Sharesies spill the tea on adopting e-learning to meet growing learning demand
When businesses are small, knowledge transfers organically. Teams work closely and subject matter experts tend to develop mentor relationships with their colleagues. Encourage that, add a few workshops into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a nice learning culture.
Sadly, that pleasant state of affairs rarely lasts long
As an organisation grows, teams become larger, and functions become siloed. That easy, informal exchange of skills and knowledge you started out with no longer meets your business needs. And if you’re scaling rapidly, developing and training your team can become a real pain point, even a barrier that hampers further growth.
Ellayne Mackenzie, Capability Manager and Executive Coach at Sharesies, New Zealand’s largest investment platform for everyday investors, was struggling to scale their learning programmes to fit the tech company’s evolving demands. When Sharesies started in 2017, it was a tight-knit team relying on subject matter experts to level everybody up. Ellayne says, “That makes sense when you’re small. But as the team diversified into different products, each team had their own priorities and L&D needs. Subject matter experts were spread thin, and their time became scarce.”
Ellayne was creating and delivering learning content in workshops. She says, “That was hard work. It was manageable because the team was still under 100 people, but definitely not scalable. Then in 2023, my role became executive coach and capability manager for the whole organisation, which had grown to over 150 people by then.”
L&D experts can’t be everything to everyone
As Sharesies sole provider of L&D, it became clear to Ellayne she wasn't going to be able to deliver everything her team needed in person. She says, “The team at Sharesies are hungry to learn and develop. When I found myself saying, ‘I'm sorry, I can't do that.’ Or “I can help in three months,” I knew I needed to find a way of scaling our learning programmes.”
Ellayne wanted to create learning content that didn't rely on a facilitator. She says, “I was repeating learning content, so I thought I could deliver that more efficiently digitally. We also needed to create L&D opportunities people could fit into their busy days when it suited them, rather than saying, ‘Today we're going to put down tools, so everybody can learn.’”
Traditional training methods have their limitations
In-person training has constraints that becomes more pronounced as an organisation grows. Downsides of traditional training for a scaling organisation include:
- High costs. Workshops work best delivered to a smaller group of people. If your team has hundreds or thousands of employees, using workshops to upskill your people is going to become a costly exercise. You also have to factor in the opportunity cost of a whole team downing tools to learn at the same time.
- Inconsistent delivery. Once your organisation grows beyond a certain size, your L&D team won’t be able to deliver all your learning in person. They end up delegating learning, hiring new people, or learning consultants. Once a wider group becomes responsible for delivering learning, consistent quality and delivery becomes far harder.
- Logistical complexities. As your team grows, finding a time when everyone’s free for training becomes increasingly less fun. And with hybrid teams working remotely or across various offices, where do you meet? Travel is expensive and environmentally unsustainable, and workshops online aren’t always the best.
Scaling your learning programmes with e-learning
Fast-growing organisations see four key benefits when they adopt e-learning.
1: Learning becomes more cost-effective
Unlike workshops, e-learning content is infinitely scalable. When Mercury acquired Trustpower in May 2022, their L&D team delivered 880 hours of customer operations training to hundreds of frontline agents in the three weeks leading up to the merger. Without e-learning that would have been prohibitively expensive as well as logistically challenging.
Each team at Sharesies gets a personal development budget. Ellayne says, “Now that we teach fundamental skills and concepts with e-learning in house, team leaders can use their development budget to level up in areas specifically relevant to their team. We’re getting more value from our training budget as a result.”
2: Learning is more flexible and accessible
Ellayne says being able to access e-learning on any device means the Sharesies team can fit learning in whenever makes sense for them. They're not bound to a desktop computer. They can learn on their mobile any time anywhere. Chameleon has also allowed Sharesies subject matter experts to create e-learning content when it fits their schedule, without the pressure of delivery. More experts are sharing their knowledge with the team as a result.
3: Learning is more consistent
Ellayne has created an e-learning template for Sharesies’ subject matter experts. Not only does it make sure all their learning looks great, but it also shows them what good learning should include. Ellayne says, “People can see they’re expected to summarise the learning outcomes at the start, include a video, and link a few articles for further reading. So, the learner’s experience is clear and consistent, regardless who's making the content.”
4: It’s easier to track and measure learning’s effectiveness
E-learning tools with inbuilt analytics make it easier to assess the effectiveness of your learning. You can tell how engaged people are by measuring the time they spend with learning content, as well as checking completion rate. Verify whether that engagement translates into effective learning by testing knowledge with quizzes and encouraging people to role play their new skills in risk-free simulated real-life scenarios.
Five strategies for implementing scalable e-learning programmes
Five considerations to implement e-learning that can scale seamlessly as your organisation continues to grow.
1: Assess organisational training needs
L&D teams are problem solvers. Map out the problem you need to solve and what you need to achieve, then marry that with potential solutions, and how you’ll measure outcomes. We recommend a learner-centred approach, where the needs of the people you’re designing learning for are at the centre of your design process.
Sharesies assess their training needs at a grassroots level and align those requests with the organisation’s strategic imperatives. Employees identify their aspirations, and break those down into a leadership goal and a technical goal in their development plans. Ellayne reviews those plans to identify themes. When she sees the same goal repeated, it’s an area that needs support. She also checks in regularly with managers on capability gaps and consults Sharesies’ CEOs to understand what they want the company to work on, before prioritising that wish list based on what the team need most.
2: Choose the right e-learning platform and tools
Ask yourself what you need from your learning tech stack. Do you need a better user experience for your learners? Do you want to make e-learning quick and easy to design in-house? What reporting do you require? Our guide to simplifying learning tech might help.
Chameleon is a one stop shop for learning design, hosting, and reporting, with the ability to rapidly build engaging learning content seamlessly. We make sure your experience is easy and enjoyable, whether you’re creating a course or studying a module.
3: Develop modular, bite-sized content
Make your e-learning content something people want to engage with as opposed to something they dread. Chameleon makes it easy to create bite-sized e-learning, and mix in interactive elements, animation, video, even audio soundbites to make modules more fun.
Another key to scaling learning is keeping it modular and digestible. Only give people the essential info they need to achieve their learning goals. Don’t overwhelm them with too much knowledge on a topic. If people enjoy their learning experience, they’re more likely to come back for more.
Central to Sharesies’ success with their e-learning has been sticking to one topic per module and being clear on the intended outcome. Ellayne also recommends including the time commitment required in your module title, for example, ‘15 minutes to learn how to do X’. This helps people fit learning into their schedule.
4: Leverage tech for interactive, engaging learning experiences
Good learning includes different forms of learning content. People learn in different ways. Some like lots of pictures. Some like videos. Some like detailed instructions. Good learning content uses the full learning toolkit from video and animations to graphics and graphs and Chameleon makes it easy to include everything from images to audio in your learning.
Ellayne says, “You need to be able to accommodate every learning style. You can't rely on people reading or watching everything. I always try to include something to read, something to watch, and something to do, so people have an artefact at the end.”
5: Evaluate and iterate your e-learning programmes
We’re big fans of putting in place a continuous improvement loop, where you assess engagement with your learning and gather qualitative feedback from your learners. Successful learning initiatives are clear on the change they want to see and committed to doing the work to iterate and improve their learning content until it delivers that change.
Ellayne recommends beta-testing, and she’s all about continuous improvement. She says, “A module is never finished. I launch the best version at that moment. It will develop over time, and I'm constantly updating it to better reflect the moment we are in.”
E-learning is ideal for scaling learning programmes fast
Ellayne no longer has to say no to colleagues hungry for learning. She says, “When I get a learning request, most of the time, I can say, ‘There’s a module on that.’ And because Chameleon is so user-friendly, it doesn't take me long to create something of great value. So, if someone asks for learning we don’t have in our e-learning library, I can whip something up from discovery to completion within a week.”
If you’re struggling to deliver enough learning to meet the demands of your fast growing team, give Chameleon a free trial. And subscribe to our newsletter for more insights and tips on scaling learning programmes and e-learning solutions.
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