Workato Creates a Digital Credential Program Flywheel with Accredible

When Workato Director of Certification and Education Julien Clement and team started to scale the Automation Institute, they faced the challenge of implementing a credentialing program to recognize professionals who have successfully completed courses. “Issuing digital and shareable credentials to people immediately after they pass a course is a big piece of how we try to delight people going through our education,” said Clement.

However, having built a custom platform during his tenure at HubSpot, Clement knew firsthand the costs and complexity of developing and maintaining an in-house credentialing platform. "At HubSpot, we built our own credentialing platform, which was really hard even with an entire Product Team working on it. When I joined Workato, building our own platform wasn't feasible, given our budget and strategy.”

The team also considered creating and issuing certificates to learners via their learning management system (LMS) but ran into limitations when it came to ease for recipients to share their credentials to social media and lack of visibility on where and when recipients shared certificates and the influence their sharing had on program enrollment. Integrating a digital credentialing platform with its LMS to streamline creating and issuing certificates without disrupting current workflows became paramount.

Also, as part of its vision for Automation Institute, Workato wanted to build a gig marketplace and ecosystem of credentialed automation experts. The marketplace would enable professionals to highlight their skills and credentials and connect businesses looking for certified experts for their automation needs.

The Workato team evaluated multiple digital credentialing platforms but ultimately selected Accredible for its pricing, credential recipient sharing and Spotlight Directory features, advanced analytics, and platform flexibility. Accredible also integrates with Skilljar, enabling Workato to automatically issue credentials to learners based on Skilljar course and lesson completion.

“If you’re doing some level of category creation, digital credentials sit at the center of what I like to say is the flywheel of credentials,” said Clement. “Someone finds your content via SEO or your website, takes a course, and then that delight moment comes in the form of a credential. With Accredible, not only can learners receive a digital credential that's easily shareable, but they're also able to see themselves in the Spotlight Directory. And then, to complete the flywheel, you have people who see other people’s shared credentials and then go and sign up.”

Workato has turned learner certificates into program referrals via Accredible’s one-click sharing to social media (without the need for recipients to register). With Accredible’s analytics, Workato has also gained visibility into the additional value, referrals, and brand exposure its certificates generate for its programs, including views, social media shares, website clickthroughs, and more.

“If people aren't sharing their credentials, they may be getting the internal satisfaction and element of it, but we want people to feel proud of it, and it's the sharing piece that is a huge part of the credential flywheel,” said Clement. “The analytics that Accredible provides around sharing are big in how we think about going to market and how we make sure that what we're putting out there is something that the customer is really excited about.”

Workato has also begun building toward its vision of an ecosystem of credentialed automation experts with Accredible’s Spotlight Directory feature, which provides a fully branded and customizable directory of credential holders. Employers can easily search and filter certificate recipients that opted to be listed in the directory. The digital hub not only rewards learners for their efforts with increased visibility and connection to future work but also has a measurable impact on the number of people who sign up for programs.

“We love the directory and the fact that you can easily have something white-labeled that sets the stage for creating an ecosystem of experts. That was a huge differentiating factor and a big part of our plans,” said Clement. “If someone needs an integration developer to build a Workato recipe, they’ll be able to go to our directory and filter by role and credentials, read their bio, and see the other credentials they might have earned.”

Since implementing Accredible, Workato’s Automation Institute has experienced 80% growth in program learners and nearly 17,500 digital credentials issued. Workato has also expanded to over 60 courses offered, including the recent launch of its Enterprise Automation Certification and Gen AI & Business Operations Certification.

The accompanying data and analytics from the Accredible platform have also played a crucial role in Workato's approach to optimizing their digital credential programs and recipient engagement for maximum impact. The team regularly tracks engagement rates for courses, analyzes how individuals interact with the credentials they receive, and continuously tests different email copy to improve the conversion rate of recipients opening and sharing their credentials. The ultimate goal is to improve the overall recipient experience and credential sharing that will contribute to the flywheel effect.

Because of Accredible’s easy-to-share digital credentials and the team’s optimizations, learners have shared their earned credentials more than 7,500 times. Workato has also increased its average credential recipient share rate by 9% since working with an Accredible Customer Success Manager—activating the credential flywheel and helping boost program awareness.

No matter what’s ahead, Workato believes they found the right long-term partner to help them achieve program growth and success. Clement shared, “We see Accredible being a big part of our program vision because it gives us that flexibility to say, ‘Is it exam-based? Great, we can do that.’ If it's not exam-based, there's also flexibility in being able to build out more custom credentials—whether that's a community achievement, a product achievement, or even being one of the first to take a certification, one-off hero badges. Having that flexibility with the group creation, content creation, and credential creation is big for us.”

With their unique approach to training and certification, Workato is not only shaping the future of automation but also creating job opportunities and fostering continuous learning. As they continue to drive their vision forward, Workato will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the automation landscape.