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Education is too important to stay the way it is. My life’s work and personal mission is…
Articles by David
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David Blake shared thisWhat do L&D teams built for the future look like?Learning Rewired: L&D’s 3 Areas of Greatest ChangeLearning Rewired: L&D’s 3 Areas of Greatest Change
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David Blake shared thisWorking with great people on big ideas has been the privilege of my career. At Degreed, we’ve gone on our own learning journey, creating space to experiment, pushing ourselves on what AI can do for learning and work. That experimentation led to Degreed Maestro, bringing personalized AI learning experiences to everyday workflows. And it continues in our AI Labs, designed to test the boundaries of what’s possible. Today, a fun moment being recognized in the top 10 most innovative HR companies by Fast Company.
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David Blake shared thisWe're more likely headed for 6-day workweeks than 4-day workweeks. Jevon's Paradox applied to work: As AI does more 'work' it doesn't reduce the old modality, human work, it increases it. As AI scales, the demand on humans is increasing, not diminishing. Welcome to the age of intensification. #DegreedLENS #skills #WorkforceLENS Keynote: Welcome to the Age of IntensificationLENS Keynote: Welcome to the Age of Intensification
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David Blake shared this"My human" datasetDavid Blake shared thisOver the past day I threw together a "I’m probably taking this too seriously" first draft of a working paper analyzing the growth, structure, and conversation dynamics of Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. tl;dr: agents post a LOT but don't really talk to each other. 93.5% of comments get zero replies. conversations max out at a depth of 5. at least as of now, moltbook is less "emergent AI society" and more "6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves" Also, "my human" appears in 9.4% of all messages which is...fun! Comments and feedback welcome. Paper: http://bit.ly/4tgkgPS Replication code: https://lnkd.in/eMqn85yV An additional caveat: both the coding and writing for this project were done with heavy assistance from an AI agent, which felt appropriate!
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David Blake shared thisInvesting in your peoples’ capabilities will always have positive ROI. Not because it’s a humanist, feel-good thing to say. But because the pace of tech innovation has outpaced the rate at which humans naturally learn & adapt, making it THE constraint in how successfully organizations are able to leverage the latest tech innovations. So, whether you can or can’t pencil it with a CFO, capability investments will always pay off with a human you intend to keep in your employ. …and love the anecdote Vaskar PahariDavid Blake shared thisOn paper, United’s CEO lit money on fire. That bonfire is the reason I choose to fly United even if it means doing a layover. Scott Kirby approved the spend of hundreds of millions rewriting United’s legacy Fortran-based mainframe built in the 1960s. No shiny “next year ROI.” No clean business case a sane CFO would approve. Just a direct hit to current earnings with no clear future benefit. But that “wasted” money is exactly why United can now process refunds immediately, change flights in-app without a 45-minute phone call, and update your PQPs the moment your flight lands. At budget time, most companies ask for cuts. He does the opposite. He challenges his team by going, “Here’s another chunk of money to spend purely on the customer.” Last year, that included $100M on upgrading in-flight wine service. Apparently they're good. I don't fly business so I wouldn't know. You can ask my wife though! The obvious “ROI-positive” investments don’t create strategic advantage. They’re obvious to you… and obvious to your competitors. Differentiation comes from the investments that look irrational in a spreadsheet - until they’re the reason you can do things that none of your competitors can. Now, the implications for HR are painfully clear. For the last couple years, a lot of orgs have quietly eroded investment in employee growth because it’s hard to “prove ROI” on paper. (I ran value engineering at Degreed, so I get the CFO skepticism.) But cutting capability-building because the ROI isn’t immediate is the workforce version of staying on the mainframe.
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David Blake shared thisJoin us at LENS and get personal access to all of Degreed's AI Labs! Access to bleeding edge tools and solutions for your personal learning and L&D toolkit.David Blake shared thisGet personal access to the products and tools we've been building in Degreed's AI Labs by coming to Degreed LENS. This is the stuff my team has been building, and I'm really proud of it. I think several of these could be standalone products, and I'm excited for them to find their way into Degreed's ecosystem of products and services. We research and try new AI products, especially any related to workplace learning, all the time. And I can tell that you that the things you'll get access to in AI Labs are a little different from what you'll see anywhere else. And, by getting personal access you can help shape the future of these ideas! This is such an exciting time to be at the intersection of learning and AI and it would be a complete shame to not take the chance to be involved. Register: https://lnkd.in/g-v8SwXP And shoot me a message or comment; let's build something great together.
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David Blake shared thisImagine waking up every day responsible for the careers, skills, and learning of ~800,000 people globally. Its bigger than the worlds largest university and just shy of the population of San Francisco, and no less diverse. If ever need connect w those doing learning and skills at scale: Maren Kabowski Jan Cramer Franz StrukeljDavid Blake shared thisGreat strategy session on learning, skill management, and the strategic alignment of education 🚀📚 We were pleased to welcome one of our key strategic partners Degreed in Wolfsburg. After years of close collaboration and a successful rollout combining SuccessFactors with the Degreed platform, we now support a learning ecosystem reaching around 300,000+ learners. Together with David Blake (CEO Degreed),Bodo Arnold Devlin Janssens, Franz Strukelj (Head of VGA), Jan Cramer and me, we took the time to reflect on our journey, discussed upcoming capabilities, and explored what learning needs to look like going forward. From digital learning ecosystems and platform connectivity to AI-powered, personalized learning assistants (Franz Strukelj "JARVIS 🙂) – the focus was on setting a clear strategic direction for the year ahead. 🌍🤖 Looking forward to continuing this partnership and jointly shaping the next learning priorities and strategic North Stars for learning and skill management. ⭐🤝 #Learning #SkillManagement #FutureOfLearning #DigitalLearning #AIinLearning #LifelongLearning #Partnership #LearningEcosystem #Upskilling #Reskilling
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David Blake posted thisDegreed is hiring on our partnerships team. Let's work together in 2026! This team/role has had some of Degreed's very best and a mission-critical role at Degreed. DM with interest
David Blake commented on a post
1w
Congrats -- sounds like a great opp
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisThere's a lot we still don't know about the future of work in an AI economy. That's part of why I'm thrilled to be part of the brilliant team at RAISE US. We're building the evidence base and the strategies and tools that turn it into action, so governors, employers, and educators can stop guessing and act. raiseus.ai
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisMost AI programs do a good job of giving people access to new tools. The harder part is helping them feel ready to use those tools when the stakes are real. That is the gap I keep seeing in transformation work. People are not unwilling to learn. They are being asked to use something unfamiliar in moments where the room already expects clarity: a client conversation, a manager discussion, a sales call. Reading about AI does not prepare someone for that moment on its own. The useful shift is practice. Not practice as a training exercise, but practice close enough to the real work that people can test their judgment before it matters. That is why I pay attention to what purpose-built AI can do in learning. Coaching, role plays, and structured feedback give people a place to rehearse the conversations they will actually have. A generic chatbot can answer a question. That is useful, but it is not the same as helping someone build confidence under pressure. The organizations handling AI transformation well are designing for that difference. They are not waiting for confidence to appear after launch. They are building the practice into the program early, while there is still room to learn.
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisI hosted Degreed's Focus event in London this month, dedicated to the AI-powered future of learning. We were joined by around 100 L&D and IT Leaders from some of the biggest enterprises in the UK and Europe. So many ideas landed with me, but for the sake of LinkedIn I'll narrow it down to three: 1. Your workforce just doubled. David Blake set the frame for the day: Agents have joined the workforce, and humans and agents both need skills. We're starting to talk seriously about growing agent capabilities in addition to human skills, which means how we build learning experiences matters more than ever. Lori Niles-Hofmann argued that we don't need more AI-generated content or to become recycling factories. We need to get AI tutors right - ones that are bidirectional and actually learn from you. The work is changing, and learning has to change with it. 2. Adoption is not maturity. Activity and usage are still how most organisations measure success. Aadesh Goyal, former Global CHRO at Tata Communications, urged us to measure value over volume. Estelle Maione of Capgemini reminded us to partner with the business to define success - we cannot do this alone in Learning. The field hasn't solved outcomes measurement yet. Experimentation is even further behind. 3. Experimentation must come out of hiding. Private experimentation has a hidden cost, and it shows up in two ways. Surendra Phatak and Leah Knapton from PwC shared the organisational costs: pilot sprawl, unclear accountability, value that never escapes the pilot. Prachi Prasad of dunnhumby covered the personal costs: people moving faster, but not toward anything that matters. Prachi put it plainly: Innovation without support is isolating. It echoed something Ashley Hinchcliffe shared recently - Canva gave 5,000 staff a week to explore AI, and most of them froze, retreating to what they already knew. As someone who has spent years in change management, this felt familiar. The blocker is rarely the tech. It's always been about people, and AI is no exception. The answer isn't less experimentation; it's making experiments visible. Surendra and Leah introduced a metric most organisations aren't tracking: return on experimentation. Learn from experiments systematically, failures included, so that organisations grow together instead of everyone rediscovering the same lessons alone. None of this works unless we hold onto why we're doing it. Lori Niles-Hofmann said it best: "To keep people learning is noble. To keep people employed is divine."
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David Blake liked thisThe training and development of our global team is a critical component of Tenaris’s business, supported by tools like Degreed. Hear from Ingrid Urman, Global Learning Director, about how, in an age of evolving technology and the growth of AI, Degreed has provided a standardized training platform for our employees worldwide.David Blake liked thisTraining one employee well? Great. Training thousands across the globe? That’s a business differentiator. From onboarding to AI skill-building, Tenaris delivers development to 26,000 employees across 19 countries with ease. 🚀 Hear more from Ingrid Urman at Tenaris.
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisAs I get back from the Degreed Focus conference in London last week, where I sat with L&D executives from some of the largest companies in the world, I'm encouraged and inspired about what the future holds. Not because anyone had it all figured out. But because everyone in that room was wrestling with the same uncomfortable truth: learning has already moved. The operating model just hasn't caught up. For years we've designed learning as an event. Someone identifies a skill gap, L&D builds a course, a learner completes it, and we log the completion. Clean. Measurable. And increasingly disconnected from how people actually learn. Learning is happening in the flow of work now. It's in the moment a manager gives feedback. It's in the AI tool a developer is using to solve a problem they've never faced before. It's in the lateral move someone makes because they spotted an opportunity and had the skills to go after it. It's not in the LMS. And that fundamentally breaks the old model. If learning is distributed, embedded in work, triggered by need, enabled by AI, then L&D can't be a course factory. It has to become an orchestration layer. One that connects the learning already happening to the outcomes the business actually cares about. Todd Tauber closed the day with a workshop on exactly this. He asked a simple question to the room: did anyone's budget get bigger last year? Zero hands. Every team is being asked to do more with the same or less, which means the old way of building and delivering content at scale isn't a strategy, it's a slow collapse. The teams making progress aren't spending more. They're redesigning what the function does in the first place. David Blake left us with a quote from Eric Hoffer that has been resonating in my mind: "In times of great change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisVenture capital has been funding the furniture. Nobody was funding the walls. That's the argument Ashley Bittner of Kalos Ventures has been making since 2018—before "care economy" was even a phrase investors used. Her bet: The systems that make work possible are collapsing, and the $648 billion market holding the American workforce together has been systematically ignored by VC. What does that infrastructure actually look like? 🧱 Childcare access—one of the top reasons frontline workers don't show up 📋 Leave management—navigating 14+ state paid family leave laws 🏠 Aging-in-place technology—for a country where older adults will outnumber children by 2034 🔗 Benefits navigation—compressing 16 government forms into one Bittner just closed an oversubscribed $78.8M inaugural fund backed by Pivotal Ventures, MassMutual, and GCM Grosvenor. The market is catching up. She's been waiting for it since before it had a name. 👉 Read the full story in Forbes https://lnkd.in/gAM8uC2u Kate Ballinger, Renée Beaumont, Siran Cao, Cameron Carter, Jennifer Henderson, David Blake, Erin Harkless Moore, CFAThe $648 Billion Care Economy Venture Capital Has Been Ignoring Until NowThe $648 Billion Care Economy Venture Capital Has Been Ignoring Until Now
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David Blake liked thisDavid Blake liked thisIt is with profound sadness that we share the news of Om Malik’s passing. It’s difficult to state the impact that Om had on all of our lives at True. Om was the first Founder we funded when we started True. In our Presidio office, Om discussed his idea for a new type of media company. That idea would later become GigaOm. Om was a brilliant Founder, an amazing teammate and Partner at True, a prolific writer, a gifted photographer, and a sage and valuable advisor to so many in the technology ecosystem. Om was brilliant, thoughtful, humorous, profoundly kind, and deeply curious. He was also relentless when he had an idea or story. Om was brave - he never shied away from sharing his views or pushing for the truth. We were very, very lucky to call Om our Partner and friend at True for these last many years. For today, we simply encourage you to take a moment to remember this beautiful soul and great thinker who was in our midst. He would ask us to slow down a bit. Om would want us to think deeper, express our love for one another a lot more. Above all else, Om wanted us all to retain our humanity and care for each other in our brilliant quest to rebuild the world. We love you, Om. Team True
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Publications
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The Expertise Economy
Nicholas Brealey
The world of work is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought-leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, co-founder of Ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of…
The world of work is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought-leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, co-founder of Ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.
The authors provide the latest scientific research on how people really learn and concrete examples from companies in both Silicon Valley and worldwide who are driving the conversation about how to create experts and align learning innovation with business strategy. It includes interviews with people from top companies like Google, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Unilever, NASA, and MasterCard; thought leaders in learning and education like Sal Khan and Todd Rose; as well as Thinkers50 list-makers Clayton Christensen, Daniel Pink and Whitney Johnson.
The Expertise Economy dares you to let go of outdated and traditional ways of closing the skills gap, and challenges CEOs and business leaders to embrace the urgency of re-skilling and upskilling the workforce.Other authors -
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Jailbreaking the Degree
TechCrunch
See publicationEducation isn’t all-or-nothing. College and its primary credential, the degree, needn’t be either. The benefit of modern, online education is that the burden of logistics and infrastructure are greatly reduced, allowing for the potential of a fluid, lifelong education model.
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