Seven years, 63 courses and counting, on a platform we never asked them to change

They were building it themselves

In 2019 this organisation was building its own eLearning capability. Not evaluating vendors. Not running a tender. Building.

Zillion approached them. The timing happened to be right, which is the honest version of how this started. They already had somewhere to put courses and a plan to fill it. What they were short of was the capacity to make what belonged inside.

That distinction is why this is seven years old instead of one procurement cycle long.

The hard part was not the courses. It was who had to take them.

One organisation. Two very different sets of readers.

At head office there is an executive management team of around 220 people who work in English all day. On the support side there are staff for whom English is not the language they think in, and for whom an English-only course is a test of reading rather than a piece of training.

Most organisations solve this by writing the course in English and quietly accepting that half the workforce will click through it. We built bilingual instead.

Not subtitles. Not a translated copy filed separately. The same course, working in both languages, so that a policy about how people treat each other at work reached the whole organisation rather than the half that reads English comfortably.

That is the decision this whole programme turns on, and it is the reason a course about dignity and respect at work could be rolled out to everyone rather than to head office.

The first eight months

Twenty five courses, built for them, deployed onto the platform they already ran.

Soft skills and leadership, written for their processes and their people. A licensed catalogue can be the right answer for a lot of organisations. It was not the answer for these twenty five.

Then people actually took them

Over 2,200 hours of learning across the organisation.

Inside that, the number worth pausing on: more than 800 hours in the first two months, from the 220 people on the executive management team.

That is roughly three and a half hours each, in eight weeks, from the most time-poor people in the building. About twenty five minutes a week.

The hard part of corporate eLearning is not building the course. It is getting anybody to finish it, and senior people are the hardest group to hold. These were opened, worked through and finished by people who already had a full day and did this as well.

And then it reached everyone

More than sixty three courses today, and the whole organisation has access to all of them.

That is the part worth sitting with. It did not stay a head office programme. Seven years on, every one of those courses was built for this organisation by one partner, and every one of them is open to every person in it.

Nobody stays with a vendor for seven years out of loyalty. They stay because renewing is easier than replacing, and renewing is only easier when the work keeps being right.

What changed for them

Their own team measured it. These are their numbers, not ours.

We did not calculate these and we are not asking anyone to take our word for them. The client measured their own programme and these are the figures they arrived at.

That distinction matters when you are being sold to. Any vendor can produce a number about their own work. A number the buyer measured themselves is a different kind of evidence, and it is the only kind worth putting on a page.

What we would tell someone in the same position

If you already run a learning platform, you almost certainly do not need another one. What you probably need is somebody to make the twenty courses that only your organisation could ever need, and to keep making them for years after the initial enthusiasm has worn off.

Keep your platform

Changing it is expensive, disruptive and rarely the actual problem. The problem is usually that there is nothing worth opening inside it.

Ask who is actually going to take it

If the answer includes people who do not work in English all day, an English-only course is a decision to exclude them. Bilingual costs more up front and it is the difference between a policy everyone has read and a policy head office has read.

Judge a partner on year three, not month one

Anybody can deliver a first batch. The question is whether they are still returning calls when the novelty has gone and you need one more module before an audit.

Count hours, not courses

A library of two hundred courses nobody opens is worth less than twenty five that people finish. Ask any vendor for hours from a real client, not a catalogue size.