Skillsoft Leadership Development Program vs. Udacity

They have a large library - make sure you clearly study the library offerings and choose the courses that are best for you as you will never be able to use all of them. Make sure you survey your user base before purchasing the licensing of the library courses so the courses are 'marked' with an employee in mind to keep costs minimized. Only purchase the Books 24x7 if you have a large IT department - otherwise you might want to lease a smaller content portion. Their Leadership Development, Project Management, business series and critical thinking and technical products are exceptional.

Incentivized

It's suited well to support on developing a project and following a set curriculum to get things and material in order. Also it has the idea of a nano-degree as the mini-certification to focus on working through a program over a course of a few months. It's more of an interactive course and best for having access for a set period of time. It helps to prepare well for exams but less beneficial when it comes to more applications I find, and should not be used to supplant any resource, but to use in conjunction with.

Incentivized

• Covers a wide-breadth of topics ranging from desktop / office skills to communications skills to leadership development
• Offers knowledge portals (Knowledge Centers) around specific topic areas such as Management Development, Six Sigma, Professional Foundations, Sales, etc - that aggregate content from the large Skillsoft resources and present it in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to the learners. Plus, they have editors update the featured topic each month.
• Include a wide variety of learning media such as eLearning courses, books, book summaries and videos.

Incentivized

• Courses are very high quality and updated regularly.
• Instructors and Mentors are available for live tutoring.
• Relevant projects are assigned in order to keep learning material fresh and top of mind.

Incentivized

• The platform does have room to improve their response time for assistance. Depending on the issue an internal "help team may be required"
• They removed what was called "knowledge centers" which could be summed up as an accumulation of books, courses, exams, practice exams, articles and basically any asset within the platform surrounded by a particular subject. This was a great benefit to some of our customer. It was a one-stop-shop but now you would need to search independently for all of those assets.
• Because the platforms library can be customized its a bit of a struggle to have certain assets changed or modified within Skillsoft. You basically are on their time when it comes to updates or any major changes you as a customer would like to make.

Incentivized

• Slack channels were a little disorganized.
• The prices are a little bit higher compared to other platforms.
• Some courses and tooling for the projects were outdated.

Incentivized

I would recommend to renew as this is part of our employee development goals and we make a strong commitment to develop employees' people skills. I think SkillSoft has a very innovative approach to develop people's interpersonal skills other than traditional classroom learning.

Incentivized

The integration between the main Skillsoft portal and Books24x7 could use improvement. Most users don't realize there is actually a separate books portal because the link to it is not that visible. Yet, once they discover it, they realize that the books portal is actually easier to use to search for books, ebook summaries, and videos.

Incentivized

For the most part, site usability is great. I would say the only shortcoming from my end was when I needed support. Support responses were typically very slow, the few times I needed it.

Incentivized

Very responsive, knowledge and helpful. They are always focused on ensuring they are doing the very best to support our success.

Incentivized

I didn't personally have any issues with the program, but scheduling time to review the final project was easy, and the assistant was pleasant to work with.

Incentivized

Just that it takes a village. It cannot be done alone. Everyone needs to know what you are doing and what their role is in the implementation. Tightly managing the project management schedule and resources is important in ensuring that everything gets done on time, and with quality. Education is KEY

Incentivized

We chose SkillSoft for the overall ease of use for both our users and our administrators and have a great value proposition. We have continued our contracts for the same reasons and the relationship we have built with our Learning Consultant and Account Representative.

Incentivized

I combined my learning from various platforms and did on exclusively reply on any one. However, the free courses in Udacity lacks the comprehensiveness as Coursera.

Incentivized

• The ability to have on-demand training saves money in not having to have an in-house trainer.
• Employees can complete training on their own time (even at home), so if they need more time for a training, they can complete it on their own time.

Incentivized

• I am already in a great position as a CTO with a great company. I hope to be able to build some new technology with what I am learning, but I haven't applied any of it yet to my own real-world problems. I will though.

Incentivized