PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. Udacity

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

Udacity is great for working professionals who want to continue their education by learning relevant technical job skills. The platform offers a well-produced content library with new courses added regularly. Overall, Udacity is best suited for individuals who need to gain technical industry experience and certifications in order to better perform in their workplaces. Udacity is a very valuable resource, however, I would not recommend it for all organizations - as there are more cost-friendly options on the market.

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.

• Practical exercises and projects definitely helps you understand how you may apply the skills and knowledge in real-world projects.
• Strong Community where people are generally friendly and helpful for answering questions. Udacity has also made an effort to encourage engagement between all the people who are taking the same courses.
• You can watch a video, access reading materials and attempt an exercise without leaving the Udacity environment which is definitely a plus for me.

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

• Organization of courses is not very user-friendly, especially the sequence of courses to take should be more elucidated for a beginner.
• There are some courses which are completely tool based on using Alteryx. Instead, more focus on concepts can be given.
• The depth of the courses is another issue. The free courses are good for beginners but not to go to the next level.
• Nanodegree programs can be better priced.

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.

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

For the most part, site usability is great. I would say the only shortcoming from my end was when I needed support. Support responses were typically very slow, the few times I needed it.

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

I didn't personally have any issues with the program, but scheduling time to review the final project was easy, and the assistant was pleasant to work with.

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

Skillsoft has been utilized and powered by enterprise organizations while Udacity is more of a side benefit and not requiring much commitment to signup for. Skillsoft has more material in terms of e-books and videos to go through while Udacity is more to use while someone is ready and have been familiar with the topic already. We have Udacity a lot due to efficiency in terms of getting set up right away on individual use.

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

• Taking the courses I took allowed me to list skills on my resume that have opened up conversations on jobs where previously I could not even have a discussion.

Incentivized