Upskilling at scale: Kimberly-Clark’s digital transformation playbook

You may know Kimberly-Clark from household products like Kleenex and Huggies. But beyond what you see on the shelves is a tech team that’s constantly innovating and evolving to drive the consumer product goods industry forward.

The key to their success? Continuous upskilling through their Digital University. 

Malinda Crosby Centeno, Sr. Consultant for CTO Change Management & Communications, and Ashley Sharp-Blurton, Sr. Technology Learning & Development Consultant, at Kimberly-Clark share how they move the needle and create a learning program that sticks.

For Kimberly-Clark, learning is a unified experience across the business. And their six-step playbook for digital transformation ensures everyone is aligned to the learning and business strategy. 

The playbook consists of these six steps:

1. Assess opportunities: Benchmark skills to align with business priorities
2. Select scalable solutions: Combine trusted platforms with internal expertise
3. Engage leadership: Position learning as a driver of transformation
4. Phase the rollout: Start small, then scale through structured hubs
5. Celebrate progress: Highlight milestones to build momentum
6. Embed for impact: Integrate learning into onboarding and career paths

“You cannot simply do one part of it. You have to do all of it,” emphasizes Ashley. “And the other thing is, you can't just do all of it for one part of the organization. You have to do all of it at every level of the organization. 

“It can't just be that you're focusing on what leadership wants. It can't just be that we're making managers happy. It can't just be that only learners are getting their needs met. When you look at this playbook, it’s the playbook for us at every level of our program, in every area of our program.”

About three years ago, Kimberly-Clark kicked off a new phase of digital transformation that eventually led to the creation of their Digital University. But before they could develop their learning strategy, they had to start with their business strategy. 

“Like every company, we have a strategic business plan. From that, we knew what our technology roadmap was going to deliver. And from that, we said, ‘Well, the most logical place to start is to know who we want to be, right? To benchmark what Fortune 100 CPG IT teams look like to best support the technology roadmap,’” says Ashley.

Inspired by other organizations, they developed their IT role architecture and, eventually, their learning and development program. Once they defined each organization and role within their IT department, they began to consider the skills each function would need. Skill assessments gave them an easy way to do that. 

“[A Skill IQ] is a series of questions that you answer before you start the training. And it says, ‘Hey, there are five topics in Agile. You already know four, so only learn this last topic,’” says Ashley.

“You get 100% credit for it even if you took three hours to get basically 40 hours of training because it wasn't about your time and seat—it was about getting you what you needed.”

After defining the skills they needed, Kimberly-Clark brought in subject matter experts to identify the best learning management systems and resources for their teams. This team consisted of internal SMEs and a trusted learning partner. 

“We said, we know what we look like, we know who we want to be when we grow up, and we need your help to get us there,” says Ashley.

“We basically co-curated content specific to a role, specific to a college, specific to Kimberly-Clark. The SMEs loved that because they had a say in what was going to be delivered to their teams.”

In the end, they created a curriculum of IT and InfoSec resources for current roles while taking the future technology roadmap into account. 

Leadership buy-in has been critical to Kimberly-Clark’s success. 

“We do have the support of our executive leadership and our stakeholders and our leaders,” says Malinda. “Our leaders aren’t worried about time in the tool. They're worried about employees developing the skills that they need to develop and to move forward.”

If you’re having trouble bringing leaders on board, provide leadership training. Show them how learning impacts the roadmap and business goals. Then tie upskilling to their performance metrics.

“Give them an objective at the beginning of the year to grow their talent,” advises Ashley. “Because we did that, we anchored [upskilling] to objectives. We made it specific to the individual in their role to support the roadmap.

“At the end of the year, [employees] have a note that says, ‘I upskilled and was able to deliver.’ When you aggregate that, the leaders actually go, ‘Huh, all of my team did this,’ and then they put that into their objectives, which goes to their senior leader, and then our Chief Technology Officer puts it into his end of year that ultimately goes to our CEO.”

Even if you’ve put together an amazing upskilling initiative, it likely won’t be perfect right out of the gate. Conduct a pilot program to gain initial learnings and make improvements to your strategy. 

At Kimberly-Clark, internal SMEs volunteered to test the curriculum and learning management systems before rolling them out to the rest of the organization. 

“When you pilot anything, it gives you that freedom to fail. It gives you that freedom to adjust and make changes and iterate and improve. So, we highly recommend starting small, starting with a pilot, and going from there. That way, you can refine and test what you're doing,” says Malinda.

“If you're not changing coming out of a pilot or coming out of a wave, then you're a monologue, not a dialogue,” adds Ashely. “And what [the SMEs] also loved is when they gave us information, they immediately saw it getting actioned by Melinda and me in the next wave,” says Ashley.

Celebrating learning progress does two things: It rewards employees’ efforts and generates excitement and engagement for future learning opportunities.

“Progress looks different for everyone. A lot of companies spend a lot of time highlighting milestones of big rocks for projects in the business, right? They've done X amount of projects, they executed on time, under budget, whatever it might be. They celebrate those. We do the same thing in learning because our folks' skill development is directly impacting those projects,” says Malinda.

“We're celebrating completion. We're celebrating certifications, whether it's an email, whether it's a ping, whether it's a post on the social channel of your choice. . . It reinforces our culture of growth and continuous improvement.”

Kimberly-Clark’s Digital University isn’t just about meeting business goals. They’re also laser-focused on helping employees grow professionally. It starts as soon as a new hire joins the organization. 

“We're making sure that when [new employees] come in, we're like, ‘Hey, let's get you into Digital University. Let's give you a community within Digital University so that it's a little bit more sticky when you get in.’ You're not just having the stickiness of your immediate team, but now you have this massive group of really fun folks in the Digital University space,” says Malinda.

From there, they encourage team members to use upskilling to open professional development and career conversations.

“Learners are able to take what they're doing, to take all of their certifications, to take their completions, to take their elevated Skill IQs to their leaders and have those conversations about career development, succession planning, performance, [or] whatever it might be.”

Says Ashley, “What we're doing is helping our [people] get the skills they need, not just to design, deliver, and support the roadmap, but to succeed in their current roles and grow into their next ones.”

If you want to replicate something like Kimberly-Clark’s Digital University in your organization, you don’t have to do it alone.

“The one thing I wish we had known—we just had such a great Pluralsight team—is to lean on them. They've done this a hundred times. You are doing it for the first time. They know what they're doing,” says Ashley.

“And when you lean in, and they lean in, we jokingly call them our Plural-Clark team. Because it's half of us and half of them, and they are with us in every step of the journey.”

Watch the on-demand webinar to hear all of Ashley and Malinda’s L&D insights.

Ready to start upskilling your teams today? Learn more about Pluralsight’s hands-on tech skill development platform.