Golden Skillet Awards
Skilljar's Golden Skillet Awards recognize the most innovative, impactful and successful Customer Education programs in the world. Each year at Connect, Skilljar's annual conference, Golden Skillets are distributed to companies that are powering their programs on the Skilljar platform.
2023 Golden Skillet Award Winners
Innovation in Customer Education Award
The Innovation in Customer Education Award honors training programs demonstrating innovation, thought leadership and industry-wide contributions.
Zapier has built their program (and team) 100% from scratch. Coincidentally, the program owner was also a former Skillet who knows and understands the challenges with getting internal buy-in for an education program. This individual created a team that supported a new academy, but also used their technical services to uplevel the experience for their end users. This company sees their courses and content as a way to help them scale, reaching and ramping up their product adoption - taking their users from automation zero to automation hero. Using their own platform, with an integration with Skilljar, they were able to automate processes for their customers.
LinkedIn Marketing Labs implemented a Certified Expert Program program that not only deepened their users expertise, but offered additional engagement opportunities to be a bigger part of their community with special events, beta testing, and insider access to additional speakers. Their users strive to be certified experts because of the amazing benefits and exclusive offerings they provide to their certified users.
Planet have an extremely Innovative program driven by a segmented approach. This year, the team developed open courseware for trial users, developers, prospects, and students to expand the reach of their general courses on all of their highly technical products. They even partnered with university professors to create a free, semester-long course on their solutions.
Success In Practice
This award recognizes customers who have met amazing milestones and/or exceeded goals or expectations with their program.
Visier launched their new program beta in 30 days and went live in 59 days with a 50% increase in customers engagement and an increase in their completion rates. They have done this while experiencing turnover and constant changes within their org. The 50% increase that this customer saw with their university on the launch of their new program beta, has been consistently maintained post-launch.
Auditboard has been focused on expanding their Partner Certification offerings and launching formal, non-proctored, end-user certifications since the beginning of 2023.
These certification programs empower their partners and customers with the knowledge and skills they need to maximize their experience with their company’s products and services. So far, this year, they have seen 75 partners and 12 internal employees get certified across five different learning paths. These certifications allow their Partners to successfully implement the platform based on their company requirements and standards.
Muck Rack found that users who had completed at least one feature-related course were active a median of 10 times more in their platform compared to those who did not complete a course. Being able to show the correlation between course engagement and platform engagement showed their company stakeholders the importance of education.
Through 2023 they have seen an average registration-to-completion percentage across all customer education content of 75%. Additionally, they have more than doubled their total Session time of customer education courses from last year (from 3,000 to 8,600 hours) – with them being on track to hitting 10,000 hours spent by the end of the year.
Impact Award
This award recognizes programs that have set and achieved ambitious corporate business goals and are recognized for their overall impact on within their business
As part of the sheer volume and growth of their customer base, Paycor came to Skilljar to modernize their approach to learning, going from a 1:1 manual customer training effort to a 1:many approach.
Since that launch they have grown their course offering to cover dozens of products. At the time of launch, they offered 4 single product certificates. They now offer certificates for 9 products and 4 certifications which are comprised of collections of products.
This new approach to certification put up some eye popping numbers. Their program has over 120,000 active users, with over 385,000 enrollments, and a 78% VILT attendance rate.
Jamf helped realize over $1M in all-time revenue generated from their online Training domain. They also saw a 14% increase in revenue generated from the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2022. So far this year, they have seen nearly 15,000 new user accounts created, with nearly 50,000 all-time active students (also a 40% increase YoY).
Bluebeam conducted an assessment of their training data and it revealed that their customers adopt features 50% more often when they're trained on those features. This insight convinced their leadership to bundle access to their University with subscription purchases—this was a paradigm shift from their previous model. As a result, they have seen a +212% increase in new students (25,000+ as of Q3 2023) and a +203% increase in active students compared to 2022. This has resulted in a whopping +690% increase in total session time (23,500+ hours) as of Q3 2023 compared to the previous year.
Rising Star Award
This award recognizes new customers that not only quickly implemented their program, but many are achieving, even exceeding, their program goals and making a tremendous impact on their business
Source Intelligence achieved the remarkable milestone of becoming accredited by the International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Learning (IACET). They set out to achieve this goal and not only did they meet the goal to become accredited within 6 months of submitting their application, but they exceeded it. As a result of their accreditation, they can now offer IACET CEUs to learners who successfully complete learning events within their academy. This is not only a way to demonstrate the high quality of their content offerings but also serves as a market differentiator for their business, as well.
Reltio launched 2 domains to 3 audiences in 88 days. This was all while migrating over 300 courses and all the historical student data from their previous LMS. Since launch they have added strong engagement with a 82% completion rate and have already generated 16.9k certificates to their learners.
Stripe have created 3 levels of certification including Fundamentals, Associates, and Professionals (a total of 8 course/exam offerings), have localized some of their content in Japanese, working on spinning up an internal training site, and have taken advantage of Skilljar grouping functionality to ensure certain audience types could gain access to content for free.
Their users have achieved over 800 Certifications since Jan 2023 and they hit their success metric of reducing time to certification by 50%, were able to increase training completions by 50%, and reduced their support tickets.
People’s Choice Award
The People’s Choice award that is given to the winner of the Education Expo