How Black Knight Uses Learning to Break Down Silos
Encouraging Knowledge Sharing with Employee Gurus
THE CHALLENGE
Black Knight, Inc. provides best-in-class software, data and analytics to the mortgage and real estate industries, as well as the capital and secondary markets. As they face the future of an increasingly complex, competitive, and regulated industry, many of the nation’s leading financial institutions trust Black Knight’s innovative solutions to help them overcome business challenges, reduce risk exposure, and stay relevant, compliant, and profitable.
This means it's vital for Black Knight's employees — across the entire organization — to have deep, current knowledge of products and services that can help clients solve industry issues in real time.
That's why Black Knight has built and nurtures a culture of constant learning — providing unrivaled leadership and training opportunities that help their employees learn new skills, advance product knowledge, and enrich career mobility. But, with over 6,400 employees across 18 offices in the US and India, a consistent challenge remains.
How do you break down departmental silos to enable collaboration, save time and resources, and share learning fluidly across the organization?
This is not an issue unique to Black Knight. As technology evolves, it's essential to partner with a learning solutions provider that offers a streamlined platform, trusted and engaging content, fluid sharing of knowledge, and the ability to offer both role-based and cross-organization learning quickly and cost-effectively.
Read on to discover how Black Knight not only met the challenge, but reaped the rewards of breaking down learning barriers with their innovative in-house Guru Program, supported by Skillsoft Percipio.
THE SOLUTION
Black Knight has always fostered a culture of learning and innovation. Powered by Skillsoft’s immersive learning platform, Percipio, Black Knight developed Black Knight University (BKU), a proprietary program built around course topics related to the industry and Black Knight’s proprietary products, as well as power skills and professional growth.
Still, while BKU offers access to hundreds of curated courses through Percipio's rich library of content, they needed a way to easily share learning and knowledge across departments, boost engagement, and reward curiosity. In 2015, their Guru Program was born: an internal think-tank and knowledge sharing site that empowers employees to become subject matter experts in critical fields, share their expertise, and learn from each other. Designed with interactive gamification concepts and incentives for participation, The Guru Program has been a great success: in 2022 so far, out of 3,646 unique learners, 3,354 employees have interacted with Gurus.
Although much of the content is technology-based, learners can also tap into Guru knowledge of diverse subjects such as DEI, Women's Leadership, Market Trends, and Customer Support, no matter what their role in the company. Through a colorful, easy-to-use interface, learners can "Meet Their Gurus", promote and share posts, watch videos, read blog posts, quickly search links to Percipio content, submit questions, and even learn how to apply to be a Guru themselves. Through engagement metrics, program administrators can easily refine and add topics, monitor feedback, and offer guidance and incentives to participating gurus. Learning leadership can also judge program effectiveness — for instance, Guru site visits were up 33% in 2022 from Q1 of 2021.
HOW DID THE PROGRAM PERFORM?
IN 2021
4,662
interactions with Gurus
91%
of Black Knight employees voluntarily accessed non-required training
BY MID-2022
3,454
interactions with Gurus
20,338
eLearning hours
5,384
Badges Earned
Overall, the Guru Program …
WHAT DO OUR CUSTOMERS HAVE TO SAY?
The joy of the Guru Program is it's not only "that one person" who has all the knowledge. We welcome anyone and everyone who has knowledge to share. Because at the core of this is knowledge sharing. I feel honored honestly, to be selected as a Security Guru, and I take great pride in it — I've received so much awesome feedback. We get to pursue that quest for meeting others, to continue to learn about their cultures, their practices, their jobs, to really highlight the human element in this virtual space. We all collectively work to learn from each other as much as we can, and we put that back out there to everyone. And that's what ultimately will help us all succeed.
Matthew Noto
Cyber Security Manager and Security Guru
Employee retention is a challenge for any organization, especially right now. And every team has a hand in ensuring employees see not just a future, but also an achievable path to that future. We not only develop custom learning journeys in Percipio; we ensure everyone has a path for growth and development and we allow them to fill those gaps in knowledge, by growing themselves in a convenient, fun, and recognized way. The Guru Program really helps give permission for people to access new content and offers friendly competition, too. And, what really catches our CFO's attention? Overall, in 2021, we had a return of $18 for every dollar we invested in learning.
Rich Baker
Enterprise LMS Administrator
WHAT’S NEXT
As the Guru Program continues to thrive, the plan is to expand metrics measurement to better understand how learning outside of department and role silos leads to career growth, leadership development, and job performance. And, as learning continues to underpin the employee experience at Black Knight, a series of team "Challenges" are being developed where employees can work together over months to learn new skills, share resources, compete for prizes and recognition, and offer feedback and friendship in virtual roundtables.
LEARN MORE ABOUT SKILLSOFT’S LEARNING SOLUTIONS
Has Black Knight's story inspired you? Learn how you can unleash your organization’s edge by working with Skillsoft.
- Skillsoft Coaching, executive-quality coaching to accelerate the professional growth and development of all leaders.
- Skillsoft's Leadership and Business Skills Portfolio, for building effective leaders at all levels of your organization.
LEARN MORE ABOUT BLACK KNIGHT
Black Knight, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated software, data and analytics solutions that facilitate and automate many of the business processes across the homeownership life cycle. The Black Knight name was selected by Black Knight Chairman Emeritus Bill Foley to reflect the values of his alma mater, West Point. Those values include integrity, dedication to excellence, pride in what we do, a stability that our clients can rely on, and an unwavering commitment to hold the highest standards.