Watch David in Action
About David Blake
David Blake is a serial entrepreneur working to change how companies value skills. His Degreed platform serves clients including Boeing, Unilever, eBay, Cisco and Intel. Blake helps leaders build upskilling and reskilling initiatives that keep workforces resilient against disruption.
Before Degreed, Blake helped launch a competency-based, accredited university. He was selected as a Top EdTech Entrepreneur by the Stanford d.School EdTech Lab, an award sponsored by Teach For America and NewSchools Venture Fund.
David's Keynote Topics
The modern economy is in constant flux due to technological change, and so are the skills demanded of employees. The predominant system of education and training, however, still considers learning to be something that takes place between childhood and early adulthood – before rather than during one’s career. By placing value on college degrees and credentials more than on a demonstrated ability to think and act innovatively, businesses are both hiring the wrong kinds of people and failing to adequately upskill their employees over the course of their careers. Consequently, they are losing valuable talent and sacrificing their competitive edge. David Blake has developed a framework and digital platform that allows businesses to identify and map the skills they need from employees to reach their goals in different business areas. This radical breakthrough enables employees to market their skills to potential employers rather than just their credentials, and also allows companies to track the evolving competencies of their own staff. In this presentation, Blake explains how, in order to survive the future of work, companies need to develop new strategies that address their own skills gaps, gauge the aggregate sum of skills within their organizations and build the workforces of the future.
Most upskilling programs are structurally inequitable for employees who hold multiple jobs, serve as a caretaker or commute long hours. For this reason, companies must remove the biggest barrier for diverse populations hoping to upskill: time. According to Degreed executive chairman David Blake, few companies are taking advantage of resources to implement L&D in fully equitable ways. In this presentation, Blake leads executives through probing conversations about fair L&D practices to help them avoid pitting their upskilling initiatives against their own DEI agendas. With tactics for absorbing displaced productivity, like strategically overstaffing, Blake helps leaders move beyond progressive intentions to capture real rewards and become an equitable employer of choice.
More organizations are taking part in the skills economy – prioritizing hiring people based on skills over academic degrees. Just how big of a change is coming to the job market and how can companies and job seekers rethink the hiring process? According to David Blake, CEO and co-founder of digital learning platform Degreed, we’re at the forefront of a huge radical shift into the world of skills, with recent research showing that half the workforce will need to be reskilled for new jobs within five years. In this presentation, he’ll provide leaders with real-world examples of how hiring for skills can be over three times more effective than hiring based on academic credentials. Leaders will learn strategies for zeroing in on candidates who are best equipped for the positions they need to fill, and job seekers will gain tools for upskilling and reskilling in a world where job-specific competencies can help both land a position and advance through a career, benefitting employees and employers alike.
Books by David Blake
David in the Media
Degreed Introduces New Solutions for Accelerating AI Fluency and Leadership Transformation at LENS 2026
Why Your GenAI Strategy Only Works for the Confident Few
Degreed: AI Training is Not Enough – Confidence and Success Comes From Doing
Forget Coffee, $1.4 Billion Tech Company Chief Says He Naps Instead: ‘I Can Take Them Just About Anywhere’
ASU+GSV 2024: Employers ‘Future-Proofing’ Workplaces for AI
How Lifelong Learners Can Inherit the Future of Work
How Degreed CEO David Blake Is Solving the Skilling Challenge at Scale
How to Thrive in the “Skills Economy”
Want to Become a Great Leader? Start By Becoming a Great Learner
Skills, Learning and What They Mean Together
Learn In Wants to Modernize How Your Employees Upskill
How Learning and Development Becomes a Business Building Engine
David’s presentation was equal parts inspirational and provocative and changed the way I thought about skills and lifelong learning. He has deep expertise in formal and informal systems of learning, and this allowed him to transcend contexts and share relevant expertise on our specific questions. He has an optimistic vision for what learning could be, not just as it currently is. His presentation helped us to imagine new ways to serve learners, and to build bridges between academia and the workplace. His own experiences as a successful founder allowed him to share tangible examples of how learning is being reinvented to be more relevant, accessible, and valuable for the future.
Caryn VoskuilDesign for Learning, IDEO
The Expertise Economy is a unicorn among business books. It presents a human and business reason to address the skills gap in a holistic way with suggestions for how universities, companies and individuals can work together to prepare for the future workplace.
Jeanne MeisterPartner, Future Workplace, Co-author, “The 2020 Workplace and The Future Workplace Experience”
David is an excellent speaker! He gave us a solid grasp of how the employment and learning markets intersect—and of the many anachronisms and dysfunctionalities in that relationship. At IFC, we invest in jobs-oriented private education across emerging markets and his insight was extremely valuable for us to find concrete ways to support lifelong learning. But David did far more than just ‘talk the talk’. He also shared his hands-on experience as a pioneering leader in this space who works with global employers to put learning at the center of their growth agenda and enable them to identify the skills they need to remain competitive and flourish.
Juliana Guaqueta OspinaGlobal Education, International Finance Corporation
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