1800 training participants in 3 months – how Sii Learning Platform revolutionized the development opportunities for Power People

How to implement a tool whose main goal will be to support employee development in the era of COVID-19 and remote work, as well as better knowledge management in the organization? Sii Power People decided to create their own. Sii Learning Platform is a tool that not only allows you to standardize the onboarding process, but above all systematizes access to training, regardless of location.

Sii Poland has been focusing on employee development since its beginings. The company’s mission is to identify and promote the best Power People, and thus, to constantly expand development opportunities, including training. Many solutions in the organization are based on ideas submitted by employees, so is the idea to implement a remote training platform, supporting courses in soft and technical skills. The purpose of the application implementation was primarily to standardize the onboarding process, make it more attractive for all employees, including those who do not work in Sii offices on a daily basis, introduce remote training opportunities and gather all knowledge in the organization and create one place to share it. The current solution is significantly different from the original idea.

Custom solution instead of off-the-shelf

There were many visions of the platform, however, the current solution is significantly different from the original idea.

– When I started working at Sii, one of my first challenges was to implement a training platform. Initially, we planned to buy a ready-made off-the-shelf solution, but after many discussions we decided to create our own solution based on the open source technology, Moodle. The change in the approach resulted from the fact that it was Moodle that allowed us to take care of all business requirements that the ready-made solutions available on the market could not meet – says Aleksandra Kalbarczyk, Training Specialist at Sii Poland.

Moodle is one of the most popular and advanced LMS systems for creating e-learning platforms. This solutions is popular among many companies and universities.

– Moodle is great for distance learning, promotes communication between training participants, and thanks to its modular structure, it allows you to flexibly build a knowledge base and make the process of acquiring knowledge and skills more attractive. Using the advantages of Moodle, the Sii Learning Platform is also integrated with the Sii employee base (AD) and the employment process at Sii itself – says Piotr Bielecki, Architect at Sii Poland. 

Consistency with the company’s systems – a long list of advantages

A tailor-made solution for the organization has many advantages that cannot be found in ready-made off-the-shelf product. At first glance, you can see the graphical consistency and personalization of the tool – photos of Sii Poland employees instead of those from publicly available libraries, visual identification consistent with other company’s applications. This is only the first impression, and there are many more advantages. The platform integrates with the company’s internal systems, which allows you to freely assign a training group to departments, positions or differently defined groups of recipients in the company. Sii specialists can add any content to the platform (e.g. recordings, presentations), based on integration with Microsoft 365, which also allows for their automatic updating. Thanks to this, we create an up-to-date internal knowledge base. This solution is also better in terms of data security. The company does not entrust user data or the data contained in training materials to external suppliers, and even the archived data does not expire. Sii employees can analyze them, present them in any way, draw conclusions and apply improvements. Analysis are already being carried out on the number of training courses, the most popular courses and test results. There are also special dashboards in Power BI dedicated to Line Managers so that they can monitor the training status of their teams.

– Thanks to the Moodle technology, which we could implement on our own with the help of internal IT, we can implement virtually any changes that meet the needs of the business on an ongoing basis – says Ewa Jabłońska, Project Manager of this project.

Unlimited access to knowledge 

Sii Learning Platform is not only a convenient solution from a business perspective, but most of all, it helps employees to take development initiatives. 

– The scale of the solution allows all employees to use the trainings that take place in the company to the same extent. On the other hand, while handling the process, we have the ability to monitor the number of training sessions, the number of employees participating in them, costs, certificates, and confirmation of attendance. The solution helps us to eliminate geographical barriers and introduce synergy between 14 Sii branches in terms of acquiring knowledge. It allows for the remote form of knowledge sharing for larger groups of employees to use the same proprietary training, often recreating it many times after their completion. This is another step towards a digital workplace – says Aleksandra Kalbarczyk. 

– Since the implementation, the platform has changed a lot – we have built a structured database of courses, including training for each new employee and each new Line Manager. The User Profile and Dashboard has been rebuilt and the view has been adapted to Sii Poland standards. Every online training and webinar now has its place on the Sii Learning Platform. And ahead of us is the transfer of the stationary training process from SharePoint on premise to Moodle – adds Ewa Jabłońska.

Ambitious look into the future

Despite the short period from implementation, currently there are 148 training courses organized in 9 categories available on the platform. It already has over 2 500 users, and over 1 800 of them have already participated in training. The platform is very popular – for comparison, in a similar period last year, almost 600 users took part in 40 stationary training sessions.

The team developing this tool doesn’t stop at these promising statistics. The next stages are already planned. 

–  The next stage of platform implementation is development towards transferring all classroom training entirely to the Sii Learning Platform. The goal is to place all available training in one system and simplify the process to make the final solution more user-friendly – says Iwona Ziarek, Analyst working on the platform.

Thanks to the opinions and ideas of Sii employees, we create the best and most effective solutions for the company. Join us and see for yourself!