Resource Topic: Learning

The Client

This global technology leader builds popular consumer electronics devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and wearable accessories, as well as software, productivity, and entertainment products. They have developed a reputation for innovation and a sleek design ethos that have made them an international household name.

The Challenge: Upskilling from Within — Creating New Career Opportunities in an Established Workforce

In response to a growing global shortage of technical talent and high attrition rates, this client looked inward to address some of its technical staffing needs.

“The rationale is simple—there’s a very competitive hiring landscape for specific roles in the technology workforce economy,” explains Chris Knotts, a Director in the Cprime Learning Practice. “As a result, the device manufacturer wanted to cultivate talent from within their own ranks. Selecting and promoting people already familiar with their culture not only improves employee retention over the long term, it is also more cost effective.”

It was not an idea new to the organization. The company already had a mechanism in place to recruit and upskill employees, but the program had a limited scope and capacity. The device manufacturer wanted to expand its internal retraining capabilities to include two emergent high-demand subject areas—Quality Assurance (QA) and Enterprise Program Management (EPM).

The fundamental challenge for the company, however, wasn’t a lack of expertise, it was a lack of bandwidth.

“They knew exactly what they wanted to do, they just needed help with the execution. They wanted someone to overcome the hurdles that prevented them from doing it themselves,” says Knott. “They needed external muscle to come in and perform the administration, needs assessment, and training design and then get in there and do the actual coaching.”

To achieve that within a limited timeframe, the company required an experienced training partner with established expertise and an inventory of relevant course materials. While they expected a customized training experience tailored to their needs, they did not want to begin from scratch.

Solution: Cprime—a Multi-Disciplined Team with the Right Educational Assets

Based on previous success working together to fulfill its Atlassian tooling needs, the manufacturer shortlisted Cprime as a candidate in its request for proposal (RFP) call. Cprime won the bid on the strength of its expansive subject expertise and proven track record.

“Cprime met all their personnel and asset requirements,” says Knotts. “We had the experience and instructors, and our learning catalog contained the exact course materials that they wanted us to design.”

The Cprime team began the course design phase by sitting down with the management and supervisory teams to further sharpen requirements and clarify expectations. Cprime then collaborated with the company over the course of two months to develop and deliver multiple iterations of the training.

 

“They knew exactly what they wanted to do, they just needed help with the execution, someone to overcome the hurdles preventing them from doing it themselves. They wanted skilled external muscle to come in and perform the administration, needs assessment, and training design and then get in there and do the actual coaching.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

 

Rapidly Iterating to Meet Client Requirements

Each of the iterations involved further defining the course design and objectives, selecting and refining course content, and creating assessment criteria to determine successful learning outcomes. A multi-disciplined Cprime team of nine people provided input to ensure the courses reflected the most up-to-date industry best practices. Leadership and subject experts from the device manufacturer’s internal talent development team provided regular input to maintain alignment between Cprime’s output and the company’s culture and ways of working.

“We worked directly with their QA and EPM stakeholders, embedding with the functional heads of the teams that we would train, so they could inject their input right from the beginning,” says Knotts. “We ended up with the Quality Assurance and Enterprise Project Management learning tracks based on Cprime library materials but entirely unique to the device manufacturer’s needs.”

The resulting course materials combined core Cprime course content with practical use cases that helped students relate them to real-world situations and expanded their understanding of how the principles fit the manufacturer’s greater project environment.

An experienced Cprime enterprise technology coach then delivered each session, beginning with core concepts and shifting into on-the-job mentorship, demonstrating key competencies on the job.

“The Cprime technology coaches got deeply involved with the teams, fostering the practical application of the software testing they were teaching,” says Knotts. “It wasn’t a matter of spoon-feeding them a lecture, It was very hands-on.”

 

“We worked directly with their Quality Assurance and Enterprise Program Management stakeholders — embedding with the functional heads of the teams that we would train — so they could include their input right from the beginning.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

 

Results: Off-the-shelf Training Content Combined With Custom Coach Delivery

With only two months to prepare, Cprime delivered two intensive, ten-day training sessions. The coaches began training the first cohorts of the device manufacturer’s internal promotion candidates on the new learning tracks in month three.

The Cprime trainers then oversaw concurrent online and localized training sessions at the client’s main California campus, training over 70 people across five cohorts.

Despite the very intensive preparation, planning, and tight timeframes, Cprime received positive feedback from the students and impressed the company leadership with their results.

“Our emphasis on the hands-on, real-world coaching component enhanced what could have easily been dry, theoretical training sessions has been really meaningful for the students,” says Knotts. “Both the students and the stakeholders really liked what we were doing and how we did it.”

Because of early successes with the pilot, the device manufacturer is already looking toward a continued partnership.

“They invited Cprime to plan a second set of sessions,” says Knotts. “They knew exactly what they needed and their standards were high. Because the project was under such heavy scrutiny, It’s been really satisfying to exceed their expectations.”

 

“Cprime’s emphasis on hands-on, real-world coaching component into what could have been dry, theoretical, training sessions has been really meaningful for the students. Both the students and the stakeholders really liked what we were doing and how we did it.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

If you’d like to see similar results for your organization, explore our flexible Learning Pathways and Technical Coaching solutions.

The Client

Few financial institutions offer greater depth and breadth of services than this U.S. based global banking and investment leader. Besides retail and commercial banking services, they are also a custodian bank for many of the financial industry’s largest hedge and investment funds.

We began working with the organization in 2014 and the relationship has grown and strengthened over the years. In 2019, it took a huge leap forward when we took on a new initiative to deliver the company’s proprietary software engineering onboarding and training courses globally across six time zones. (To learn more about that epic undertaking, read the case study here.)

The Challenge: Onboarding and Upskilling a Global Development Organization

The need for qualified software engineers and DevOps professionals has been speeding up globally for years and shows no signs of slowing down. The financial services industry is no exception, and a large digital transformation necessitates new roles and qualified professionals to fill them. So, our client found themselves in a familiar position: needing to prepare a large number of existing team members to thrive under a new way of working even while zealously working to transform their development organization to support enterprise agility.

With a software engineering workforce numbering in the thousands—and constantly growing—this was no small task.

Fortunately, Cprime had already cultivated a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with the company that already spanned nearly six years.

Alex Gray, Cprime’s Lean Agile Practice Lead on the engagement, explains, “It was really the relationship and reputation we’d cultivated with the software engineers onboarding training that encouraged them to approach us about this new program. We were glad to get the opportunity.”

So, when this initiative began in 2022, they trusted us to get it off the ground.

The Solution: Custom “Blended Workshop” Learning Academies Delivered with Speed and Finesse

Unlike our previous learning engagements with this client, they asked us to generate custom coursework rather than facilitating courses they had already developed internally. The initial request was for an e-learning course for Scrum Masters (referred to as Agile Leads within the company), so that’s where we began.

An initial plan for the learning Academies

“Our first step,” Alex says, “was to develop a storyboard outlining the general learning objectives for the e-learning course, and how the modules would progress. We put that together and reviewed it with the client leadership team.”

After iterating on the storyboard, they fleshed out the content within that framework. The goal for the e-learning course was to cover the core fundamentals any new or existing Agile Lead would need to know to succeed in their role. Rob Hill, a Cprime Learning Consultant, explains, “This was a combination of standard Agile concepts and best practices combined with terminology and processes unique to the organization, designed to get Agile Leads at various levels of experience up-to-speed quickly.”

Once we developed the initial content and the client approved, we collaborated with a partner vendor that created the actual course using Adobe Captivate. These experienced practitioners made suggestions around visuals, format and frequency of quizzes, and the general flow of the learning path. Where it added value, we implemented the changes before coming back to the client with a completed SCORM file. They uploaded that to their Learning Management System (LMS) so they could securely host the course internally and students could access it through their Learning and Development portal.

“It was really the relationship and reputation we’d cultivated with the software engineers onboarding training that encouraged them to approach us about this new program. We were glad to get the opportunity.” -Alex Gray, Cprime Lean Agile Practice Lead

Developing the blended workshop approach

“Although the e-learning course was very good,” Alex says, “we felt there would be tremendous value in giving the students the opportunity to interact with each other and expert instructors. So, we developed a complementary instructor-led workshop as well.”

Students completed the e-learning course remotely and at their own pace. Then, in small, structured cohorts, they would come together in the workshops (virtually or in-person) to discuss what they’d learned, ask questions, and run through several interactive exercises.

Rob continues, “This blended learning approach offers students the best of both worlds: the ease and convenience of e-learning and the enrichment of a more traditional face-to-face workshop so they can apply their knowledge to real-world scenarios and get some experience working with the new concepts. More practical, less theoretical.”

Expanding to meet growing demand

The Agile Leads course thrilled the client, so they requested more courses in the same format for additional roles. Thus far, we have developed blended learning courses for:

• Agile Lead
• Product Owner
• Agile Lead Coaching
• UX Designer
• Engineering Lead
• Product Adoption
• System Architect

Additionally, we have developed these instructor-led courses:

• Agile Architect
• Agile Designer
• Agile Engineering Lead
• Agile Product Owner
• Agile Scrum Master
• Agile Stakeholder
• Agile Story Writing
• Agile Customer Centricity
• Defining your Product Roadmap
• Implementing Kanban
• Agile Team Transformation
• Agile Product Adoption
• Agile Stakeholder Management
• Agile Coaching
• Shift Left

Alex adds, “As the organization continues scaling their Agile practice and the teams mature, they have requested courses covering more mature subjects and advanced roles.”

The Results: Top Scores from Students and Enhanced Trust from Leadership

The results of this training program have been remarkable. Over 4,700 students have gone through the programs Cprime has developed since 2020. And feedback has remained very positive nearly across the board.

Feedback scores of 4+

“We request feedback from every student, and it has thrilled us to find nearly all of them have rated the course material and the instructors at four or better out of five,” Alex says. “We’ve heard comments like, ‘this wasn’t like any other classes I’ve taken—I feel like I can go out immediately and use what I’ve learned.’ That’s really gratifying.”

Of course, perfection is unrealistic. In one case, a trainer we brought in simply didn’t mesh well with the teams and we saw some negative feedback as a result. So, we immediately rectified the matter and feedback scores rose again.

“In some ways, negative feedback is even more valuable because it supports our and the client’s mutual commitment to continuous improvement.”

From trainers to trusted advisors

Alex concludes, “I think the most telling result of this engagement is how our relationship with the client has expanded. They already considered us excellent trainers. But now, they view us as trusted advisors, which is exactly what we want to be. Whether it be refining the courses in play or considering where new courses may be of value, we’re working together to deliver the greatest value to the organization.”

Could Your Company Benefit from Results Like These?

Explore our training solutions today and speak to a learning expert so we can help your organization achieve something similar.

The Client

Since its formation in 2011, this company has grown into one of the world’s largest transportation groups. Operating leading airlines in Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, its premium and budget brands connect over 350 destinations worldwide. Moreover, they serve nearly 120 million passengers and move countless tonnes of cargo annually.

The Challenge: An Unexpected Market Upheaval Provides an Opportunity to Upgrade Internal Processes

Every airline struggled through the long and unpredictable travel restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this group was no exception. However, looking ahead, leadership focused the time on improving the company’s internal tools and processes to ensure they came out of the situation stronger and in a better position to weather change in the future. Meanwhile, they also created a new business unit dedicated to their global tech operations. 

To learn more about the digital and scaled Agile transformation they took on, read the case study here.

A vital part of every successful enterprise-wide transformation is a robust training program to enable and empower employees at all levels of the organisation to succeed in the new reality the transformation is creating. However, the global tech business unit did not have a formal learning and development program set up. 

So, they turned to Cprime—their trusted transformation partner—to quickly spin up a training program that could start making a difference immediately.

The Solution: An Innovative Approach to Rapid Training Success Across 19 Tracks

Unlike many learning and development engagements Cprime has headed up, a quick turnaround was of high priority because the client was pursuing a tight timeline for their digital transformation. By the time the organisation was ready to pursue this new training program, the goal was to have employees fully trained on new roles, concepts, and processes (which were still being established) progressively over a period of 18 to 24 months, starting as soon as possible.

Rather than creating bespoke training courses with original custom content—an excellent but time-consuming option—the training team decided to focus on sourcing, curating, and coordinating delivery of existing courses that would fill the client’s needs as quickly as possible.

Progressive, role-based training in three phases

“We started by outlining a series of learning pathways in three phases,” recalls Alex Gray, Cprime’s Lean Agile Practice Lead on the engagement. “They had to be role-specific, developed in priority order. They also needed to be tailored to ensure students would be able to absorb the elementary level coursework immediately, and would then be knowledgeable enough to successfully progress through intermediate and advanced coursework as the transformation progressed around them.” 

As a result, pathways were developed to guide students to take on 19 different roles within the transformed tech business unit:

“Each level of each pathway included a group of core modules that contained the basic concepts, required skills, and practical guidelines around fulfilling each role in the transformed organisation. Then, a range of additional modules provided supplemental knowledge and deeper dives into each role, which the students could take on at their own pace.”

But how were the learning pathways developed so quickly? 

A new training role created to fill the need

Alex continues, “Since we were not creating any of the content, we needed to approach building these learning pathways in a different way. I worked closely with Aradhana Sabherwal—one of Cprime’s experienced Agile Coaches—to fill a new role we haven’t needed in the past. We called it the Learning Curator.”

The responsibility of the Learning Curator was to:

• Identify any learning challenges across the business unit
• Suggest the skills that could help the organisation meet those challenges
• Liaise with internal SMEs to understand the client’s learning context
• Seek out Agile learnings that could instil those skills in the teams
• Describe the modes and formats in which the learning would be delivered to the teams
• Design the learning pathways
• Build the system and access points to support the teams’ learning and application

“Once we had an outline of the pathways completed, it became a matter of leveraging Cprime’s own catalogue of existing instructor-led courses where possible, and seeking out third-party classes and interactive video courses to fill in the gaps where necessary.”

Coordination and management to keep the program on track

This unique combination of formats and providers required the efforts of an exceptional Learning Manager—a role well-suited to Cprime’s Vicky Brownsell.

“Vicky serves as the coordinator that ensures the ongoing training program runs smoothly, because there are a lot of moving parts.”

“Once we had an outline of the pathways completed, it became a matter of leveraging Cprime’s own catalogue of existing instructor-led courses where possible, and seeking out third-party classes and interactive video courses to fill in the gaps where necessary.” -Alex Gray, Cprime Lean Agile Practice Lead

The Learning Manager’s responsibilities include:

• Hosting in our learning management system (LMS) and training management system (TMS)
• Coordination of the training schedules to support each student’s progressive learning path 
• Booking participants onto Cprime and external courses
• Following up with participants to make sure they have booked, attended, and completed classes
• Engaging with Cprime instructors and third party vendors to solidify schedules 
• Agreeing the best possible rates with third party vendors to ensure the client is getting the best deal without compromising on quality
• Coordinating billing and invoicing between the client and training providers

“Vicky’s work has been invaluable over the last three quarters as the training program has only grown in size and complexity,” Alex says.

The Results: Smooth, Progressive Training with Clear Practical Impact

“The most powerful evidence of the success of this program is the fact that the students who have gone through the program are successfully applying what they’ve learned to their evolving roles within the changing organisation.” 

So far (as of January 2023) 265 students have benefited from a total of 932 hours of education in the ten months since the program launched. Cprime has also worked simultaneously with the client to develop internal capabilities so they will be able to take over the management responsibilities to keep the program running continuously going forward.

Alex adds, “Something else that underlines the value Cprime brought to this engagement was the fact that our executive sponsor started out requesting continuous input as every detail was arranged. But, she very quickly grew comfortable with the level of quality, efficiency, and professionalism we brought to the table. Now, she only wants a weekly update to keep her in the loop, and she’s thrilled with the outcomes so far.”

Consequently, as the client’s transformation progresses, these qualified and experienced students are forming a strong foundation of expertise to solidify the new way of working.

Could Your Company Benefit from Results Like These?

Whether you’re undergoing a large-scale transformation or just looking to upskill your teams to increase productivity, efficiency, and quality, Cprime’s pre-developed and custom learning solutions can get you there. Contact us today to explore your options.