10 Companies with Innovative L&D Best Practices

Looking to jazz up your company’s L&D program? At Udemy for Business, our Customer Success team is able to partner with innovative companies all around the world. We learn from our customers every day and are frequently inspired by their creative L&D strategies. Read on to get ideas for promoting programs, boosting engagement, and creating a culture of learning from our Udemy for Business customers.

1. ITX: Using L&D to attract new talent

Full lifecycle software development company ITX Corp. helps companies develop and shape their product vision and bring it to life in a way that helps turn customers into lifelong brand advocates.
ITX embraces a growth mindset and chose Udemy to encourage self-directed learning among its employees. ITX integrates the Udemy for Business platform as part of individual development plans for employees. The L&D team has also created internal communication channels to encourage employees to share what courses they’re taking and which instructors they recommend. But it’s not only ITX employees who benefit from access to Udemy—the company also shares courses with potential new hire candidates to demonstrate its commitment to learning and build relationships with key talent. The results so far have been impressive: 82% of employees have completed at least one course, more than 2,330 collective hours of learning have been logged, and each employee has completed an average of more than 14 hours of training. It’s been a busy year and ITX has broken records on all aspects of their performance, including hiring. To learn more about how ITX has been using Udemy to attract, retain, and develop talent, see Inspiring Teams to Continuously Learn and Improve with Udemy.

2. Box: Career development with a dose of healthy competition

Cloud content management company Box believes that L&D is an essential component of employee engagement. To create career development opportunities at Box, the People team likes to encourage a little healthy competition when it comes to L&D. When launching a new L&D program with Udemy, Box did a “25 x 25 x 25” promotion. The first 25 people to watch 25 minutes of Udemy content won $25 gift cards. To make the prizes extra special, the gift cards were decorated with balloons and chapstick.

3. Prosper: Creating a culture of learning

Prosper cultivates a culture of learning at its monthly town hall meetings and through internal social media channels. Prosper is a leading peer-to-peer lending marketplace that connects people who want to borrow money with individuals and institutions that want to invest in consumer credit. At Prosper’s monthly Town Hall meetings—where the leadership team keeps employees up to date on what’s happening at the company—the People team shares a slide on “Prosper Picks,” popular Udemy courses employees recommend. Sometimes courses are work-related and sometimes they’re simply for personal development. For example, employees recommended Personal Financial Well-Being and How to Become an Exceptional Writer. These monthly top picks are also shared on the internal social media channel Slack and on their TV screens throughout the offices.

4.TrustArc: Weaving L&D into onboarding

Privacy solutions company TrustArc weaves L&D programming into new hire onboarding. If new hires want to receive a company hoodie, they have to earn it by completing Employee Stock Options & RSUs, EU GDPR: Employee Awareness Training Certificate 2018, and one course of their choosing. This ensures all employees start off with the same foundation of knowledge, that they get in the habit of learning at work—and that they look great while learning, too.

5.Getty Images: WeLearn Wednesdays leads to an uptick in learning

Encouraging learning is an ongoing process at visual content provider Getty Images, so the Talent and Leadership Development Team started a custom of “WeLearn Wednesdays.” Every Wednesday, they’ll share one recommended Udemy course through Slack, their internal social media platform. They’ve used this platform to promote a wide variety of courses, covering everything from Kim Scott on Radical Candor and Microsoft Excel – Data Analysis with Pivot Tables to Awaken Your Heart, Creativity & Wisdom with Tara Branch. One especially effective tactic included having their Chief HR Officer share what he was learning by posting a photo of himself learning at his stand-up desk on Slack. He urged everyone to enroll and spend an hour taking a course. Following the share, Getty Images saw a huge uptick in employee enrollment and Udemy usage that day.

6. Acorns Grow: Building the wealth, minds, and bodies of the Acorns team

Micro investing app Acorns is a company that understands the power of an integrated approach to wellness—that fiscal, mental, and physical fitness all positively impact overall health and work performance. In January, Acorns developed a Udemy course for team members to get their finances in shape. Acorns’ Guide to Personal Finance breaks down the basics of personal finance and wealth building, offering up practical advice to everyone on how to save, invest, earn more, and stop living paycheck to paycheck.
In April, Acorns expanded on its commitment to wellness with the launch of a program encouraging its team members to strengthen their minds and bodies. In addition to running a fitness challenge for the month with fitness tracking app Count.It, Acorns also promoted the exploration of the personal development content on Udemy. All employees who completed at least one Udemy course in the subject were eligible to win an Amazon gift card.
Acorns’ Guide to Personal Finance is now available on Udemy for Business and was recently featured in our roundup of in-demand skills your employees need today.
Acorns is accessed simply and easily via the app for iPhone, Android, or desktop. Visit Acorns.com for more.

7. Explore Data Science Academy: Using a blended learning model

Explore Data Science Academy teaches students how to solve real-world problems with the latest tools, algorithms, and platforms. This education-focused company is using Udemy in a blended learning approach. The academy has a full-year data science program with 100 students and a 6-month software development course with 140 students. They use Udemy as supplemental online training to their classroom instruction. This program has had great results, with the average user spending 22.7 hours learning on Udemy over the past three months.

8. Canadian Pacific: Amazing Race trivia contest to test learning

Canadian Pacific uses Udemy to upskill their IT employees. In order to get employees excited about learning on Udemy, Canadian Pacific launched an Amazing Race-style competition where they paired employees from different teams to compete in answering questions about content that they learned on Udemy. The winning team received Udemy backpacks.

9. Appian: Creating personalized learning pathways to meet employee goals

At digital platform company Appian, the Engineering Department encourages learning during one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports. Managers work with employees to help create personalized learning pathways to help their direct reports meet their goals. In one recent case, an employee needed to learn a web technology (Webpack) and after spending four hours studying, he was able to complete a project using the newly learned skill later that week. Recently, Appian launched a company-wide learning platform, Appian University, to further their commitment as a learning organization.

10. TBC Corporation: Just-in-time learning helps solves problems on the job

TBC Corporation is one of the nation’s largest marketers of tires for the automotive replacement market with more than 10,500 employees throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The TBC Learning Group used Udemy for Business as part of a flipped classroom and blended learning approach. For example, as part of their instructor-led Business Writing course, “Business and Technical Writing Immersion Course,” employees were assigned online writing courses as “pre-work” so they compiled drafts before coming to the class. This not only shortened the class length, but also increased the efficiency and effectiveness. Instead of “instructing,” the Udemy for Business courses set a foundation, so the instructor was able to dive directly into the hands-on part of her class.
What also drove engagement was the way courses were broken down into bite-sized lectures on the Udemy for Business platform, enabling people to learn only what they needed to know. One employee attended over 100 courses but only consumed the specific sections that were useful to him and helped solve a problem in his daily workflow. This self-directed “just-in-time” learning empowered TBC employees to optimize what they learned and when they needed to learn.
Through just-in-time learning and a blended approach to L&D, TBD was able to create a program that saw 71% of employees taking their first course within 30 days. Learning engagement for all users was 84%, while the top 10% of “active users” enjoyed a 98% learning engagement rate in the first 60 days of receiving a Udemy for Business license.