Frontline Professional Growth vs. Skilljar by Gainsight

This is perfect for the district looking to convert older physical forms to digital copies, and mitigate the tracking of forms from desk to desk. Frontline will do it all digitally. Those in the approval process can approve or deny, or even ask for more information, which sends the form back to the user who submitted it. This is also good for those looking for a way to manage professional development in their district and all that comes with it, including tracking workshops, awarding hours, etc. Most districts use Frontline programs somewhere, so this is another piece to that. However, this is cost-heavy.

Incentivized

Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're
looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your
customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform
is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users
through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their
learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on.
Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable
resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats.
It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring
engagement.

For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive
learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it
supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations
might require additional specialized software or platforms.

Incentivized

• Frontline Professional Growth is set up to organize and document all aspects of a teacher's evaluation. Artifacts are archived and can be used in multiple areas.
• SGOs, observations, PDPs, and documentation logs can all be shared between the staff member and the administration.
• The forms are easy to fill out, can be saved as drafts in progress, and can be referred to from year to year.
• The Professional Development Workshop section offers a calendar of workshops in catalog format as well as calendar format.
• As a workshop presenter, enrollment tools are easy to use and offer multiple ways to access your roster.
• As a workshop participant, workshops are listed as in progress and completed. Hours are tabulated and saved each year.

Incentivized

• Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
• Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
• Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
• Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
• Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site

Incentivized

• Confusing sign-on processes.
• AESOP (absence management) is not integrated with Professional Growth as advertised.

Incentivized

• Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
• Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
• Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.

Incentivized

I like what you are using and how we are doing it. Also, changing systems is a lot of work

Incentivized

The learning curve for Skilljar is not too steep, and I've renewed our contract twice now. I've been able to add additional administrators and get them up to speed on platform functionality within a day. Plus, Skilljar provides awesome resources to help you learn how to use is. The Help Center has articles for almost everything, and when in doubt, their amazing CSMs (like ours, ...) provide exemplary support/advice.

Overall, Frontline Professional Growth manages observations, SGOs, documentation logs, and Professional Development Plans. In addition to these evaluation pieces, it allows our district to manage our Professional Development Workshops (in-house), Professional Development requests (for out-of-district), and many online request forms. The only real negative is that some of the menus are a bit cumbersome, and it takes several steps to get around the system.

Incentivized

I have opened several support cases in the past and at times felt like little was being done to resolve the issues I was having. For example, when searching the use against a training credit, Skilljar said the code was fully used, yet only 1 had been used. The support team seemed to not have interest in learning why this was happening and ensuring it does not happen again. The issue was resolved with this particular case, but I have no idea if it was the only training credit having this issue. At times I feel like the issues we encounter do not seem as important to the support team

Incentivized

Do a good job of preparing your internal teams (IT, Salesforce, etc.) about the work they will have in the process

Incentivized

I have only used this and GCN trainings. I think it helps having more choices that hold value to your work day.

Incentivized

Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive

Incentivized

• We have used a lot less paper over the past few years which leads to cost savings.
• The time it takes to submit a form and get approval has sped up since this is all digital.
• The time it takes to track and award professional development hours has sped up.

Incentivized

• Our customers seem to be getting onboarded efficiently. Giving our customers a good experience helps us retain them longer.
• So far, we are still not able to come up with solid metrics that it provides evidence of ROI. If Skilljar could somehow come up with clear, actionable metrics about customer success and how that relates to ROI then I think it would be vastly better. To be fair, we roll the cost of using Skilljar in the overall price, otherwise, we would charge customers and have a revenue stream to measure.

Incentivized