The ALTANA team was open to creative ideas and to relying on the expertise and recommendations of the imc team. Following a joint kick-off meeting on site, ALTANA opted for a programme comprising two different but interlocking parts. The first part was the general onboarding programme – mandatory for new employees and voluntary for the old hands.

The second part was the training programme specifically for leadership personnel. The idea was that existing employees moving up into leadership roles would only have to do the leadership part. External leadership appointees, on the other hand, would have to complete both parts.

Schaeffler aims to be completely climate neutral by 2040. Its in-house production will be climate neutral by 2030, and its entire supply chain will achieve climate-neutrality by 2040. “That’s a very ambitious goal, certainly, but we are utterly determined to achieve it,” emphasises Nadja Lemke, Schaeffler’s Senior Vice President Global Branding & Marketing.

“But, of course, we will only succeed if everyone gets onboard.” Which is why Schaeffler is seeking to harness its employees’ creativity and expertise. It wants to draw together ideas from all areas of the company worldwide.

This was the thinking behind Schaeffler’s Climate Action Day, a group-wide event staged in June 2022. On that day, all the company’s employees paused their normal work for 90 minutes. For 90 minutes, they jointly focused on the challenges posed for Schaeffler and for society generally by climate change. In over 4,000 workshops worldwide, they developed a wealth of ideas for reducing CO2 emissions in their respective departments.

Climate Action Day was also to be a day of learning. Employees were to improve their knowledge of sustainability and climate neutrality through in-person and online workshops. But how, exactly?

All STIHL tools, whether chainsaws, lawnmowers or hedge clippers, are high quality, safe and easy to use, and built to last. Therefore, many people keep their STIHL tools their whole life and have them serviced and repaired at their local specialised dealerships.

Consequently, employees at the 50,000 dealerships worldwide must be able to repair any older model at any time. And to enable that, employees and sales partners need access to detailed information on all STIHL products. This information needs to be in digital form, quick to access, and available worldwide.

All of this learning content would be imparted by trainers in in-person training workshops. But once it became apparent that the pandemic was not going away any time soon, and that steps therefore needed to be taken to protect employees, Vodafone decided to digitalise these training workshops.

That was at the start of 2021. Vodafone HR Learning Manager Sabine Fusenig remembers the decision well: “Even before the pandemic, we had been considering digitalising our onboarding programme in order to improve quality and standardisation. A key requirement was that our trainers retain their central role but be given more time to provide one-on-one support. We had already worked with imc Learning on a number of successful projects and were keen to see what they would come up with to meet these requirements.”

It was immediately obvious to imc that an undertaking of this complexity and scope called for an extremely well-thought-out blended learning concept. Keeping learners engaged over several days of at-home online learning was clearly going to take more than run-of-the-mill online lectures or hours of video content. Because to deliver 2030 minutes of learning, you need variety.

With this in mind, the team from imc’s content department put their heads together with the Vodafone team. They developed a blended learning concept called “Basic Customer Care”, or BCC for short. This new onboarding programme is strong on variety, comprising such varied components as a trailer video, performance cards, a four-day challenge, a learning diary, a central portal page and a “Vodafone Island” 3D map.

Sabine Fusenig agrees: “imc has been a very constructive, pleasant and reliable partner to work with. The project managers defined clear structures, including timelines, so everyone knew exactly what they had to deliver, and by when.”

It was also a special project experience for the business-side team at Vodafone, which consisted of the Training Specialist Manuela Jeschke and the three trainers Monika Arenz, Rene Schmelzer and Dirk Winkler. They spent many weeks compiling and reviewing content and providing feedback.

“Here on the Vodafone project team, we have a really good handle on things and are very well coordinated. But we are a learning organisation, and this was a learning opportunity,” says the HR Learning Manager. “We had half-hour sprint meetings with imc twice a week and were given ‘homework’ to do after each session. Also, we had separate kick-off meetings for each day of the onboarding programme so that we could define clear goals and structures for each day of programming at the outset.”

Before corona, Jägermeister took a rather traditional approach to learning and knowledge-sharing. In most cases, new employees, distribution partners and resellers were invited directly to the headquarters in Wolfenbüttel to help them learn about the brand and understand it better. There, they would receive all the necessary training on the products and get a feel for the brand.

Yet, even before the pandemic, it was clear that this system needed to be optimised, and Jägermeister started to look into procuring a learning management system (LMS). Professional training courses in e-learning format were also on the wish list back then.

The range of training to be covered by the LMS, individual learning nuggets and web-based training (WBT) went beyond the offering for external distribution and trading partners. For instance, different target groups from apprentices and trainees to the CEO needed to gain an in-depth understanding of e-commerce.

At the same time, a coherent and strong brand image that all employees identify with is a top priority for Jägermeister. Therefore, the learner experience was considered crucial.

The Hansgrohe Group is committed to top quality. Delivering on this commitment entails communicating the quality message to all employees at multiple locations around the globe. To that end, the company needed to guarantee the same high level of expertise in all its divisions, whether in the USA, Europe, or China.

Face-to-face professional development was another challenge: shift workers in production had few options for attending courses held at remote locations during their normal working hours.

When employees learn that they have to attend compliance training, their enthusiasm is often limited. The trainees are usually hostile to the training even before it begins.

Audi therefore wanted to train employees with an unusual compliance training course in such a way that the necessary knowledge is clearly conveyed to them and, ideally, they also have fun during the training.

Arbeit und Leben (English: work and life) Berlin-Brandenburg provides support to people from many backgrounds. These include apprentices, job-seekers, low-skilled workers, and people with limited digital literacy and limited skills in reading, writing, and math.  

To combat the skills shortage, it aims to help people from many different (educational) backgrounds through further training and improved preparation for workforce entry. 

Accordingly, it trains instructors and apprentices and advises businesses and educational institutions on implementing targeted learning in the workplace. 

But it wanted to incorporate modern, digital learning methods into its offering. And for that, it needed a tool that was easy for teaching staff to integrate into their teaching practice. The idea was to facilitate greater long-term retention of knowledge by turning the learners themselves into producers of learning media. 

After much comparison and testing, Johanna Lambertz from Arbeit und Leben’s vocational training department chose the authoring tool imc Express.

“We were impressed with imc Express right off the bat,” she says.

“The tool is intuitive and easy to use, particularly for people with low literacy and media skills or from migrant backgrounds.  And the great thing for our teaching staff is that its integrated AI takes care of layout, dubbing and translation. What’s also really helpful is the option to summarize things in simple language with its built-in ChatGPT features.

What’s more, the integrated image database means that our instructors don’t have to worry about legal issues like copyright. They can prepare their teaching materials and then invite the learners to generate content – which the learners find extremely motivating.” 

Funding rate of the funding body: 
The ABConnect project (funding code W1497BAOG) is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the "National Decade for Literacy and Basic Education 2016 - 2026".

Uwe Roniger, CEO of mybreev with more than 25 years of expertise in the industry, had been looking for a super-fast authoring tool that could provide a cool, engaging content experience for global learners for more than 2 years.

As Uwe explains: “Even though only 10-15% of the off-the-shelf content that mybreev supply to their clients needs customisation, it is this 10-15% that is most important for both the learner and the client company, to personalise their content and provide the best learning experience.”

Around 50% of mybreev’s clients request customisation or language localisation so finding the right authoring tool would have a huge impact on mybreev’s efficiency. However, this solution was proving very difficult to find. “In our own private media consumption, we can view anything we want, instantly in our own language, for free. So why, in the professional sector, are clients still having to invest huge amounts of money and time in translation? In an age of technology, this doesn’t make sense,” Uwe says.

As a future-focused, innovative organisation, mybreev’s CEO, felt strongly that an automated tool using the power of technology was the solution and tasked his senior manager, Jutta Nowak-Strauch, to find the ideal authoring tool.  

Jutta’s many years of experience in e-learning content creation meant she understood fully all the problems that can occur in the production process. The frequent changes needed to create the optimal learner experience, especially where multilingual content is required, are the most time consuming. She explains “all learners learn better in their own language”.

As soon as Jutta saw imc Express in action and tried the system, she was convinced.

“I was astonished to find how much AI was already available within imc Express, compared to other solutions, especially the AI voices. All our in-house content producers are now using imc Express as part of their suite of expert tools.”

imc has changed a lot over the years, both in terms of our brand image and the core values on which it is built. This change in culture is reflected in all areas of our company and therefore needs to be understood and actively supported by all employees – including new hires, who need to be able to connect with and internalize our values.

Achieving this outcome requires learning in the following main areas:

• Company history: What defines us as a company? Where do we come from?
• What are imc’s goals and vision?
• What are the values that shape us, and how do we communicate those values?
• What is our business purpose, and what can each and every employee do to further that purpose?
• What does the imc brand feel like?

We needed a learning solution that could both impart this knowledge to all new hires right from day one and make it available to all existing imc employees on an ongoing basis. The obvious approach was to create an interactive, digital training course that was fun while still getting the imc brand and culture across.

The challenge in designing the course was not just to find a way of disseminating the informational aspects of the training content. The main challenge, in fact, was to give the content emotional power and authenticity, but without overdoing it, so that the very diverse target audience here at imc could identify with it.