BDO

1,400

Learners

90%

Learner satisfaction

28

Content experts and producers

Industry

Financial Services

Location

Norway

The Company

BDO Norway, one of the largest companies in auditing and accounting, consulting and law services in Norway, provides a range of services to its 34,000 clients in the region. Ensuring employees can retain the organization’s expert reputation and top-notch customer service is key.

As a supplement to regular courses, BDO Norway invested in digital learning in 2016. Since then, they have built up an employee-led production team made up of 28 eLearning novices to share in-house wisdom. They built effective digital learning resources with a helping hand from Elucidat and its Professional Services team.

"I love the way you treat your customers and are really competent in what you do. For me, that makes you really credible."

Miriam Kringen Molnar, HR training consultant at BDO Norway

The Challenge

Having historically trained their employees via physical events and annual online streaming, the management team decided it was time to embrace digital learning solutions. With 1,400 employees spread across 70 locations, eLearning would increase ROI and improve engagement:

“Employees said they wanted learning ‘here and now’; at their ‘own speed’ that’s ‘easy to use.’”

The team also recognized the opportunity to share in-house expertise and wisdom by going digital:

“The knowledge in the business is not in HR or in management, it’s in the people – they are our knowledge base. Our ambition was to make people digital learners. Therefore, providing a good onboarding process for digital learners and choosing a tool that was easy to use was of key importance to us.”

“We chose Elucidat since it makes it simple for our people to contribute; it’s so easy to create and deliver content.”

Having chosen their authoring tool, they still faced another challenge – how could they go from zero (no eLearning) to creating eLearning at scale, to high standards, with a team who was new to creating online learning?

The Solution

“Who I work with is really important to me. The Elucidat team was so friendly and service-minded; they really wanted to help us. That was a decisive factor in why we chose Elucidat.”

Our Professional Services team has assisted BDO Norway in two key ways: strategy and planning, and design coaching. Here’s how our Professional Services team has worked with them so far using the 5C Framework:

1. Plan for Success Workshop in Oslo, run by Simon Greany.

“We didn’t have any experience with digital learning; we started out blank. Our first workshop with Simon helped us understand the concept of digital learning – and shape a strategy.”

Simon Greany, Co-Founder of Elucidat and Learning Consultant, helped set up a strategy for the team. They created a design framework and developed recommendations for how they could work together to produce their first pilot project.

2. Concept Creator Service

“Simon helped us set up a theme and style. He also helped us add some guidance inside each page in the template, making it easy for our team to understand how and when to use each page type and interaction.”

The Elucidat team supported BDO in the creation of their first pilot project, which could be used as a template for future designs of their own digital learning.

3. Fast-Track Author Onboarding, plus a bespoke blended coaching program

The pilot was a resounding success, so the next challenge was to onboard a wider team – who all had busy day jobs:

“Kirstie (Elucidat Academy Director) and I set up a coach-led training program based on BDO’s needs. She designed a ‘Fast-Track Author Onboarding’ package, including virtual classroom sessions along with some short activities. The classroom sessions got everyone thinking about what makes effective digital learning, and how to get there. This helped everyone get in the right mindset.”

Kirstie provided the team with a basis for what makes great digital learning and shared lots of ideas to work from. The new BDO eLearning producers began working on their first projects. Many were ambitious – tackling behavior-changes, soft-skills, and comprehensive onboarding programs.

4. Design Direction Service to review and get input on each team’s design concepts

Each project team had a dedicated coaching session with an Elucidat consultant to gain input on their initial ideas. This helped them to structure their design in the most engaging ways for the end users. To frame these conversations, Elucidat provided the BDO Norway teams with a quick needs analysis template to ensure everyone was clear on the purpose of their project.

Some teams gained further input from the Elucidat consultants to help create wireframes to lay out a best practice design. Other teams went straight in.

“This coaching was essential for helping the project teams structure their ideas and goal for the course. This has been important for us to succeed initially, and we will continue to invest some time in this process.”

5. Learner-Ready Service

The BDO project teams also worked with their Elucidat consultant to gain in-depth feedback on their builds. This helped guide them on how to get the most from layouts, flow, user-experience and content design.

Get the best results from your digital learning with the 5C Framework

The Results

“I would highly recommend Elucidat. The tool is easy to use and easy to set up, and the team is service-minded and really competent. They also walk the talk; they provide training that is digital, and it’s up-to-speed with the latest features.”

BDO’s initial goal was to get their digital learning producers and content experts up-to-speed and creating high quality digital learning. Now, after 12 months, they have 12 content experts and 18 producers working collaboratively to deliver online courses.

Although it is still too early to measure the effects on financial results, BDO expects to see a clear ROI from using Elucidat. It has already helped the company reach out to more people and share valuable in-house expertise. Additionally, employees love the training, because it is easy and convenient.

The Future

Miriam expects to produce 12 digital learning projects for internal training over 6 months. Further, the L&D team will measure effects and quality of digital training by using analytics and feedback from the participants. BDO is also considering creating online training for clients. They have talked with Elucidat’s Simon on how to Commercialize their products effectively – another service the Professional Services team offers.

Make your digital learning more successful – talk to one of our consultants