is similar to completing a Pathway, and participants are evaluated by CredSpark, an assessment tool and another Degreed partner strategically integrated into the Degreed platform.
Milestone badges focus on achievements like tenure, and performance and recognition like contest wins. Experience badges validate knowledge, skills and ability applied in real-world situations. (These are oftentimes confirmed via real-world observation.) Role badges validate the full range of knowledge, skills and achievements expected for a position by the company and industry. (And in certain cases, an additional Specialist badge recognizes niche skills relevant to a specific strategy or initiative.)
“We have a lot of great initiatives, and we wanted everything to connect,” Leonard said. “We use the success profile as a starting point to look at how we develop these badges. When we ask people to learn things or do things, we want it to always go back to that success profile for the role.”
RESULTS
Leveling Up Made Easy
Skills Validated & Opportunity Democratized
Earning badges at TEKsystems helps propel an employee’s journey to specialization and expertise while verifying their skills and achievements along the way. For example, in addition to learning about recruiting in general, recruiters are developing knowledge on topics like HTML or C# coding and absorbing marketplace intel relevant to the technical jobs they recruit people for. Obtaining a Role badge celebrates newly-gained, broad expertise, signifying deep understanding of TEKsystems business needs as well as industry standards (factors baked into the company’s badging strategy).
“Everything’s consistent. It’s accurately leveled. And skills are essentially building blocks,” Kuehn said. “We now have transparency of opportunity. Before, historically, it was like, ‘I’m going to tap the next best person in my office who I think is suited for the role.’”
Badging helps TEKsystems plan and deliver. Leaders are now empowered with objective knowledge about who’s qualified for the next role or meeting performance expectations to help grow the organization (or in the case of a Specialist badge, serve as a coach or mentor).
In addition, earning badges sets TEKsystems employees apart from their counterparts at other organizations, Leonard said. “The badges have weight. We’re not just badging everything… We’re badging items of worth, value and substance to a consultant or a customer who sits outside the four walls of TEKsystems. So, it’s really a differentiator for our participants, who can easily share their credentials on LinkedIn or other social channels and via email. When someone external views those badges, they’re able to learn more about our people’s expertise and verify authenticity.
“We’ve had consultants proactively reaching out to our recruiters who were sharing those badges, saying, ‘Hey, our contract’s going to end. I would love to re-engage.’”
Employee Brandon Emanuelson, a Specialized Recruiter Lead for National Data Analytics & Insights, said the badges spark new conversations with consultants. “From current consultants in my network commenting on badges to a new consultant mentioning they noticed the badges on our first call, the badging program has had an immediate positive impact.”
People participating in Level Up Badging and Credentialing at TEKsystems never have to leave Degreed. Whether they’re completing a course, taking an assessment or being recognized, it’s all intuitively accessible right in the Degreed user interface. This elegantly designed ecosystem has multiplied the overall influence and effectiveness of
the company’s already robust Degreed implementation. More than a front door to learning, Degreed is now a powerful upskilling motivator.
The transparency inherent in the Level Up program provides the recruiter and seller populations at TEKsystems with a clear understanding — from onboarding onward — of specific career paths and exactly what it takes to fully succeed from Day One in a current or next-level future role.
“We’ve had consultants proactively reaching out to our recruiters who were sharing those badges, saying, ‘Hey, our contract’s going to end. I would love to re-engage.’” - Allison Leonard, Senior Learning Strategist
Looking Ahead
Learning leaders are excited to more fully measure the success of Level Up as it matures. In particular, they plan
to look at badge completions, continued improvements in new hire time-to-productivity, retention and attrition, and promotions including those into leadership roles and higher level sales and recruiter roles. And they’re hoping to boost the company’s already excellent net promoter score (NPS) of 60.
The company is looking to double the rate at which its recruiters rehire consultants. In addition, leaders plan to offer badges to employees who book meetings with director-level contacts or above, Kuehn said. “If people hit those benchmarks, we’d assume it will yield results in winning deals.”
To boost the appeal of Level Up even more, the learning team anticipates incorporating Degreed Experiential Learning into the workforce learning experience in the future. Using this product, people will be able to match their skills and credentials to open, on-the-job stretch assignments, projects, mentorships, internal gigs and other growth opportunities, not just new roles and promotions.
Learning leaders envision eventually expanding Level UP to everyone at TEKsystems. They expect it to positively impact the company’s brand, Leonard said. “The long-term goal is to market this.”
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