This is how Ambiq successfully deploys their learning platform for youth and adult care

Ambiq is an orthopedagogical center and treats and supports children, adolescents and adults with mild intellectual disabilities and additional problems. With their personalized online learning platform WIJZER, they ensure that employees have online learning opportunities in addition to physical training.

In this interview, Paulien van Rijswijk, training consultant at Ambiq, shares how they use this platform. Read on and get inspired!

The Youth Care Package

You want an online learning platform to meet all the needs of your employees and organization. Finding the right partnership can therefore take a lot of time. Paulien explains, "We had many different conversations. In the end, one of the turning points for our choice was SkillsTown's large generic offering, with not only personal and general training, but also the Youth Care Package which all includes online training for our industry. We also think it's important to add our own content, and that's possible at SkillsTown."

Create your own content

To make your training offerings as complete as possible, you can also develop your own trainings. Paulien: "We are very enthusiastic about the possibility of adding our own developed trainings. For example, we have made an e-learning about sex education and training for the AVG ourselves and placed it in WIJZER. For the coming period, we are going to develop even more in-house trainings in collaboration with SkillsTown. Our plan is to include our own webinars in the coming year, for example in the webinar studio of SkillsTown. This way, employees can choose the way of learning they like best."

TIP: By involving your own experts in creating your online training courses, you can share internal knowledge in an eye-catching way and your employees will find it even more interesting to attend these courses.

Paulien continues, "Last year we celebrated our 10th anniversary at Ambiq. Among other things, six different podcasts were recorded for both internal and external interested parties. In these, our own experts share knowledge about digital care, trauma and care in education, for example. We posted the podcasts on WIJZER for internal use. For external interested parties, the podcasts can be listened to via Spotify and SoundCloud."

Set up learning lines

By highlighting learning lines within the platform, you can spotlight trainings that fall under a particular theme. Paulien says: "We put our own learning lines ready on the platform for our employees to follow. Employees who don't know which training courses they can follow are immediately shown what might be interesting for them.

One example is the forensic learning line for adult care staff. Since adult care works with forensic clients, it's helpful for staff to learn more about this. In the learning lines we mix existing content from SkillsTown, but also own created content." By alternating learning lines, employees keep coming across new and interesting training courses.

Highlighting the learning platform

Make sure you bring the learning platform to the attention of your employees in an eye-catching way. The more they want to know and the more enthusiastic they will be to get started! Paulien explains, "To make employees aware of the growth opportunities the online platform offers, we made a flyer called: Growth + bloom. In it we tell them how to get to the platform and what they can find here. We sent the flyer along with a bag of flower seeds to every employee."

Fact: You can personalize the online learning platform and give it your own name. To come up with the name of the platform, Ambiq held a competition among their employees. This resulted in the name 'WIJZER'. This way, you even involve employees in the preliminary process!

The combination of online and offline resources provides additional attention. Paulien says, "We also share information about the platform on our internal communication platform. For example, we share the most followed modules, which trainings are popular and certificates that have been obtained. We want to share something at least once a quarter so that the learning platform stays alive among the employees."

Employee reactions

The online learning platform has been well received by employees. For example, WIJZER has already received many nice responses:

• "This is very valuable and a source of knowledge that we were very much looking for at this time! I have already seen great things about grooming, talking to parents about abuse, trauma-sensitive work and much more. Also handy that SKJ points can be obtained with it, top notch! Now to add to it and make it all AMBIQ's!"
• "This is really super! What a great platform with the opportunities to learn and delve into what you find interesting!"
• "Really very happy about this. Let's fill WIJZER with all the knowledge we have 'in house'!"