How Insights from Customers Fueled Innovation at Udemy for Business in 2019

As we sharpen our focus for 2020, we reflect back on the product investments we’ve made in 2019 to help our customers drive deeper, more meaningful learning within their organization. While helping employees do whatever comes next is foundational to shaping our product roadmap, customer feedback is a powerful driver of the enhancements we make and the features we build. We’re excited to share how we’ve incorporated these valuable inputs in our product development to help global organizations successfully upskill their workforce.

Driving more purposeful learning 

We have resounding feedback from customers that the most effective learning often happens when it’s recommended by a colleague, team lead, or an SME within their organization. Research from a recent study by Degreed and Harvard Business Corporate Learning found that employees are constantly seeking information in the flow of work. 

To bring together a powerful learning experience that harnesses the collective knowledge of an organization and leverage resources beyond Udemy for Business courses, we created Learning Paths. Anyone at a company can create a learning path to share and socialize learning by combining resources in one place: fresh, high-quality Udemy for Business courses and lectures, internal links like Wiki articles or shared docs, external links such as podcasts or articles, and custom courses for easy access. 

This is an effective way to help customers streamline onboarding, build custom career growth paths, or upskill for a new project that requires a new set of skills. We are continually optimizing our Learning Paths feature to make it more robust so that companies can achieve learning outcomes even faster and more efficiently.

Reaching learning goals faster

Managers, L&D professionals, or those that drive learning at an organization wanted the ability to easily assign relevant content to learners. By listening to this feedback, we made enhancements to our course assignment. With features like due dates to drive completion and engagement, more tools to track progress, and notifications to ensure learners stay on track, our goal was to provide learning professionals with simple but robust functionality to drive learning. Both courses and learning paths can be assigned for a more guided learning experience.

More forms of content, more engagement

Our Udemy learning data shows that shorter forms of content tend to lead to increased learning engagement. Knowing that employees have limited time to learn, we wanted to maximize their time and increase the impact of learning. That’s why we introduced Smart Tips — courses that are 3–8 minutes long to help learners attain their goals, reinforce learning, and apply new skills quickly.  Each Smart Tip can be immediately applied in the areas of Communication, Excel, and Productivity. 

We’ve also heard from customers that it is vital for non-technical teams to understand technical content as well. Whether it’s the CEO becoming conversant in key technologies to communicate with their Engineering or Product team on key initiatives, or the Sales teams understanding the enhancements technology brings to their product, it’s essential to gain an understanding of what various technologies are and the key concepts of how they’re applied in business. 

That’s why we’ve created Executive Briefing courses. These are short courses that break down complex technical topics for anyone to understand. In 2019, we introduced Executive Briefing courses on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data, and plan to introduce additional topics in 2020.

Extending the value of Udemy content 

We want our customers focused on achieving learning results and not on the administrative burden of managing learning. Therefore, we were committed to helping organizations that leverage Learning Management Systems to easily gain access to our top-rated Udemy for Business content for their learners. This year, we extended our learning partnerships with top leaders in the industry to make it even easier for learners to engage with Udemy content through their current LMS/LXPs.  

Check out our exciting partnerships below:

• Saba
• Degreed
• Continu
• EdCast
• Workday

Never stop learning in the new year! 

Whether it’s content or product enhancements, we are committed to bringing the customer voice into how we build the product. We’ve made some fundamental, powerful changes to our product, and we’re thrilled for what’s in store for 2020. A big thank you to our global customers for providing insightful feedback that helps improve our product.