Objectives and benefits of the platform
The edyoucated platform is a skill and learning platform that will be introduced in our company to support and strategically expand employee development. It combines classic learning management with skill management, offering numerous options to manage and promote learning in a corporate context. For our company, the platform offers, among other things, the following benefits:
Centralized learning and development: All learning activities – from onboarding and mandatory training to professional development – are organized in one place. Employees can find all learning content relevant to them clearly arranged in a single system.
Personalized learning paths: edyoucated makes it possible to individualize employees' development paths. Everyone learns at their own pace and focuses on the content needed to develop the required skills.
Skill development and transparency: The company can define critical skills and create skill profiles for roles or employee groups to provide guidance on relevant learning goals. Employees can assess their skills (optionally together with their manager) and develop them in a targeted way through suitable learning recommendations.
Engagement and motivation: edyoucated focuses on a motivating learning experience, e.g., through playful elements (points, leaderboards) and personalized learning journeys. This is intended to boost motivation to learn, but it is not a mandatory function (see section Avoiding behavioral control). Employees can voluntarily collect learning points and see their progress towards their learning goals.
Efficient compliance training: Legally required training (e.g., occupational safety, data protection) can be set up as mandatory training. These are prominently displayed to the affected employees and assigned due dates. Automatic reminders help ensure deadlines are met. L&D owners can track completion of these trainings in the system, reducing administrative effort.
Reporting and optimization: A comprehensive analytics dashboard enables HR development to evaluate platform usage and learning outcomes (e.g., active users per week, completed learning hours, completion rates, etc.). This provides valuable insights to continuously improve development measures. (Details in the section Reporting and analytics)
In summary, edyoucated helps our company make employee upskilling more efficient and connects learning with active skill development. Employees receive exactly the learning content they need, which benefits both them and the company. At the same time, the company maintains visibility of progress – without exercising disproportionate control over individual behavior.
Scope of features and configurable options
Below is an overview of the most important functions of the edyoucated platform, focusing on which features can be enabled/disabled and how they can be tailored to our company’s needs and requirements:
Learning paths: The core element is learning paths, which can be either static (standard learning paths) or adaptive. Adaptive learning paths adjust to the employee’s level of knowledge – known topics can be skipped, unknown content is taught. This increases learning efficiency. If desired, purely standardized learning paths can be used (i.e., without adaptivity) by simply creating such paths. Note: Adaptivity is an optional function – the company decides whether to use this personalization. Learning paths can be created by the company itself (e.g., for internal development) and can also include external content or SCORM courses. Assigning learning paths can be done to individual employees or entire teams, simplifying administration.
Learning content and media: Within learning paths, courses consist of various learning materials (texts, videos, quiz questions, etc.). Authors within the company can create these materials.
Mandatory training: As mentioned, certain learning paths can be designated as mandatory training. This is particularly relevant for compliance topics. Due dates can be set and the platform automatically sends emails to the affected employees as reminders (7 days before, on the due date, and when overdue). Managers also receive notifications when deadlines are approaching or have passed, including a summary of completion status in their team. Important: Creating and managing mandatory training is restricted to authorized persons (platform administrators) – regular users cannot create or modify these. This ensures that only authorized parties (e.g., HR/L&D or subject-matter experts with an administrator role) define mandatory trainings and have insight into overall status.
Events and seminar management: The platform allows organizing in-person sessions or webinars (Events). You can create events, invite participants or allow registrations, and even generate meeting links via an MS Teams integration. There is also an analytics function for events to track who attended (or who registered or declined). Event registrations can require an approval process if configured by the company (e.g., manager approval). Note: Approval requests from employees (e.g., for event participation) can be handled within the platform by the responsible managers; see Team management below.
Skill management (skill profiles and analyses): Beyond learning management, edyoucated offers extensive functions to manage employee skills. You can build a skill taxonomy and define skill profiles based on it – for example, requirement profiles for specific roles (e.g., "Digital Editor", "Data Analyst", etc.) with their relevant skills. These skill profiles can then be shared with employees or teams: the employee sees which skills are part of their profile and can assess their own skills. skill profiles are initially created as drafts and only made accessible to the defined audience by publishing. You can finely control which learners can see the profile (all or only specific users). This means not every user sees every skill profile – only assigned people can view and work on the respective profile.
Skill assessment: The platform enables employees (or, if applicable, their managers) to assess fulfillment of a skill profile. In practice, this is usually done via self-assessment: for each skill or chapter in a profile, there is a scale (e.g., level 0 to 5) on which the employee rates their proficiency. These assessments can be adjusted over time. Optionally, a manager’s assessment can be added. The skill profiles thus serve as an instrument to identify skill gaps – i.e., where an employee still has development needs – and to align suitable learning offerings (learning paths, materials).
Skill analyses: For authorized persons (admins), the skill dashboard provides aggregated evaluations. You can see, for example, how many skill profiles have been assigned in the company, the average mastery level, and completeness across all profiles. For a specificsSkill profile, you can also visualize how the distribution of skill levels looks across assigned employees and how it develops over time. These evaluations are shown by default in an aggregated or anonymized way (e.g., histograms, trend charts) and primarily serve HR development to track the progress of skill initiatives. If needed, the customer can also enable additional visibility options:
If required, an individual view of single employees within the dashboards can be enabled, provided the company prefers this setting. A common use case is internal search for experts with specific skill profiles.
Admins can also look at individual profiles if needed, for example to discuss development measures with the respective employee. Important: Skill data is not used to rank employees, but to enable targeted support. The decision to share a skill profile with an employee always implies transparency to that employee – the employee can see and work on their profile.
Gamification elements (points and leaderboards): edyoucated uses learning points that users collect by completing content. This is intended to provide playful motivation. The platform can optionally generate leaderboards in which users can compare point totals. There are important privacy settings here: In the individual leaderboard, each user sees only their own name; all other names are anonymized (only rank position and point totals of others). You can thus see your own placement without learning the identity of colleagues. This design ensures there is no public "pillory" and avoids pressure on individuals. In addition to the individual leaderboard, there is a team leaderboard, which compares teams by their average collected points. These data are aggregated at team level to ensure fairness across teams of different sizes.
Deactivatable leaderboards: The entire leaderboard function is optional. At the company’s request, the leaderboard can be completely disabled. It is also possible to provide only one type of leaderboard (e.g., team leaderboard or individual leaderboard) or turn both off – this only requires a brief request to edyoucated support, who can enable or disable the function accordingly. You can even control at team level whether a team should appear in the team leaderboard (this can be configured when creating a team). This flexibility allows you to use gamification elements only to the extent desired. If there are concerns that a leaderboard creates unwanted competitive pressure, the function can simply remain off.
Integrations and single sign-on: The platform can be integrated into your existing IT landscape. Single sign-on (SSO) and interfaces to common HR systems (such as Personio) or content platforms are offered. Employees can log in conveniently with their corporate account (no separate passwords), and learning data can be synchronized with HR systems if desired (e.g., transfer completed training to the HR database). SSO also increases security, as no additional login data needs to be managed.
In summary, edyoucated offers a broad feature set that is modular. Our company can decide which modules to activate and how to configure them. In particular, potentially sensitive functions such as leaderboards or mentoring are optional and can be switched on or off at any time.
Data protection and data security
Data protection has top priority at edyoucated. The product is developed in Germany ("Made in Germany") and is of course GDPR-compliant. For detailed information, see our DPAs and TOMs.
Roles and access permissions
A central element in safeguarding employee privacy is the platform’s role and permission model. It defines who can see or do which content and data. The most important roles in edyoucated are:
Member (learner): This is the default role for all employees. Members can access learning materials, complete tasks/quizzes, assess their own skills, and track their individual learning progress. They have access only to the learning area and their own data. Members do not see other employees’ learning activities or profiles. Rankings are anonymized as described, so they do not learn others’ identities. This role is suitable for all regular employees, as it grants no administrative access.
Author (content creator): Authors can create learning content (learning paths, learning materials, questions, events, etc.) and manage skill management (taxonomy, skill profiles). This role is held, for example, by internal trainers or subject-matter experts who provide content. Authors do not have visibility of users’ personal learning progress, unless they also hold a higher role. They focus primarily on content quality, not employee data.
Access manager: This role complements Authors in that access managers ensure the created content is available to the right employees/teams. They manage content permissions (which team sees which learning path, etc.). They also have no extended analytics rights for user data and focus on content distribution.
Curation admin: A combined role (Author + Access manager), intended especially for smaller organizations where one person both creates and distributes content. The focus is also on content here; personal progress data is not visible, except with respect to events/journeys this admin manages, where they can see participant lists. But these data are limited to registrations, not performance.
Owner / Administrator: This is the highest role with full permissions. Owners can manage user accounts, configure content and organization settings, and, most importantly, monitor the effectiveness of learning programs – that is, they have access to the analytics dashboards and insights into learning and Skill data. Only Owners can view the personal data and learning information of all Members. This includes, for example, individual users’ progress in learning paths, their point totals, skill profile evaluations, etc. They are also the only ones who can assign training (e.g., mandatory training) and view and manage participant lists for events/journeys. In practice, this role is typically assigned to the responsible L&D team or HR administrators. The number of people with this permission should be kept small (data minimization principle).
In addition to these main roles, there are team-related permissions that fine-tune rights-based visibility at employee level:
Teams and team managers: In edyoucated, employees can be organized into teams (e.g., by department, location, or project group). This serves not only as an overview, but also enables additional functions:
Content (learning paths, skill profiles, events) can be assigned to entire teams at once.
There is the team leaderboard mentioned above, which compares teams (optional).
Team-specific analytics: In the analytics dashboard, you can filter by teams to, for example, view the learning hours of a specific team.
Important: Within a team, you can mark one or more users as "manager". The default role within a team is Member, but by setting someone as manager you reflect the leadership structure (e.g., team lead). Team managers receive certain rights for their team:
In the Team management area, they see a list of all team Members they manage, including their last learning activity date. This means a team manager can see, for example, when employees in their team were last active in learning and broadly what progress has been made.
Team managers can view their employees’ learning progress – mainly regarding assigned learning paths or mandatory training in their team. Specifically: If a team has been assigned a mandatory training, the team manager can see who has completed it and who has not yet (similar to the completion statistics also reported by email). They can also use the team analytics dashboard to see how many learning hours their team has accumulated in total, etc., but only for their own team.
Team managers can process their team members’ approval requests. For example, if an employee wants to register for an event that requires approval, it will appear in the "Open requests" area for the team manager, where it can be approved or rejected.
Important: A team manager does not have the same rights as a platform administrator. They only see data for their own team, not for the entire organization. Nor can they change global settings or assign roles to other users (except setting Members/managers within their own team, if they have this permission).
This team manager function is useful to grant direct supervisors certain insights without giving them full access. For example, a department head can check their people’s training status but cannot view data from other departments. This follows the principle of granular rights assignment and prevents misuse, as each manager receives only the minimum necessary information.
If your company does not want to use this team structure, you do not have to define team managers. In that case, only global admins would see cross-team analytics, and supervisors would receive reports, if needed, indirectly from the L&D team. The platform can be flexibly adapted to the desired organizational setup.
No other visibilities: Aside from team managers, there are no hidden "manager accounts". This means if someone is not defined as an admin or team manager, they will not see any analytics automatically. A regular employee truly sees only their own profile, their own learning content, and possibly anonymized comparisons (point rankings).
This role model has been consciously designed in the platform to support data protection and co-determination. It follows the need-to-know principle: As little personal transparency as possible, as much as necessary. This ensures that behavioral and performance data are not visible to everyone without control, but exclusively in the hands of those responsible (e.g., L&D administrator or direct supervisor to a limited extent). The roles and permissions can be viewed at any time in the admin menu to ensure clarity about who holds which role. Changes to roles can only be made by administrators, and each person can hold exactly one role on the platform, which determines their permission profile.
Learning paths, mandatory training, and learning progress tracking
Here we go into more detail about how learning progress is tracked, who sees this information, and how feedback is provided – especially in the context of mandatory training (compliance) and general learning paths:
Employee view: Every employee has a personal dashboard ("home page") showing their current learning paths and trainings. Mandatory training is specially marked there and has a due date, so the employee knows by when to complete it. There is also a progress indicator for each learning path that the employee themselves sees. This self-monitoring helps employees keep track of their learning goals.
Reminders and notifications: As noted above, the platform sends email notifications to employees for certain events (assignment to mandatory training, upcoming due date, overdue, completion confirmation). This happens automatically and is intended to support employees, not to monitor them. For supervisors (team managers), there are notifications shortly before and at the deadline of a mandatory training for their team, including a small statistic (e.g., "5 of 7 employees have completed"). Outside of mandatory training, no individual performance emails to managers are sent by default. This means that if an employee takes or does not take a regular (voluntary) learning path, their supervisor is not automatically informed.
Reporting for administrators: Admins (Owner role) can view overviews in the analytics dashboard, such as how many users are actively learning, how many hours have been learned, etc., partly broken down by period or team. These metrics are initially aggregated (e.g., "Weekly active users: 40" – a number for the whole company). Admins can also view details per user, for example by selecting a specific learning path in the progress overview and seeing which users have completed it and to what percentage. Especially for mandatory training, there is a table listing each assigned user with status "Completed on [date]" or "Overdue". These detailed progress tables are visible only to admins – in this case probably to the responsible HR development department. A team manager can see a similar table for their team, but not for other areas.
Use of the data: All collected learning progress data serves the legitimate purpose of ensuring required trainings are completed and analyzing how learning offerings are adopted. There is no automated performance evaluation or ranking of employees based on these data. Experience shows that transparency about learning progress is primarily used to plan training needs better or improve learning offerings (e.g., if many drop a path, the content may be unsuitable). Behavioral control is explicitly not a goal of the platform.
Individual feedback: edyoucated also enables employees to give feedback themselves – for example, they can rate content or leave comments. This is voluntary and serves to improve the quality of learning content. Such feedback is visible to Authors/admins but is anonymized or not publicly visible among colleagues.
Storage of learning histories: Learning activities (completions, point totals) remain stored as long as the account is active so that both the employee and the company have proof of completed training. If an employee leaves, their account (and thus their learning history) can be deleted upon request (see data protection above).
Reporting and analytics
Analytics dashboard for admins: As mentioned, only Owners/admins have access to the full analytics dashboard. It contains various key performance indicators (KPIs) at an aggregated level:
Weekly active users (WAU): Number of users active in the last 7 days.
Hours learned: Total learning time, calculated from completed materials and event duration.
Hours saved through personalization: Estimated time saved through adaptive learning paths (because known content was skipped).
Learning paths started: Total number of learning paths started.
Learning path completion rate: Percentage of started paths that were also completed.
Average learning path progress: Average of all progress percentages to also account for incomplete paths.
These metrics give the company a sense of learning activity without being immediately personal. For example, they help to see whether the platform is being adopted (WAU) or whether learning paths may be too long/demanding (if completion rates are low but progress percentages are high, this could be an indicator).
Charts over time: There are visualizations such as:
Active users per day (chart with daily active users, and rolling WAU/MAU)
Learning time per day (split into learning path time vs. event attendance time)
Mentoring hours (if mentoring is active, a chart of used mentor time, chat vs. call)
Learning path performance table: Lists each learning path with number of starters, completion rate, average progress
Filter options: Admins can filter these data by period, by teams, and by user role. The latter helps, for example, to restrict evaluations to Members only (you can hide admins who test content themselves to avoid skewing the stats)
Personal data reports: Apart from mandatory training tables and team overviews, there is no standard dashboard that, for example, outputs a leaderboard of all employees by learning hours (and as mentioned, the leaderboard that exists is anonymized). However, an admin can, of course, obtain information per person through drill-down. For example, they can search for a specific user on the Members page in administration and view that user’s profile.
Skill analyses:
Skill profiles: Aggregated overview of skills (and temporal development) across skill profiles and/or teams; no individual evaluation possible.
Skill experts: Optional feature; overview of skills of individual employees, filterable by skill profiles, skills, teams, and username.
Content coverage: Optional feature; overview of coverage of individual skills across different learning content providers; thus contains no user data.
Avoiding behavioral control and protecting employee interests
Clear purpose limitation of data: All collected data serves the purpose of Learning & Development. There is no performance or productivity monitoring beyond that. For example, learning time cannot be used to infer work performance – someone with few learning hours may already possess the skills or be fully engaged in projects; conversely, many learning hours are not an end in themselves.
Anonymization and privacy by design: The platform has privacy principles built in. The best example is the anonymized leaderboard. This reduces social pressure. Employees are not publicly singled out for how much they have learned. The fact that regular Members do not have insight into colleagues’ profiles also prevents social comparisons or unhealthy competition. This privacy by design approach is also reflected in the fact that, for example, skill profile data is only shared after release – nothing is captured or published without the employee’s knowledge.
Right of access and deletion: Every employee can request information about which data is stored about them (this follows from the GDPR and is supported by the system). As described above, anyone can also request deletion of their data – of course, this would take place as part of an orderly offboarding or upon request within their rights. Importantly, there is no obligation to store data permanently against the employee’s will (except for statutory requirements, e.g., for compliance evidence, but even then only within the retention periods). This underlines that the platform does not attempt to build profiles of employees against their interests – it serves the employees.
Training and communication: A system is only as good as its users and administrators. To avoid misunderstandings, it is recommended to inform all employees about how edyoucated works, in particular:
Which data do I see myself?
Which data does my supervisor see?
What happens if I cannot complete a mandatory training? (Here you can communicate that a conversation will be sought rather than immediate warnings, if this aligns with company policy.)
How can I view or change my data?
Who is admin and can see analytics? (Open communication builds trust: e.g., "Analytics are reviewed monthly by the HR development team to identify trends – there is no individual evaluation by the executive management.")
How are the works agreements for the learning system adhered to?