This customer is a leading financial services firm offering wholesale and retail banking, insurance, asset management and wealth management services across thirty-nine countries through partnerships and alliances.
With over 27,000 employees, the customer serves the needs of individuals and businesses in different regions. The customer considers people development a key driver of business growth and thus embarked on the mission to drive learning and upskilling at scale.
The problems to solve
The customer's earlier learning ecosystem did not support the firm's strategic goals to become more customer-focused, agile, digital and competitive. An internal analysis helped them identify the challenges of their talent development ecosystem and outlined the below problem statements:
- There was no core capability framework in place to define and drive learning
- Learning was skewed towards classroom training and came at a high cost of infrastructure, budget, time and resources
- Learning was difficult to scale, impacting their reskilling and upskilling efforts
- The current digital learning architecture delivered an overall poor user experience, required multiple sign-on, was device and bandwidth dependent and was not suitable for a new world of work (anytime, anywhere, any device)
- The learning ecosystem did not enable a culture of self-owned and lifelong learning
- Complex systems and data architecture were a hindrance to data-driven decision making
The mission
The customer's leadership team embarked on the mission to transform the employee experience. This laid the foundation for deploying a new tech platform:
- Be inclusive (i.e., cater to both permanent and contingent workforce)
- Scalable
- Enable self-service
- Enterprise-first mindset
- Enable anywhere, anytime, any-device learning
- Democratise access to learning
- Enable a great user experience
The mission was to transform employees' learning experiences and create a culture of lifelong learning through a personalised end-to-end modern learning ecosystem.
The Cornerstone solution
The customer partnered with Cornerstone to drive learning and upskilling for a +30,000-person global workforce. Key highlights of Cornerstone Learning Experience deployment include:
One-stop learning shop : The Cornerstone platform helped integrate content from various internal and external sources into a single window, available on the web or mobile and easily accessible via the SSO (single sign-on). The single point of access for learning content democratised learning and skills-building for the entire workforce, resulting in a personalised, simplified and improved learning experience.
Using a single platform for all learning content enabled the customer to prioritise effectively, source and design fit-for-purpose learning solutions to meet its business needs ahead of demand.
Seamless content integrations : Aligned to the customer's enterprise capabilities, various digital and leadership capability channels were set up inside the platform with content aggregation from open source, internal SharePoint and LMS (learning management system) plus key external sources like:
- LinkedIn Learning
- Skillsoft
- Udemy
- Coursera
- Overdrive
Group creation : Over 35 groups were created on the platform to leverage cluster-specific initiatives and support the capability to assign content and learning solutions based on strategic focus areas and business priorities. Examples of core business groups include:
- Retail and Business Banking: Driving and enabling the power skills initiative
- Wealth: "Power of 10" focused on upskilling leaders for the digital era
- Risk Business School
Learning channels : Over 200 channels aligned to various topics were created. The Discover page was personalised to populate relevant groups and channels to multiple employees, with custom carousels aligned with the customer's business architecture and talent development priorities. Some key channels include:
- Digital Capabilities
- Financial Service Capabilities
- Beyond Financial Systems and Ecosystem Capabilities
- Business Support Capabilities
Learning in the flow of work : Not limiting access to only the Cornerstone web portal and mobile app, the customer wanted to make learning accessible to employees at the moment of need, inside their daily applications of productivity. They activated the Cornerstone MS Teams widget, which made their LXP content available inside MS Teams, enabling learning in the flow of work.
Social and collaborative learning : With user-friendly authoring tools inside the Cornerstone Learning Experience, the customer was able to build and foster a network of internal experts, mentors, coaches and SMEs (subject matter experts) to share knowledge and insights and engage with other employees. This enabled capturing and sharing of institutional knowledge at scale. Collaborative learning also reduced reliance on external experts as the customer was able to leverage their rich diversity in thinking, knowledge and experience available internally.
Robust analytics : the analytics engine of Cornerstone Learning Experience, helped the customer's L&D team get access to rich data and insights so that they could stay focused on creating impactful L&D programs. In particular, Cornerstone Learning Experience's out-of-the-box analytics reports helped in the following:
- Understanding what is working and what is not, enabling agile response
- Enabling the learning community to self-serve and drive strategic initiatives
- Providing the ability to drive usage of its vast content library
- Helped in legislative reporting requirements and identifying future functionality releases
- Help the L&D team optimise the content portfolio with content analytics and get more of what is working on getting rid of what is not
- Proactively identify trending topics and what the learners are actually looking for with search analytics
Key outcomes
Since the launch of the digital learning platform powered by Cornerstone, the customer has experienced steady growth in monthly active learners and the feedback received to date has also been encouraging. Social interactions, organic searches, and learning content consumption continue to scale in the learning platform.
Highlights of L&D transformation success include:
- With Cornerstone Learning Experience, the customer is on the path to enabling proactive reskilling and upskilling to create a future-ready workforce
- Teams and individuals are taking ownership of their development
- Personalised learning aligned to individual and team interests coupled with learning goals and preferences is resulting in increased self-directed career development and skilling
- Learning is aligned to learner preferences (time, place and channel), resulting in an improved learning experience in the flow of work
- Cornerstone Learning Experience is acting as an enabler to drive critical capability-building initiatives through various digital academies on the platform
- The customer is able to leverage social learning with 32K likes, 12K comments, 100K bookmarks and 8K shares of learning content between colleagues
- With over 120K searches on the platform already, the L&D team knows exactly what their employees are looking for, which makes content sourcing and curation priorities clear ahead of time
- The L&D team is now enabled to drive self-directed learning at scale, aligned to business priorities
Cornerstone Learning Experience has massively improved the learner experience and will continue to become more personalised as more content, partnerships and skills are added to the platform. AI-enabled, personalised content and learning paths will prepare employees for multiple careers and build multi-disciplinary skills for work and life.
The impact in numbers
Cornerstone Learning Experience deployment is helping the customer build an employee-centric learning culture across the organisation. Here are some of the critical KPIs defining their success:
- +30K registered users
- 70% platform adoption rate
- 50% monthly active users
- +140K unique content completions in 90 days
- +10K badges issued
