Isentia, headquartered in Sydney, with offices in 12 countries from China to New Zealand, is Asia Pacific’s leading media intelligence company. Staying on top of industry trends is a high priority for the business, because their environment changes rapidly.
The Challenge
Isentia’s media intelligence services range from software-as-a-service products to highly customized media insight, digital and content agency services. This translates into a wide range of skills across sales, client servicing, media operations, analysts, creative, IT, and HR. These team members work together to deliver media monitoring, intelligence and insights to over 5,000 clients across the Asia Pacific region.
The nature of Isentia’s business means its people need to be at the forefront of media and current events. The previous learning and development program was a series of generic classroom-based courses. This approach grew ever more challenging (logistically and financially) as Isentia became more geographically diverse and the needs of different functional areas moved beyond the standard suite of soft skills training.
Additionally, Isentia had purchased content from several top content providers like SalesDNA, Pluralsight and Lynda. There wasn’t a central location where everyone could access this content, or track usage across content providers. Isentia needed a solution that could restructure and group this training in a way that worked best for learners.
The primary challenge: find a cost-effective and impactful way to deliver relevant and tailored learning to diverse functional groups spread out across 12 countries.
The Solution
Helen Thomson, the Executive Director of Human Resources at Isentia, was looking for a better solution. Isentia wanted a way to empower every employee in the organization to be able to learn what they want, when they want, both for their current role and their future career aspirations – in a cost effective solution.
Helen became interested in Degreed because it offered a cost-effective, centralized learning solution that could meet the needs of the decentralized workforce at everyone’s own pace, and time zone.
With Degreed, Isentia would have the ability to:
Provide on-demand learning content to all of its team members regardless of their location.
Organize and structure learning content in meaningful ways for the team.
Provide a tool to their team members that genuinely empowers them to take control of their own development.
Crowdsource the creation of content and learning pathways using ‘experts’ within different functional areas within the organization.
Enable leaders and team members to recommend learning to each other and their peers.
Track and give credit for all learning, whether an online course, article, YouTube video, seminar attended, formal education and even on the job experience.
Tap into an existing ecosystem of learning content from around the world, including in content areas Isentia never would have had the capacity or funding to develop itself.
Create blended learning experiences that enhance the application of skills and knowledge while on the job.
Integrate and manage access to existing organization subscriptions to content from other online learning partners such as SalesDNA, Lynda and Pluralsight.
Enhance their value proposition as an employer by providing access to learning in almost any area that interests a team member.
The goal was to promote self-directed learning, and empower employees to find what they need, when they need it – giving employees the tools they need to grow and progress in their career.
Degreed’s ready-made ecosystem of content was a key solution for Isentia’s needs. Because Degreed provides content for diverse job functions, Isentia could start offering learning resources to support diverse skillsets- without breaking the budget on dedicated L&D resources to build content. Degreed also offered the ability to aggregate content from any source in a way that made the most sense for Isentia employees.
The Impact
Isentia now offers a new approach to learning that isn’t focused around generic classroom training. They’ve transformed themselves into an organization that values all learning and promotes career development, on all levels.
In the first three months, 36% of the Isentia workforce is active on Degreed. Collectively, they have completed 1800 pieces of learning content and 12 full learning pathways. Contrast this to the previous quarter where in the same period they were only able to deliver 28 classroom sessions to 17% of employees. Clearly the platform is opening up learning opportunities for the team.
In addition to opening up learning opportunities, employees are sharing their expertise with each other. Degreed Pathways are curated collections of content focusing on a particular topic or skill. Pathway creation is being crowdsourced at Isentia. Experts in every department are building pathways of learning content and sharing them with the rest of the organization. Content for these Pathways are being pulled from a variety of sources and content providers. Pathway creators are able to mix classroom-based training with online content plus proprietary content made by Isentia employees, and combine it all into one learning Pathway.
The Takeaways
Isentia successfully embraced learning as a competitive advantage. Here’s what you can learn from their experiences:
1. Embrace the learning revolution. Classroom-based training alone isn’t enough for today’s fast-paced industries, or to capture how employees are really learning. Go beyond classroom training and give your employees more options to grow and progress in their careers while closing the skill gaps in your organization. Accomplish this goal with the same budget you have today by leveraging the tools of the future.
2. Enhance the ROI of your organization’s talent development activities by leveraging tools that amplify your efforts.
One central location for all learning.
Leverage the power of the Degreed network, the largest learning network on earth, instead of trying to buy or build all the learning content yourself.
Remove the bottlenecks to learning and create new channels to meet the diverse needs of your organization.
3. Transform your organization into a learning culture that values all learning. Empower employees to find the learning that is most interesting for them by giving them the keys to the library.
Learn more about how you can make learning a competitive advantage here.
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