From Career Connection to Collaborative Knowledge: How Cisco Built a New Breed of Knowledge, Learning, and Productivity …

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described the circumstances that led to the creation and roll out of the Career Connection pilot and the formation of the Cisco Collaborative Knowledge digital workplace platform. Now I want to share more about the evolution of how all of this transpired.

Career Connection, as you may recall, is a learning platform for Cisco Service employees. It was developed after months of employee engagement, user testing, surveys, interviews, and executive input. The Career Connection platform offered employees a new way to collaborate and learn:

• The Learning Plan provided an overview of learning opportunities scheduled by the employee and their manager, as well as an overview of progress toward learning goals.
• Community offered social learning opportunities among employees and experts.
• The Training Catalog offered a single portal through which employees could access training courses to support reskilling and upskilling.
• Career Universe presented Career Playbooks, organized by job category or job family. These playbooks were created by management teams to provide employees with tracks they could follow to meet requirements for jobs they wanted to attain.

These technologies represented key foundational capabilities — knowledge sharing, formal and social learning – critical to the creation of Cisco Collaborative Knowledge. The proof-of-concept pilot for Career Connection went live in 2014, and it proved to be a breakthrough for Cisco Services, which until that time, relied heavily on formal learning programs. Once employees took to the solution, employees and managers benefited in a myriad of ways.

Career Connection as a learning and knowledge sharing solution, surpassed expectations for reskilling and up-skilling the workforce. Employees embraced the technology, too. Here’s how they responded:

• 89 percent agreed or strongly agreed that learning from leaders via blogs about strategic direction and career development was important to how they create their own development path.
• 76 percent agreed or strongly agreed that being able to share information through discussion forums was important to their professional development.
• 82 percent agreed or strongly agreed that visibility into information for all jobs (Career Universe) helped them plan their career goals.
• 79 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the intent and mission of the platform. Moreover, employees felt engaged on important business topics and empowered to share professional knowledge.

With such positive feedback to Career Connection, Learning@Cisco executives began asking: Could Cisco customers benefit from a similar platform to transform their own companies? To determine if there was an unmet need in the marketplace, Learning@Cisco connected with hundreds of customers to discuss their challenges and potential learning opportunities.

Armed with customer feedback, and the proof-of-concept pilot validated by more than 14,000 Cisco Services employees, Career Connection evolved from an internal learning offering into a fully integrated, cloud-based knowledge and learning digital workplace solution appropriately named Cisco Collaborative Knowledge.

To learn more about Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, visit our the Cisco Collaborative Knowledge site.

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