How AlphaSights Built a Scalable Onboarding Program with 99% Satisfaction Rates

The Challenge

As AlphaSights grows rapidly around the world, scaling effective employee development becomes more crucial than ever. Ongoing professional development is essential to ensure their 900+ team members have everything they need to perform their best, build transferable skills, and ultimately achieve their career goals. 

Even before COVID-19, AlphaSights’ Professional Development team knew it was time for a transformation – particularly for their in-person training portfolio. 

Digitizing their training would offer their employees greater flexibility in pursuing professional development, scaling their team’s operations, and increasing their ability to measure impact.  

The transition to digital onboarding began in late 2019, which unknowingly gave AlphaSights a head start for the fully remote work environment to come in 2020. In considering their learning culture and the characteristics of their workforce, they needed a solution that would allow them to:

• Streamline the course creation process and easily keep training up-to-date 
• Collaborate with subject-matter experts in a scalable and intuitive way
• Engage a large millennial workforce and provide flexibility for more experienced employees

The Solution

The AlphaSights team identified 360Learning as the solution that best met their learning technology needs. The main competitive advantage was our easy-to-use authoring tool, ability to collaborate with subject-matter experts, and social features to drive high learner engagement. 

By empowering 27% of their employees to contribute directly to digital training programs, the team has unlocked their organization’s collective expertise, while exceeding the 360Learning standard of engaging 3% of employees in the course creation process. 

The ability to track stats like these has strongly benefitted AlphaSights in ensuring their employees receive the training they need, especially during the shift to remote work. 

New joiner onboarding with blended learning

When it came time to onboard the July 2020 class of associates, the Professional Development team faced a new challenge: onboarding new joiners in a fully remote environment. 

With 360Learning in place, the team enlisted their subject-matter experts to help transform a two-week in-person program into a blended learning program with 23% of trainings delivered through 360Learning. 

In the US, 83 new joiners completed the two-week onboarding program. The blended learning approach included 15 hours of digital training and provided new joiners with scaffolding for live sessions. 

Olivia Loome, a July new joiner, explained, ‘‘The introduction of content ahead of live sessions gave me time to think through the information before discussing it with others. I enjoyed the mix of videos, slides, and quizzes. I even kept a folder of my cheat sheets to reference later.’’

Increased visibility and recognition for the Professional Development team

By collaborating with the organization to digitize training, the Professional Development team gained visibility into various training initiatives across AlphaSights– enabling them to ensure every team training meets their quality, brand, and compliance standards.

Brody Garrity, an AlphaSights manager said, ‘‘Now, I see the Professional Development team is here to help me and my team do our jobs better and scale much more effectively. We’re really excited about the results we saw with our July new joiners and we’re looking to add more digital learning to our playbooks that goes beyond the first two months of onboarding.’’

Impact

The Professional Development team used the Kirkpatrick Model as the framework for evaluating the success of their onboarding program. 360Learning made data collection and analysis extremely easy when assessing Level 1 (reaction) and Level 2 (learning). To assess Levels 3 (behavior) and 4 (results), they leaned on behavioral assessments from managers and commercial performance data to gain insight to tangible business impact.

With the help of 360Learning, the Professional Development team assessed reactions and learning in real-time. The team monitored Reactions, course engagement, and exam results available in the Dashboard and ran daily surveys with new joiners to gain additional qualitative insights.

The Future

The transition from classroom-based learning to a digital and blended learning strategy enables AlphaSights to better meet the needs of their learners. Learning can be asynchronous, in the flow of work, and decentralized. And, in a dynamic market that requires continuous learning, the professional development team can now go a step further: connecting internal skill development to long-term career value. 

With 360Learning in place, connecting internal learning paths to transferable skills is where the AlphaSights professional development team is headed. 

“Covid-19 has upped the discourse around transferable skills and crystallized that it’s not just an L&D buzzword. It is what gets you a job or doesn’t,” Chris said, “As L&D folks, our obligation to employees is to make them relevant for the future. Doing that pays off for the organization and for them.”

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