One of the highlights of our annual user conference, Connect, is the presentation of the Golden Skillet award winners—companies with the most innovative, impactful, and successful Customer Education programs, powered by Skilljar.
The Golden Skillets are such a special award and the winners this year exemplify the reason I come to work each day. You all inspire me and make me so proud to represent Skilljar. Our customers truly are what make Skilljar so special and it’s an honor to be a partner of each of this year’s honorees.— Sara Barnes, VP Customer Success, Skilljar
What is a Skilljar Golden Skillet? Is it like a Golden Ticket?
For those new to Connect or Skilljar, you may be wondering, what is a Golden Skillet?
Over the years, we’ve come to affectionately refer to our employees as “Skillets.” And we decided at our very first Skilljar Connect conference five years ago that there was no better way to honor the top Customer Education programs for their innovation, impact, and success than by presenting them with an actual golden skillet. We continue the tradition in 2022 by welcoming 12 Skilljar customers to the ranks with this prestigious award.
The Golden Skillet represents the best in customer education. We honor programs that exemplify the relationship between training and business value so that other companies can learn and grow from their success as well.— Sandi Lin, CEO and Co-founder, Skilljar
So without any further panfare, here are the Golden Skillet Award winners for 2022!
2022 Skilljar Golden Skillet Award winners
Be sure to click on each winner’s platform to learn more about what best-in-class customer education looks like!
Impact Award
Recognizes programs that have achieved ambitious corporate business goals and recognition by their internal teams for their impact on the business.
The 2022 Skilljar Golden Skillet Impact winners are:
Cisco Cloud Security
Since launching Skilljar, Cisco Security has grown from three academies to 10 and continues to grow year over year. Those who go through their training are 70% more likely to renew, contributing to overall business retention goals. According to Andrea Zwaschka, Head of Customer Enablement, “Our mission is to enable our customers to achieve their security goals through the best learning experience possible. My goal is to educate our customers on how to use and get value out of our products as much as possible.”
Autodesk
The customer education team at Autodesk worked around the clock to build new content, organize existing content, and redesign their existing eLearning site to include their entire portfolio of products to launch within three months! They have exceeded expectations within their company, and are now a main focus of their customers’ overall journey and experience. Autodesk Construction Cloud uses training to connect workflows, teams, and data at every stage of construction to reduce risk, maximize efficiency, and increase profits for their customers.
Pendo
Pendo’s education domain is open to both their customers and non-customers, as they see training as a crucial element to their product-led growth strategy. This year they launched an entirely new domain dedicated to Product Led Certification alongside their existing domains. The new domain was set up and content was established in record time. Pendo uses training so customers can learn their products and best practices for being product-led, validate their expertise, and advance their careers with a Pendo certification.
Innovation Award
Honors training programs demonstrating innovation, thought leadership, and industry-wide contributions.
The 2022 Skilljar Golden Skillet winners for Innovation are:
Zscaler
Zscaler leveraged Skilljar to create a best-in-class education program for their customers and partners with training credits, labs, live training, and certification. They also took advantage of the Skilljar/Influitive integration to give their end learners an amazing education experience. They pushed the bar for site design and user experience, creating persona-based training that allows users to naturally proceed through training without having to guess what courses they should be taking next. They made their content free and easily consumable for users and they are leveraging gamification to entice users to consume content continuously. Zscaler uses “Zcertification” to help customers grow their skills and drive their businesses forward.
ClickUp
ClickUp has consistently moved the needle towards perfection by restructuring and optimizing their courses with user experience and feedback top of mind. They continue to expand and attract new active users every month. Their program has reduced churn, increased gross revenue retention, and net revenue retention for customers who have completed at least one course. ClickUp University uses training to help customers level up their skills to increase their productivity and save time.
Dynamic Yield, a MasterCard company
Dynamic Yield delivers digital customer experiences that are personalized, optimized, and synchronized. They have used their own technology within Skilljar to deploy recommendation widgets on high-traffic Academy pages to suggest relevant courses to users according to algorithm-weighted scores. They are then able to analyze data for insights. Additionally, using algorithms, they are able to personalize the learner experience with recommendations and engagement techniques within Skilljar. Dynamic Yield uses training to help customers become personalization experts through interactive step-by-step courses, on-demand videos, seminar recordings, and live trainings.
Success in Practice Award
Recognizes programs that have achieved a remarkable milestone using Skilljar.
The 2022 Skilljar Golden Skillet winners for Success in Practice are:
Braze
Braze has utilized Skilljar functionality to its fullest and has leaned into what’s possible in education. This customer has been with Skilljar since 2018, but this year took on a new challenge of rebranding and relaunching their program. They had to deal with turnover and an uncertain direction in early 2022, but rapidly got their program onto a positive course. Since implementing Skilljar, all of our Success in Practice winners have seen impressive results for unique learners coming through their academy, all-time course enrollments, learning hours, course completions, and lessons completed. Braze uses training so their customers can gain skills and certifications to become leaders in Customer Engagement.
DocuSign
DocuSign came to Skilljar with lofty goals around reach, engagement, Instructor-Led Training, and user experience. Since they implemented Skilljar in 2021, they have steadily grown their monthly active users surpassing their rough average in their previous LMS. Since implementing Skilljar, all of our Success in Practice winners have seen impressive results for unique learners coming through their academy, all-time course enrollments, learning hours, course completions, and lessons completed. DocuSign uses training to help their customers chart a course to agreement transformation and earn badges to showcase their knowledge.
Tricentis
Through their education program, Tricentis set out to grow revenue through training and product engagement. Since implementing Skilljar, all of our Success in Practice winners have seen impressive results for unique learners coming through their academy, all-time course enrollments, learning hours, course completions, and lessons completed. Tricentis has also seen tremendous results for certificates granted and quizzes passed. Tricentis uses its award-winning training to help customers master their application testing products.
Rising Star Award (New this year!)
Presented to exemplary customers that have been with Skilljar for less than one year.
The 2022 Skilljar Golden Skillet winners for Rising Star are:
Shopify
Shopify launched at the end of September 2022 and has already had some amazing successes out of the gate. Their complex implementation required several integrations including Single Sign-On, Salesforce, PS theming, Skilljar’s Data Connector, Marketo, and advanced filtering functionality (PS customization). They also had a wealth of new content to introduce including topic-based pages, new courses, and new webinar pages. They have a long list of growth initiatives for their program and have created an ambitious GTM rollout plan with new features and content, and two additional domains. Shopify uses training to help their customers grow their brands with resources that cover everything from e-commerce best practices to technical integrations.
Chili Piper
The primary goal of Chili Piper’s program was to create certification paths for their customers based on which products they owned. They took advantage of Skilljar’s Live Training feature for their first graduating class of Concierge Certified Admins. Creating Chili Piper University put training in the hands of their customers through use-case scenarios, easy-to-follow simulations, and on-demand courses. Their certification program allowed them to maintain their quality of service without needing to increase CSM headcount.They have chosen to open their university to the public so prospects can become certified users and promote their product within their companies. Chili Piper uses training to help their customers unlock their full potential through on-demand courses and certifications.
People’s Choice Award
Chosen by Connect attendees, this award goes to one of the 12 Skilljar customers that shared their expertise and highlighted their program at Connect’s Education Expo. This year’s Expo participants were IPRO, LinkedIn, Handshake, BetterCloud, Dynamic Yield, Smartsheet, Loopio, ClickUp, Bloomreach, Alarm.com, TechSmith, and Checkr.
And the winner of the 2022 People’s Choice Golden Skillet Award is:
BetterCloud
BetterCloud is the market leader for SaaS Operations, empowering IT to transform their employee experience, centralize data protection, and maximize operational efficiency.
I’m honored to have won the People’s Choice Award for the best customer presentation given at Skilljar’s Connect conference 2022 for the BetterCloud Flight School. I hope I covered everything you need to know to make your learning themed, fun, and immersive.— Dan Gaultieri, Senior Manager, Customer Education, BetterCloud
What a feast of training delicacies our Golden Skillets whipped up for 2022! To see the winners from previous years, check out The Golden Skillet Awards page.
A lot of (customer) love went into all of our winners’ training programs this year. And a lot of love also went into the making of our Golden Skillets! They were hand-painted in gold by our very own Customer Training Manager, Cutler Bleecker, who you may know from Cutler’s Corner in our monthly newsletters or Customer Education Coffee Chats.
And speaking of Coffee Chats, Skilljar customers can continue to learn and share best practices for creating customer education programs with each other at these monthly virtual gatherings. You’re likely to discover a future Golden Skillet winner or two in next year’s roster, so join the conversation!
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