A good learning platform thrives on two things: good content and participant motivation! Nico Adorf and Hendrik Hinsken from SNIPES reveal how these two centerpieces connect in the SNIPES campus – and why a solid learning platform is part of the corporate culture.
Note: This article was published in July 2019 and last updated in November 2020.
Their SNIPES campus is actively used by more than a thousand employees every month in a total of 9 countries.
The SNIPES Campus has been around for over a year. What formats and content do you offer your employees there?
The platform is used for virtually everything: We have classic eLearning content in which our people can further their education independently. At the same time, we also use blended learning, especially in the area of customer service. The content varies greatly: We have some mandatory courses – for example, onboarding – but mostly voluntary courses.
In addition, we have an event area where we promote and present news about the latest campaigns and products. It has become a platform where we offer diverse learning content, on the one hand, and an entertainment aspect, on the other.
That sounds exciting! Why did you choose blink.it for this concept?
The decisive factor was that, with blink.it, we’re not tied to external partners and can really create content ourselves as quickly as possible. It gives us that flexibility to create our own material. We can shoot videos, use PDFs and upload Powerpoints – in other words, use all the information delivery points that we have in our daily work, anyway. So blink.it is exactly what we need to communicate with our people in an agile and fast way.
Your biggest course is the onboarding course for new employees. Why did you move onboarding to the digital CAMPUS?
SNIPES is growing incredibly fast. That's where it's usually essential to have onboarding meetings for management in our stores several times a week, but that would take some time. So we wanted to simplify the daily agenda for all employees and their managers.
For this reason, we designed the onboarding course and various onboarding roadmaps that conclude with a small learning assessment. That way, we can convey the same knowledge as quickly as possible and legally ensure that all employees have been educated on important topics.
A glimpse of the german SNIPES Campus: In addition to the mandatory onboarding course (see picture), many voluntary contents are also offered.
In your courses, you provide a lot of content in videos. Why do you prefer this format?
In the beginning, we used a lot of PDFs and PowerPoint presentations. However, our very young target group is used to content presented in a slightly different way.
By evaluating the courses, we quickly noticed that anything with video was clearly better received. That's why we immediately rethought our strategy and have been working with an emphasis on audio-visual ever since, reducing the text content to the absolute minimum.
Now that we've adapted our content to our employees, we're also seeing that the campus is being used much more actively than when we started! So active, in fact, that some employees are starting to work on their own to create videos – for product training, for example – which we also upload to Campus after careful review. In this way, users create content themselves – and without pressure, just for fun! For us, an absolute win-win situation!
With videos, we have another advantage: If we become aware of a particular topic during analyses or meetings, we can react quickly and flexibly. We create a concept, shoot a short clip, turn it into a tutorial and send it promptly to the end devices of our employees throughout Europe. This process can be completed within a few days.
In addition to the mandatory courses, you also offer a lot of voluntary learning content. How do you motivate your employees to actively participate in these voluntary courses?
Well, for one thing, we’re convinced that the platform should be fun, so we include some entertainment value in it and thus create incentives to regularly look at the platform. In the entertainment section, for example, there's information about events sponsored by SNIPES and cool new product videos that we produce in collaboration with our partners from the industry. Once our employees are regularly on campus, they automatically engage with the voluntary learning content.
And then there’s the fact that we show right up front what a career path at SNIPES can look like via the campus: We emphasize in the mandatory courses that self-initiative is rewarded – with a wide range of opportunities for advancement. Anyone who has a desire to learn, gets to learn!
We are also keen to deliver new content regularly and keep the platform up-to-date. The new employees grow up with the campus: it becomes natural for the new people to work with it directly.
So new employees know right from the start that the campus and some mandatory courses exist – How do you then introduce them to the learning platform, in practice?
That's quite simple: Employee data is synchronized daily at blink.it. As a result, the employee receives an invitation email for the campus even before their first day of work.
The introduction is a welcome course with short video tutorials on the platform and how blink.it can be saved directly to the home screen on their smartphones, like an app. The compulsory courses are structured more or less like a video game, where you work your way up from level to level to receive a certificate from your store manager at the end.
During the first few days of work, we in the T&D department and our colleagues on site in the stores will of course provide support if new employees have any questions about the courses or how to use them. Generally speaking, our eLearning platform is simply part of our corporate culture!
Thanks so much for the interview, Nico and Hendrik!
Conclusion: Know your employees! To get them excited about a learning platform, the content must be tailored to the target group. A diverse offering and the right format contribute significantly to the success of eLearning and blended learning in companies.