WHAT WE KNOW

Cornerstone (CSOD) has acquired EdCast! What started as a unified, organically-built talent suite provider with learning roots, Cornerstone is now a multi-product company, complete with all the challenges and opportunities that presents.

FIRST IMPRESSION

This is an interesting deal as it gives Cornerstone an established leading LXP solution to offer, but with high overlap with its own Xplor solution. It is also a potential harbinger of other acquisitions likely to move more quickly to take advantage of emerging, hot markets.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR CORNERSTONE

The acquisition of EdCast specifically puts CSOD in a better position to serve what we’ve seen emerge across our customer base—what we’re calling The 4 Es:

• Exploration
• Experience
• Exposure
• Education

EXPLORATION (THE STARTING POINT)

EdCast bolsters CSOD’s capabilities by offering a talent intelligence platform built on a skills taxonomy that allows people to better understand what jobs, roles and capabilities the organization values, to better define their own potential career paths. Through capabilities like personalized job discovery, people can assess their own skills and solicit feedback from others through 360-degree assessments.

EXPERIENCE (LEARNING BY DOING)

Once interests and learning needs are identified, EdCast can serve up targeted opportunities to ‘learn by doing.’ These include gigs (e.g., temporary work assignments) and open jobs posted by people managers inside the organization. EdCast offers the ability to do some of these things natively or through integration with talent mobility platforms (e.g., Fuel50, Eightfold) and Applicant Tracking Systems (e.g., SmartRecruiters, iCIMS).

EXPOSURE (LEARNING FROM OTHERS)

EdCast enables exposure through targeted microlearning content—small, very specific bursts—generally 10 minutes or less. EdCast can serve up this content natively or ‘in the flow of work’ through tools people already use for knowledge sharing and collaboration (e.g., MSFT Teams) via both digital learners and influencers.

EDUCATION (LEARNING FORMALLY)

Organizations are experiencing an abundance of content. From traditional instructor-led training and compliance-related elearning to higher growth forms such as influencer-generated videos and blogs and crowdsourced job aids, the options are endless. But it is possible to have too much content, and it can be overwhelming. EdCast offers underlying content curing using data analysis to identify the content required for particular jobs or skills and suggest to individuals the resources (e.g., videos, articles, blended learning program descriptions) that make sense for them, given characteristics associated with their profile (e.g., experience, hire date, role, skills assessment, topical interests).

WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE MARKET

In light of this acquisition, Cornerstone customers and prospects now have two LXP options to consider: Xplor and EdCast. While Xplor’s future is unclear, we have some first-glance recommendations.

For EdCast Customers and Prospects (who are not using Cornerstone or Saba as an LMS)

• Find out from Cornerstone their plans to continue to support integrations to other LMS solutions (and other talent solutions – EdCast has a broad ecosystem)

For all other EdCast Customers and Prospects

• Inquire about planned investments or roadmap changes as you consider your going-forward strategies

TO SUM IT UP

With the EdCast acquisition, CSOD has the opportunity to move beyond its historical LMS strengths, which have become marginalized as a commodity at best, a necessary evil at worst. It’s clear Cornerstone is embracing the shift to being a multi-product company that will need to balance investments across many different platforms and technologies. We can’t wait to learn more about this now complete acquisition and the go-forward plans for these solutions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mike Brennan is Leapgen’s Chief Service Officer & Co-Founder. He  is responsible for Leapgen’s Services organization, providing leadership by managing our rockstar Leaper team, methodology, growth and profitability. He also works with our Sales, Marketing and Delivery Teams to manage relationships with clients and ensure their success.

Mike has nearly 20 years of enterprise consulting experience in both HCM and CRM with a strong track record for partnering with customers and building high-growth teams.

Jim Holincheck has more than 25 years of experience in the HCM technology industry and is the Vice President of Advisory Services at Leapgen. Jim has spent his entire career  working with customers to strategize, select, implement, support, and optimize their usage of enterprise applications. As a seasoned industry veteran, Jim brings a wealth of practical insight to the role. Before joining Leapgen, Jim served as the Vice President of Customer Deployment Applications at Workday where he led Workday’s Services Strategy in 2012 and 2015, and then moved into product management to build and lead the Adoption applications team.

ABOUT LEAPGEN

Leapgen is a global digital transformation company shaping the NOW of work. Highly respected as a visionary partner to organizations looking to design and deliver a digital workforce experience that will produce valued outcomes to the business, Leapgen helps enterprise leaders rethink how to better design and deliver workforce services and architect HR technology solutions that meet the expectations of workers and the needs of the business.