Degreed Reviews

-Poor leadership/management culture: it's a touchy-feely, mission-driven org but that doesn't mean that the leadership knows how to organize, engage, and execute on strategy and promises. For example: it's uncomfortable when the CEO starts crying on the company-wide call because anonymous employees point out there is a lack of diversity and promotion of women specifically across the organization and they want leadership to address it. In this instance, it seemed like the CEO should have consulted with his team and prepared to address the issue beforehand, instead of reading & responding emotionally in real-time. It came off as both unproductive and unprofessional and is not an example of leading in a way that inspires confidence. -Unprofessional: Yes, it's an agile start-up but at some point to become scale-able and take advantage of the work, learning, and efforts across the team, some level of training and process are needed to empower employees with information--especially when the majority of the team is remote (no face-to-face contact, different timezones, etc). Additionally, with blue-chip & Fortune 500 clients under contract with an expectation to adopt new features the sheer lack of visibility to product changes, roadmap, and timing (or responses to existing issues) contributes to an extremely inconsistent level of client service. Some of that is a normal part of start-up life, launching a new product (especially software) but much of that is poor transparency/training/and access to information about the changes forthcoming. I think it will get better (it has to!) but the current leadership has not shown that they are open to working across the company team to make that happen. -Politics: One of the reasons I initially joined Degreed was in hopes of spending less time on company politics and more time delving into the work of making things happen. I found that most employees--including some of the leadership--were all about this as well, however there are some head-cases that really liked to emphasize "levels" within the organization and didn't hesitate to openly use trump cards in a public forum to shut down lower-level employees. I agree with another reviewer here that there were definitely inner circle "boys club" moments. That wasn't as big of a deal to me, but I did take issue with the shutting down of individual contributors within the organization in front of coworkers who weren't in that circle and saw this repeated behavior from leaders and managers. Again, no people or companies are perfect but this behavior did not foster the kind of "design thinking" and collaborative environment that Degreed likes to share as its foundational story. I both experienced and observed this multiple times, which was a big part of my reason for no longer wanting to work with the company.

Toxic culture- This company was still making employees travel for "optional" work retreats throughout most of 2021, except for one major issue: it wasn't truly optional. Not attending in-person meetings and off-site gatherings are detrimental to your career at Degreed. Management believes these meetings assess who is serious about the company and who is not. The sad truth is after these meetings, people contracted Covid-19 and thus they finally stopped in Q4 of 2021. The fact that this company was so brazen as to continue in-person meetings during a pandemic with multiple variants says a lot about how much they care about employees. No long-term or short-term strategy for future- Over the last 15 months, many top executives who had been with Degreed for years have left this company. That tells you a lot about what these "insiders" thought about the future of the company. Degreed is overpriced, adds little value other than aggregation of learning content (anyone can do that) and the company has missed its window in the marketplace to really make an impact. Larger competitors like Workday and Microsoft can come in and squash Degreed like a bug and they have in the past year. Degreed is a long way from success and the ride is VERY rocky. I don't believe they can pivot and sadly, I think they have exhausted their ability to make the company a success. It will be downhill from here. Lack of true learning experts across the business units- It is pretty shocking that the company that attempts to help others learn does not have true learning experts within the company itself. Degreed, as of Q4 2021, has exactly zero PhD's or practicing learning experts employed. Most of the people running the company don't have any background in research or true expertise on how to help people learn. There are a lot of unqualified, non-experts people at Degreed pretending to be experts which gains you very little credibility with buyers and executives. Extremely high turnover among salespeople and "leadership"- On paper, yes, you can make a good amount of money if you sell the SaaS product that Degreed offers. In reality, more than 50% of the sales team will miss quota each quarter and subsequently each year. There are multiple reasons for this, A) it's a very long sales cycle, 12-30 months B) the product is overpriced compared to the market and compared to the fact that an HRIS company like Workday can provide Workday Learn for free c) Leadership has no idea how to position, market and sell this product. What this means is that every salesperson is on their own, just hoping that someone will avoid asking the right questions during discovery. A lot of the sales leaders at the company were just selling the product themselves last year or the year before -- many of them couldn't get promoted at LinkedIn or were fired from other SaaS companies and they ended up at Degreed. Sales leaders are completely unequipped to be in their positions and don't have the skills to do their job effectively. CEO is out of touch with reality- We all know that SaaS start-ups and emerging SaaS companies need a great CEO to act as a north star for the company. The current CEO has no idea what he is doing. He is so out of touch with reality that on company-wide Town Halls and monthly team calls he starts out by talking about the "logging equipment" he had to "truck-in" to clear his oversized property in California of trees. I'm not sure if he thinks he can impress his employees, is trying to "humble-brag" or thinks it is acceptable to talk openly about a multi-million dollar property that he lives on while the rest of his employees work 50-60 hours a week to make him rich. It adds no value to the team calls-- and I share this story because I think it sheds light on what type of person he is and his mindset. Out of touch, completely. He also set forth the culture of meeting in person and off site gatherings during a pandemic. Not a very bright person. Lastly, DO NOT fall for the benefits package. The unlimited PTO only means that they are hoping you take very little PTO and if you do you will be considered someone who is not serious about success. I have witnessed this play out, first hand.