Following a comprehensive appraisal process, Specsavers partnered with Learn Amp for the platform’s ability to provide an intuitive user experience, reduced administration time, with functionality enabling the L&D team to decentralise learning and empower people to take ownership of their learning.
The Specsavers team had developed a new learning strategy, including:
- Need for learning to live in stores: Right Learning, Right Time, Right Place
- Reduced time to competency
- Delivery through a variety of channels
- Support people to learn more quickly and on-the-job
- Enable self-directed, peer and ongoing learning
- Micro-learning, where possible (<10 mins)
- Packaged, curated, blended
- Needs defined accurately and quickly
In partnership with Learn Amp, Specsavers embarked on a journey to deliver their revised learning strategy; transforming the delivery and quality of learning across the region to deliver their overall vision: that Learning Lives in Store – Right Learning, Right Time, Right Place. Within this vision there were three key focus areas: Learning Culture, Learning Experience and Learning Management.
On brand
This began by using the fully customisable branding options in Learn Amp to give the platform its own look and feel, including the name ‘iLearn’. Specsavers wanted to created an environment that felt unique to Specsavers and effectively immersed existing and new team members to Specsavers’ culture, so having the option to fully customise the branding of the platform was crucial.
Access for a highly-distributed workforce
In addition, by leveraging the customisable log-in options with Learn Amp, to enable the use of a custom username rather than an email address being used as a username, since email addresses weren’t unique per user in our environment. This meant that all in-store colleagues could access learning at any time, despite not having a personal Specsavers email address.
Getting 6,000 users up to speed, fast
Using in-app pop-up guides, Specsavers were able to quickly get their 6,000 new users up to speed with the platform, which they named iLearn. By creating a 'Welcome' learnlist with videos and tutorials, and featuring these on personalised homepage dashboards, the Specsavers team could help learners get the most from the new platform and deliver a consistent experience without manually assigning content, or running training sessions which they’d have to repeat.
And they didn't stop there! Specsavers continued to use dashboards to highlight monthly updates and learning opportunities, such as their regular ‘Month in Focus’ learning and customised channels of ‘How Do I?’ information for each role.
Structured onboarding and upskiller programmes
By structuring content into learnlists (modules) and channels (categories), Specsavers could build their onboarding journey for new team members. This included a combination of eLearning modules, documents and videos, structured into modules so learners had everything they needed in one place.
As well as onboarding, Specsavers used learnlists and channels to create specialist training for teams needing to develop expertise in their skill areas - in particular so they could achieve their goal of increasing team member competency to Level 2.
They built award-winning upskiller learning pathways across a range of programmes - for example, a series of modules for their Optics teams to ensure that new members had all the skills needed to hit the ground running. These modules are fully automated to assign to new Optics team members in specific locations, so the Learning and Development team no longer need to administrate learning.
With built-out upskiller pathways, the Specsavers L&D team are now able to decentralise the ‘control’ over learning to subject matter experts (such as In-Store Trainers) - as trainers have all the resources they need in one place. This has meant the L&D team can balance consistency and high quality of learning with decentralising ownership, despite having a highly-distributed workforce across Australia and New Zealand.
Bringing expert training to team members
Previously, much of the specialist training was delivered in-person, resulting in high expense for travel and lost time. The Specsavers team transformed this approach:
- Using Learn Amp events, Specsavers were able to promote and deliver all in-person training events, virtually.
- Using the Zoom integration, Specsavers could automate the uploading of session recordings, and attendance automatically tracked.
Managing risk in a highly-regulated industry
Being in a highly-regulated industry meant it was important for Specsavers to maintain the integrity of previous learning records tracked in the old system. They were able to map almost 2 million records of historical completion data to content in their new iLearn, meaning they're able to continue reporting on completion data for both ‘active’ team members and team members no longer at Specsavers.
Using task automations, Specsavers could set up a series of tasks to go to the right people, in the right locations at the right time, which send out reminders to learners and their managers to ensure a high level of compliance is maintained across all regions.
Using an optional 'time-out' setting, Specsavers could meet security standards by timing out users after no activity for a set time period. With team members in stores so often on the move or away from devices, this was vital to ensuring a higher level of security.
