From Push-to-Pull Experience

The Secret Sauce to Creating a True Self-Learning Culture

How does a global IT organization with over ten years of e-learning take their learning culture to the next level? Atos, the top European company in cloud, cybersecurity and high-performance computing, set out to do just that this year. With over 110,000 employees in more than 70 countries, Atos rolled out a new learning platform that transformed their learning culture overnight. They moved the culture from a top–down “push” model to a learner-led “pull” model, enabling employees to stay up to date with new learning in a time and fashion that works best for them.

As an IT solutions and services firm, the learning and development team at Atos was hyper-focused on regular skill–building and rapid certification. With technology changing and advancing more rapidly than ever before, continuous learning had gone from a nicety to a necessity, particularly in the cybersecurity industry. Deputy Head of Learning and Development, Günter Deutsch, responded to this need by investigating new platforms for their e-learning.

Listening to employee feedback, Günter and his team realized that to expedite and improve their learning, they needed to focus on the end–user experience. If they could find a way to enhance the user experience for learners – specifically the ease of platform navigation, the quality of recommendations and the speed of certification – Atos could stay ahead of the curve by increasing the number and quality of courses their employees would take. As Günter observed, “If learners don’t have a great experience with how they are learning, then it would be better to not have the experience at all. A bad experience can block people for a long time.”

They didn’t just need a Learning Management Software (LMS) but a Learning Experience Software, which was user-centric and that is just what they found. After working through the technical integration, Atos rolled out a digital learning experience platform that put the learner at the center of the experience. With a wide variety of course topics and mediums including books, video, live boot camps, recorded sessions and audio-only summaries, this new digital learning experience software helped employees find what they needed to learn, when they needed to learn it and in a way that worked for them.

Since rolling out this new software, Atos has seen a 400% increase in usage and has received hundreds of unsolicited positive feedback notes from learners. Now, that’s the secret sauce to building a learning culture!