PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. LearnUpon

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

With regard to course construction and design, I think LearnUpon excels in many areas. There tends to be a bit of a learning curve for new users, but the dashboard interface and finding courses that a student has enrolled in is pretty quickly resolved, and it is very convenient to house materials in LearnUpon and ensure that students are able to access them, rather than having to rely on printing materials and/or manually distributing documents through emails or some other digital means (DropBox, Drive, Hightail, etc.). It is, for all intents and purposes a Learning Management System, and is intended to manage and track students' coursework and learning. I will say though, that in terms of record-keeping, is an area where it falters. Finding and maintaining receipts of orders placed through the storefront is not convenient from an administrative standpoint. Processing a refund for a student if we cancel a class, that was an enrollment transferred from a previous class, is clunky. Guaranteeing that members are able to purchase course enrollments under their specific price tier, while at the same time preventing non-members from doing so, is not convenient and not something that is easily fixable. Currently, new users can only [default] to either members OR non-members, and that classification has to be manually adjusted. Given that some organizations can run into above 10,000 members, this is an obvious challenge.

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.

• LearnUpon has EXCELLENT support. I have always been quickly and effectively taken care of whenever I had a problem (the majority of the "problems" were simply my perception; turned out not to be problems at all).
• LearnUpon has a simple, intuitive interface that works and rarely causes problems. Obviously, they heavily user-tested the interface before implementing. Too many LMSes do not do this and the interfaces which have been designed by software nerds are super hard to navigate.
• LearnUpon has lots of features packed into one system. You can host multiple "portals" for different audiences, you can have learning paths, you can upload videos and documents of all kinds. It just works and is not limiting.
• LearnUpon has an EXCELLENT test creation/implementation feature which I have not seen in any other LMS I have used.

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

• No integration with a payment gateway that shows in a students account what courses they have purchased at what price.
• There is some confusion on when registering for the LMS that only a username and password need to be supplied, it does not require a first and last name.
• Limited function of coupon codes, too many restrictions make us come up with work around in order to utilize coupons.
• They ability to group students by the course type they are selecting not just custom data fields.

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.

We've been a customer for six years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We're very happy with LearnUpon.

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

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

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

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

You cannot publicly post badges from LU which you can with Credly. That would be a nice feature. LU is a much nicer interface than both SumTotal and YourMembership/Crowdwisdom. However, course searchability was much easier in your membership. Course creation is much easier in LU. From an administration perspective, I think LU is easier to use, including standard reporting. Your membership has a much better self-assessment product than LearnUpon. You can rank your confidence when answering questions. You can also do more robust mapping

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

• LearnUpon helped us significantly reduce the cost of travel and lodging for staff and trainers who would previously have had to travel to participate in learning.
• LearnUpon helped introduce our organization to the concept of online learning and asynchronous study.
• LearnUpon helps us improve our staff's technological literacy by giving them a friendly and inviting system to learn from independently.

Incentivized