Our very own Innovation Strategist, Troy Stein, flew to the UK earlier this year to visit Virgin Media to see how one of the largest media companies was using Snagit to document and share the invaluable knowledge of some of their most experienced employees.
The Problem
Training is a necessary aspect of every company, whether you’re a new hire or a veteran employee. Skills have to be refreshed and new software and applications need to be learned. This can be a tedious and extensive process that can be hard to keep tabs on year-round or in the midst of the onboarding process. Sometimes, it can even be swept under the rug and forgotten, leaving employees floundering and unproductive.
There’s no way a training department can know or share all the knowledge employees company-wide need to know. However, learning on the job never stops. Recording, collecting, and sharing employee knowledge will greatly benefit the growth and development of employees and the company in the long term by allowing those records to be built upon over the years. This is why it’s exciting that leading companies such as Virgin Media have revamped the training process by incorporating digital media for recording employee knowledge.
As one of the global leaders in media, Virgin Media is highly invested in the training and development of their employees. However, due to the large number of their employees projected to retire this past year, Virgin Media was in danger of losing a lot of valuable knowledge stored in their employees’ heads. In order to record their years of experience, Virgin Media wanted to a create a platform where employees could share information and experiences, ask questions, and create knowledgeable resources for their peers.
“A lot of the intentions of training is to give you the tools that you can apply under your specific context,” says Casson McRae, the Learning Technology Designer at Virgin Media in Manchester. “A lot of what we do in the learning technology team is to explore and try out new tools. By using these tools, [employees] are developing new behaviors that are key for organizations in the 21st century.”
The Challenge
After setting up Snagit for 150 of their retiring employees, Virgin Media decided to expand its use to 15,000 of their employees. “We structure a lot of our training development interventions around this idea of the community as a course,” says Casson. “Snagit as well has helped us with that because we find a lot of people that are actually using Snagit to demonstrate how they’re applying their learning back in their role.” By sharing this knowledge company-wide and streamlining the training process, they are able to easily share the expertise of each employee to the entire workforce.
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Snagit was a hit. The ease with which the employees used the product only made it easier to integrate into their daily routine. “We’ve got a tool that allows you to create that content but also to upload it into the ecosystem that we put in place at Virgin Media so it can be shared easily,” Casson said. Especially in a company as large as Virgin Media, Casson points out how tutorial videos of various tasks and software can be reused across the company: “That one piece of content which was created to serve an individual’s need can actually serve hundreds or potentially thousands of people within an organization very quickly and just by being created once by an expert user.” With Snagit’s help, every facet of the company knowledge would be represented in a video tutorial or walk-through for any employee to access and learn from.
While most companies rely on training departments to create and distribute training materials, Virgin Media put the power in the hands of their employees. Casson explained that this decision was highly beneficial for the employees and the company as a whole, “It took the pressure away from training and development to create that content and put that content creation in the hands of the subject matter experts.” It makes sense that the employees who use the applications and software on a daily basis would be the ones that could accurately and efficiently report and teach others about them.
The Solution
But why would a media mogul like Virgin Media come to us for software? Not only is Virgin Media halfway around the world (not that this fact hinders much business that happens nowadays), but they are a much larger company in brand and employee size, comparatively. How did they choose Snagit among the numerous other screencasting competitors?
In the simplest way, Virgin Media was able to achieve their goals quickly and efficiently. They were looking for a simple, easy-to-use software that they could distribute to their employees and expect them to use without additional training. Employees easily navigated the application and quickly produced results which allowed them to spend more time making videos and less time figuring out the software. By encouraging them to use Snagit, Virgin Media could empower their employees to share their expertise by creating their own videos.
By incorporating media such as Snagit into their training process, Virgin Media can easily document the necessary skills and abilities of their workforce for future employees. The important tools and facets of the workflow can be learned, developed, and changed over time through this shared media network. The legacy of Virgin Media, as of any company, lies in the knowledge of its employees. The more streamlined the training process, the faster and smoother the integration of new minds into the fold of the company. In the midst of the business world–especially the media world–Casson described Virgin Media’s approach the best: “We’re not looking at just being in the game, we want to change the game. That’s core in everything we do here.”
Learn More
Read Virgin Media’s Customer Story or watch the video.
Visit our training page for ideas on how to get the most out of your training sessions.
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