Partou childcare center breaks records with online learning

In recent months, childcare provider Partou has achieved record numbers in terms of online training and development among their employees. They have been enthusiastic users of SkillsTown's online learning environment since 2016. As a result, Partou received the prestigious Skills2Perform award this year.

We spoke to Marieke Hochstenbach, manager of learning & development at Partou about their experiences with the online platform and how they achieved these record numbers.

Started its own micro-courses

When Partou started working with SkillsTown in 2016, it was primarily with the goal of sharing complicated material with employees in a simpler way. "Initially, we created our own essentials that explained complicated regulations and legislation in a simple way. For us, it is important to provide mandatory knowledge that is important for educational staff. Essentials were a nice, accessible and quick way to do this," Marieke said.

"We get a tremendous amount of positive feedback and employees are amazed at how much fun it actually is."

It soon became apparent that these micro-courses were enormously well received by employees, and Partou expanded their offerings to include SkillsTown's general training courses and those with specific childcare knowledge. "After the essentials, we opened up the rest of the trainings more. Employees were first introduced to the platform through the essentials we created ourselves. That was so well received that we then made the other offerings available as well. Employees are now given time to use freely for their own development," Marieke said.

Extra attention to development in corona period

Employees in child care fall within the professional group of "vital professions. Especially at the beginning of the corona period, this had a great impact on Partou. Childcare centers had to close, but partially remain available for emergency care. Marieke explains, "Because many children stayed home at the beginning of the corona outbreak, we temporarily closed some of our branches. This left our staff sitting at home, but the work they perform cannot be done from home. That's why we put even more effort into personal development during that period. Together with SkillsTown, we moved quickly and prepared learning lines on certain topics in the online platform. We asked employees to devote part of their day to those learning lines and they did so en masse!"

Ultimate benefits according to Partou:

• Comprehensive implementation support
• Attractive and fresh training courses
• Continuously responsive to change
• Many different and innovative learning phenomena

Not surprisingly, over 100,000 training courses have been followed at Partou in the past period and employees have obtained a total of more than 10,000 certificates. That is an enormous amount when you consider that Partou has 2,700 employees. One of the most followed trainings in this regard was "COVID-19 and the coronavirus. Marieke explains: "During this period, employees really experienced what the learning platform contains. Before, employees mainly followed the mandatory content, but now they have had a lot of time to look at it extensively. We get an enormous amount of positive feedback and employees are amazed at how much fun it actually is."