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Global | Retail

If you’re looking for a story of successful high-scale, SME-driven elearning creation, then this is the one for you! Sports giant Decathlon believes that every employee should have the freedom to take learning into their own hands and shape their own career path. So when Decathlon’s learning leaders decided the best way to ensure employees could get access to relevant, localized learning was to embrace an employee-generated learning model, they needed some smart technologies to help them. Partnering with Xperteam-Easy and Elucidat they entered a journey into SME generated elearning, and soon had 1000 users creating over 4,000 courses in a year.

Shopping in decathlon
Learners Worldwide
Global Authors
Courses Annually

Introduction

 

As the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, Decathlon has enabled countless customers to achieve their sporting goals. And they take the same approach with their people. Every Decathlon employee is empowered to take ownership of their own development and, ultimately, career success.

 

But to truly honour this, learning needs to be available, relevant, localized, and up to date.

 

Find out how Sophie Vanhems, Leader of pedagogical skills, and Arnaud Loison, Leader of Sports skills, at Decathlon empowered 1000 employees from around the globe to produce quality digital learning at speed and scale, to honour their ethos.

Sophie Vanhems
“

Our end goal is not to create experts but for our [1000] authors to be autonomous in creating elearning content through Elucidat to enable upskilling”

Sophie Vanhems

Skill Leader, Decathlon

The challenge – how to create relevant learning, for all?

 

With employees working across the globe, Sophie and Arnaud knew creating consistent high quality and effective autonomous learning was going to be a challenge. Training needed to be easily understood and relevant – for teammates in different countries, sectors, sports and branches. Rather than being dictated by the business, it had to inspire employees from the ground up.

 

“The challenge is to make training courses available world-wide. They are the lever of individual competences and therefore our collective competences – they help us reach our objectives in terms of human and financial performance. It’s vital our courses are accessible, simple, engaging and fun. In that sense, we see our approach to using, sharing and spreading L&D as a key step in our company performance. But it always needs to be one step ahead.” – Sophie Vanhems

The solution – platforms that empower local experts

 

It was clear to Sophie and Arnaud that going digital offered the flexibility they needed for successful learning at scale. But this was only the start of a solution. From identifying training needs to content creation, they needed a platform and approach that gave employees the lead in production.

 

By partnering with Xperteam-Easy and using the Elucidat authoring platform, they could begin to develop a learning ecosystem built on autonomous development and with employees at its center.

 

Starting small with an inner circle of content creators, Sophie and Arnaud quickly opened up elearning production more widely. Supported by some simple onboarding and online academy guidance, content creators were given full autonomy. With easy course duplication, rebranding, localization and translation, they weren’t starting from scratch.

Sophie Vanhems
“

The main benefit of our learning tools choice is the autonomy given to the content authors, who are free to create their content, in line with our vision. Each sport or each sector can then personalize its projects with its own visual identity; each country can localize what it wants according to its specificities without having to recreate everything.”

Sophie Vanhems

Skill Leader, Decathlon

Decathlon staff looking happy

The outcome – a global network of authors

 

In no time, they’d grown a global community that was producing training and sharing best practice. In just one year, Decathlon had over 1,000 users across 41 countries producing nearly 5,000 elearning courses. These are accessible to over 90,000 learners. 

 

The team are continuing to inspire existing content creators to push development further. What’s more, work on Decathlon’s skills development project is attracting new employees. It seems the sky’s the limit!

In summary

 

Collaborative learning production models or employee generated learning, is a growing trend. As organisations like Decathlon are faced with the challenge to keep up with the demand for relevant learning and continuous up-skilling, it makes sense to empower specific and local experts to take the lead.

 

  • Novice authors: Opting for a collaborative elearning authoring platform like Elucidat empowers anyone to create impactful elearning, and at high scale!
  • Easy translation: Translation processes means that courses in Elucidat can be easily switched into other languages, to meet local needs
  • Variations: Authoring Platforms that make switching branding, language and localizing content easy are vital for global organisations

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