Online training a great success at Goossens living & sleeping

The personalized online learning environment of Goossens living & sleeping has only been live for a few weeks but is already a great success. We spoke to Raquel Vos, who works within the HR team of Goossens Wonen en Slapen as a company trainer. She talks about her and the HR team's experiences with SkillsTown's online learning platform.

On May 1, 2020, SkillsTown's online learning platform went live at Goossens living & sleeping. From that moment on, all employees could increase their level of knowledge on professional subjects but certainly also on a personal level.

Raquel indicates: "From our cultural values, we focus on collaboration, customer focus, creativity, and empathy. With this platform we can strengthen the cooperation between the different disciplines. In doing so, we find it important to keep the knowledge level of our employees up to par. Our customers like to be advised by experts and our colleagues must be able to give the right advice. It is therefore important to us that employees can continue to develop themselves. In our opinion, this contributes to job happiness. It is a win-win. Employees can develop themselves which makes them feel better in their own skin and better at their job."

Fully personalized learning platform

The online learning environment is completely personalized to the wishes of Goossens. For example, their own photos and images were used and the colors of the learning environment are in their own house style. "SkillsTown laid the complete foundation of the platform and personalized the academy. This way our employees really feel that they are learning within Goossens," said Raquel.

In addition to personalization in terms of design, Goossens also uses personalized learning lines. This is a compilation of existing or self-created training courses that allows employees to have direction in choosing a course. Raquel explains: "Together with SkillsTown, we have put together learning lines. These consist mainly of in-house training courses. Each employee, depending on the department or position, is assigned the appropriate learning line. Here we made a distinction between 'need to do' and 'nice to do'. In this way, employees are helped in their choice of training. It unburdens us enormously because this way we do not have to draw extra attention to this ourselves."

Link with personnel file (Afas)

At Goossens, the HR Team chose to link the online platform with the personnel information system. That way, existing and new employees get a personal login right away, and employees who leave employment are also automatically removed from the system. "Because we don't have to deal with the administrative side in the system, we can focus on creating our own content. Thanks to the automatic link, we don't have to worry about the access of new employees and outgoing employees in the online learning platform," Raquel said.

General training but also proprietary content

At Goossens, they not only use the standard training courses offered by SkillsTown. They also take advantage of the ability to add their own content to the digital learning environment. This allows them to share subject matter knowledge with employees in an easy and consistent way.

"For us, creating and adding our own content was decisive in choosing an online learning environment. And the nice thing is that SkillsTown looks on and gives didactic tips. Together with the various departments within Goossens we determine what content we want to share with employees, all for the optimal customer experience. Everyone has their own responsibility to make sure it stays up to date. Before we went live, we made sure that we had a good basis with our own training so that every department could view personalized content. We are going to add to this in the coming period. The nice thing is that there are already managers from different departments within Goossens who are showing initiative to share their own content via the platform," Raquel says enthusiastically.

Ultimate benefits according to Goossens:

• Easily and quickly add your own content
• Appropriate for every industry
• Super broad offering so there is always common ground
• Personalized allowing instant recognition
• Extremely user-friendly

First experiences with the learning platform

The platform was launched in corona time. And despite or perhaps because of the circumstances, Goossens noticed that employees who were working from home also felt a need for it.

Raquel says: "The learning platform has been very well received. At the time of launch, many of our colleagues were working from home, so we had to do a lot of the communication and implementation online. Because we started communication before the launch, many employees were very curious. We did this through short teasers that we created ourselves and shared within our online communication tool. For the implementation, we created a voice-over video that guides you through the platform. This is shown to every employee when he or she logs into our Goossens Academy for the first time. The first experiences are super positive. Employees think it looks professional, easy to use, manageable and above all fun to follow. Especially the store employees can easily take short courses between their work that can easily be completed within an hour. That's nice, because they need to be able to move quickly."