Crafting Linguistic Excellence: The Degreed LQA Success Story

Degreed is a trailblazer in the educational technology sector, dedicated to revolutionizing workforce upskilling. Recognizing that eight out of ten workers lack essential skills for their current and future roles, Degreed offers a user-friendly eLearning platform focused on closing this skills gap. The company offers targeted programs and collaborative learning experiences aligned with business needs to enhance employee onboarding, engagement, retention, and professional development. Their comprehensive solutions empower over nine million workers globally, aiding in skill development crucial for career growth.

With its extensive global reach, Degreed was working with multiple language services providers (LSPs) to translate a wide variety of content types into more than 25 language pairs. Degreed needed to quickly onboard a Language Quality Assurance (LQA) partner to validate the end quality of their translated content, perform functional QA on localized tools, and homogenize workflows and language asset usage among their language vendors and internal team members. Degreed’s engagement with non-English audiences required scaled levels of engagement, with languages prioritized into one of three tiers, each requiring distinct approaches and resource allotment. A flexible and scalable solution was necessary, and support needed to be ramped up in less than a month.

After in-depth meetings with Degreed stakeholders, the Eriksen team thoroughly analyzed the unique challenges at hand and came up with solutions. Eriksen assigned a dedicated program manager to serve as Degreed’s central point of contact. Selected from among Eriksen’s top performers, this program manager was to work European hours to align with Degreed’s international staff. The role entailed serving as the primary project manager for Degreed, coordinating the dozens of translators, editors and specialists aligned to the account, and acting as quality manager for Degreed content.

Eriksen’s vendor manager vetted and tested numerous LQA specialists for inclusion on the Degreed service team. Those who made the first cut were presented to Degreed for feedback and approval before final selections were made. These language professionals were quickly trained to work within Degreed’s Translation Management System (TMS) of choice and scheduled for a series of regularly occurring meetings between the linguists and Degreed stakeholders.

Time allotments were established for the linguists. Those supporting Degreed’s highest-need language tier would dedicate an agreed-upon number of hours per week, during which they would be available to meet any Degreed need. This could include the LQA work itself, in-context reviews, refinement of translation assets, stakeholder meetings and training sessions, or other localization tasks. Time allotments for lower tier languages were scaled accordingly.

The disparate types of content being translated – ranging from technical to legal to creative copy – required tailored workflows and referencing of specific language assets. Eriksen instituted custom processes to facilitate each content type to support Degreed’s varied business needs.

By providing granular performance metrics, Eriksen offers insights into not only the work of our own teams, but also that of the LSPs with whom the translations originate. We give professional feedback such as translation pass/fail rates, adherence to approved terminology, and on-time delivery statistics, all of which are broken down by language. Spend reports itemized by line of business and content type allow Degreed to distribute expenditures and prepare future budgets. The result is an LQA program that lifts the performance of various vendors and internal resources that drive Degreed’s robust localization program.

With our LQA program up and running smoothly within weeks, the Degreed team witnessed immediate positive returns, and the level of success continues to increase with time. By combining expert use of the TMS platform, development and refinement of quality assets, comprehensive reporting, and the program manager’s attention to detail, Eriksen has helped Degreed synchronize its processes. This has led to a noticeable improvement in localized assets in terms of consistency of tone and terminology, appropriateness vis-à-vis the content’s end use, and overall quality.

Positive reception from Degreed’s marketing stakeholders – a group that often withholds positive feedback – is perhaps among the most rewarding outcomes. Our partnership with Degreed has enabled the company to streamline its localization processes and lay the foundation for expansion into additional markets.