100,000
learners worldwide
1,030
users in 41 countries
4,000
Decathlon
Industry
Retail for sport and leisure
Location
Global
Empowering autonomous development at Decathlon
Sports giant Decathlon is built on a fundamental belief that every employee should have the freedom to shape their own career path. So, when it came to choosing learning platforms, they were looking for a solution that would support this approach.
Hear how Sophie Vanhems, Leader of pedagogical skills, and Arnaud Loison, Leader of Sports skills, at Decathlon empowered their teammates to produce quality digital learning at speed and scale, autonomously.
“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, whilst respecting the Decathlon charter and guidelines”
Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader at Decathlon
The mission
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.
“It is one of Decathlon core values that everyone can be autonomous and responsible for their own upskilling”
– Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
The challenge
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, Skill Leader, Decathlon
The solution
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.
“We don’t have a team dedicated to e-learning content production because we want to see learning content tools used widely across the group. It is in Decathlon’s DNA to create an ecosystem that is passionate, ambitious and that maintains a high level of expertise and quality.” – Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
The outcome
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.
In no time, they’d grown a global community that was producing training and sharing best practice.
“Our biggest consumer in terms of e-learning is the Sports department. Our team members must be able to find everything they need to sell the products season after season. Skills leaders create the content, and field and product experts review the courses to ensure their quality. Our courses are created in France where the sports team is based. Other countries are then able to duplicate, translate and adapt to their local practices if needed.” – Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
Regular check-ins with Xperteam-Easy quickly resolved any issues and kept them on track. 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 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. The other advantage of our learning tools is being able to update the content and promote its distribution, easily.” – Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
What’s more, work on Decathlon’s skills development project is attracting new employees.
What’s next?
Already open to anyone who wants to get involved in authoring elearning, Sophie and Arnaud are focusing on building further engagement.
“We share best practice with all of our creators via our community and through email communication”
– Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
They’re continuing to inspire existing content creators to push development further. It seems the sky’s the limit!
Want to find out how you can achieve similar results? Book a demo of Elucidat and get started with a free trial; or reach out to discuss our partnerships with organizations like Xperteam.
