IPRO: Employee Training Creates Better Advocates for Your Customers

Julie Badger is the Director of the Learning Experience team for the Information Governance and eDiscovery software, IPRO. Her team, which includes trainers/online learning content developers and technical writers, also oversees the design of their customer experience, particularly the onboarding phase. In addition to their customer-facing training site, IPRO Learning Center, IPRO also has an internal training site for employees, IPRO Academy, both of which are powered by Skilljar.

Before they had the Academy in place, IPRO trained employees on products using live, in-person training. Live training, particularly for a company that is geographically distributed, is extremely inefficient and expensive. According to Julie, “While people might grasp concepts and workflows in training, they might not remember those same things when they’re back doing their day-to-day jobs. The information isn’t as sticky.”

Having content that helps employees learn our products at their own pace is a game changer. Online courses can be taken at any time, stopped and started as necessary, and referenced repeatedly when someone needs a refresher. Giving employees the ability to learn in a self-guided manner is a huge win.— Julie Badger

IPRO built the IPRO Academy at the same time they built the IPRO Learning Center, allowing them to publish a single source of content to multiple domains. Julie said their staff takes the exact same courses their customers take. This helps orient team members to the actual customer experience and helps the Learning Experience team get regular, real-time feedback on the courses. Julie and her team use employee feedback on courses to continually iterate on the content and ensure that it remains evergreen.

Most of the courses in IPRO Academy are product-specific training in the form of recorded webinars and self-guided learning. However, they also have department-specific training and other self-guided learning materials that help orient new employees. For example, IPRO Support has their own catalog page and courses/exams to help ensure Support personnel are certified subject matter experts.

These catalog pages give internal teams the ability to create their own content and broadly share it across their teams. It’s quite valuable.— Julie Badger

Julie’s team is starting to grow their department-specific training to include learning materials that cover specific topics such as understanding industry-specific terminology.

Our terminology courses and recorded webinars have been beneficial for internal stakeholders. Employees can take the admin courses when available, stop and start as needed, and get certified a lot faster because of the ease of use of this system.— Julie Badger

Julie estimates there is 70-80% overlap in the content for both training domains. All content is built by their small but extremely agile team. There are content creators focused on Learning and Development (overview courses with audio overlays, software simulations, recorded webinars, text lessons). There are also technical writers that help repurpose parts of documentation in relevant lessons. Further, content is linked between their Help Center and Learning Center.

We have to value learning and make it easy for new employees to get the information they need to be successful. It helps them get ground under their feet and become successful users of your products and better advocates for your customers.— Julie Badger

Julie’s advice to training professionals looking to start an internal employee training program is to start small, figure out what would be the easiest win, and build from there. She holds up their “Terminology” course as a great example, as new staff members need to know what their coworkers mean when they use certain language.

Internal training is crucial to the success of the business. Use the tools at your disposal to streamline this, systematize it, and then measure its success and iterate on it again and again.— Julie Badger

Julie’s team does a lot with a little and she is very proud of their accomplishments. It includes two trainers/content developers, one data analyst, and five tech writers, plus their manager. Together, they create and maintain documentation for four flagship product lines on the IPRO Help Center and nearly 200 courses on the IPRO Learning Center/Academy.

My team is amazing. I couldn’t do it without them. And they couldn’t do it without Skilljar.— Julie Badger

Learn more about IPRO’s journey with Skilljar and understand why Julie says, ” If you need to scale and want to move to an online learning platform that will help make that happen, you should definitely check out Skilljar.” Read our case study.

Want to learn more about how to build an internal employee training program on top of your customer education program? Talk to a Skilljar expert!