PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. Skilljar by Gainsight

Great for managing medium sized teams of people spread over geographically dispersed offices. Not so good for small teams (less than 15). Requires a degree of time and effort to set up correctly to provide useful data for management and a good experience for staff members, but once that effort has been made the results are great.

Incentivized

Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're
looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your
customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform
is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users
through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their
learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on.
Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable
resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats.
It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring
engagement.

For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive
learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it
supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations
might require additional specialized software or platforms.

Incentivized

• Excellent customer service - when all else is equal, customer service will win the day.
• Ease of use helps us get everyone on board with the goals and ratings.
• The analytics are helpful to senior managers - we can compare how managers rate as well as how employees perform.

• Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
• Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
• Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
• Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
• Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site

Incentivized

• Being able to select more than one person when approving goals.
• Options to identify which people managers haven't approved goals, dine a review etc...rather then having to mimic each manager to see how they are going.
• 360 Feedback to stakeholders outside the business.
• Being able to remove a role that isn't being used in the organization anymore.

Incentivized

• Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
• Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
• Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.

Incentivized

It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.

I like what you are using and how we are doing it. Also, changing systems is a lot of work

Incentivized

There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.

Incentivized

The overall usability is great as the software is very easy to learn and navigate. After just 1 week of "playing" around in the system I felt very comfortable using it and teaching others to use it as well. Customers have also mentioned Skilljar is a much better than out previous vendor

Incentivized

So far 100%.

The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.

My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.

Incentivized

The support team is great at Skilljar. Not perfect, but that can't be expected. Everyone I've worked with has been friendly, attentive, and fairly quick to respond/act. They also have a pretty sturdy set of Knowledge Base articles as well to self serve.

Incentivized

We bought training provided by 3rd party – it was fabulous.

I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.

I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads

Do a good job of preparing your internal teams (IT, Salesforce, etc.) about the work they will have in the process

Incentivized

We did review other systems when we purchased PiiQ but I don't know what these were due to the member of staff no longer being with the company, however, I do not that we chose PiiQ as it was simple to use and that it also had the Performance option available in addition to the learning platform. we knew that this was something we wanted to have in the future which is why we purchased it.

Incentivized

Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive

Incentivized

• Reviews are generally taking managers less time to prepare because the essential infrastructure is in place. Past reviews are easily retrievable for review if needed.
• HR administration of the system takes less time than the previous version of Cornerstone (CSOD). HR is still responsible for training new users, but the built-in user guide is more thorough and easier to use.
• We're starting to see - slowly but surely - more (and hopefully better) interaction between manager and employee.

Incentivized

• Having Skilljar is improving retention—customers who completed recommended training made up 85% of our Q2'23 renewals.
• Customers who completed the recommended training make up 84% of our healthiest accounts and we've seen a 15% decrease in support ticket volume.
• Since launching Skilljar, we've seen a 16% increase in active users.