5 Examples of Successful Learning and Development Programs

Companies that invest in employee training experience a 24% increase in profit margins compared to those that don’t. The same study by Forbes also highlights that organizations with robust training programs see a 218% higher income per employee compared to their competitors.

In today's competitive and ever-changing market, having a strong and flexible learning and development (L&D) program is crucial for organizations that want to stay ahead and prepare for skills shortages. Organizations are already struggling to find the talent they need—75% of employers report difficulty in filling roles, a 17-year high. 

A well-researched L&D program bespoke to your organizational and workforce needs, powered by a modern learning platform, will help you and your team upskill, reskill, and future-proof your employees in a tight labor market.

Today, we’ll showcase five real-world examples of L&D programs that work and highlight the different use cases for L&D programs. 

First, let’s talk about what learning and development programs are.

The evolution of L&D programs

Learning and development programs have evolved to support business goals and employee professional development rather than focusing solely on training and compliance.

In recent years, the shift to hybrid workforces, the abundance of information, and new technologies such as generative AI have altered perspectives on career development and how organizations leverage talent management to meet the needs of their employees.

Modern businesses prioritize dynamic L&D strategies to enhance employee skills, ensuring they are equipped to perform in their current and future roles through personalized employee training programs. These new skills and relevant knowledge directly contribute to organizational needs and goals. 

Organizations will continue to leverage L&D programs to boost employee engagement and foster continuous learning. The result is a company culture that encourages innovation and improves performance and productivity.

Benefits of an effective L&D strategy

An effective learning and development strategy will help your company attract and retain talent through employee training programs that meet the demands of a tight labor market.  

Corporate learning and development opportunities are seen as essential for 76% of Gen Z, 61% of millennials, 56% of Gen X, and 55% of baby boomers. 

With more and more employees looking for organizations that offer skills development in addition to opportunities for personal development, an effective L&D strategy is sure to impact retention numbers and improve employee performance and quality of work.

Moreover, by leveraging the right learning management system (LMS) with your L&D strategy, you can expect to create a learning culture that positions your company as an industry leader known for growing and nurturing top talent in your industry. 

By designing and deploying an L&D strategy specific to your organization's and your employees' needs, your team can help create a company culture where employees see the company’s values aligned with their own. They will also view your organization as a place where they can learn the right skills they need for their current role and have growth opportunities for their future career path.

Different use cases for L&D programs

L&D programs serve diverse purposes across organizations, addressing key areas designed to meet specific organizational and employee needs.

Let’s break down the six most common use cases briefly:

Onboarding: Critical for every organization, onboarding programs ensure the smooth integration of new hires. Great onboarding impacts workforce retention, skills training, employee experience and performance, and your company’s bottom line. Successful onboarding programs will be role-specific and include blended and self-guided learning.

Employee development: These L&D programs include upskilling initiatives to futureproof your organization's workforce and ensure employee career development. For example, leveraging leadership development plans can help offer a clear path for employees to expand their skill set and close your organization’s skills gap. 

Customer training: If you want your company's clients to fully understand and utilize your products or services, you need to create customer training programs. You can leverage eLearning, webinars, and instructor-led tools in these initiatives to ensure your customers get the most out of their investment. 

Sales enablement: These are training programs that equip sales teams with the knowledge, soft skills, content, and tools they need to sell your product and reach revenue goals successfully. These L&D programs should include pitch training, one-on-one asynchronous coach feedback, and upskilling opportunities through employee knowledge sharing.

Compliance training: Any employee training mandated by legislation, regulation, or policy falls under compliance training. These programs ensure all team members understand and comply with the latest safety, legal, or company regulations and procedures. 

Software training: These trainings assist employees in becoming proficient in using new software tools, platforms, or applications that are critical to their current role. These training programs need to be tailored to upskill team members consistently and provide learners with a fail-safe environment to practice their new skills.

With these different use cases for L&D programs in mind, let’s discover and unpack five examples that showcase real-world L&D in action.

5 examples of successful learning programs

Looking at each L&D program case study, we highlight each example's challenge, solution, and outcome.

1. Simplyhealth

Established in 1872, Simplyhealth is committed to providing affordable access to healthcare to support the everyday healthcare needs of millions of people across the UK.

The challenge

Simplyhealth faced a significant challenge in delivering consistent, scalable training to both internal employees and external partners. 

As a company regulated by the FCA, Simplyhealth's staff needed to complete 15 hours of regulatory training every year. However, several issues hampered their training effectiveness:

1. In-person training led to inconsistent learning experiences and proved to be costly.
2. The training process was time-consuming and lacked accessibility for learners.
3. Tracking the progress and completion of training programs was a complex task.

Existing training programs needed to be updated and more effective.

The solution

Setting out to solve the challenge of delivering consistent and scalable training, Simplyhealth deployed a new L&D program with the help of 360Learning’s comprehensive learning platform. 

The solution brought new benefits to the team that included:

• Insights into course sign-ups and dropout rates, allowing for the iteration and improvement of learning initiatives.
• Empowered managers who can effectively drive and monitor the completion of mandatory and optional content.
• Time-on-task metrics that show learner engagement and helped the L&D team understand which courses resonated with learners most. 
• A revamped L&D program facilitated by real-time feedback to ensure training content remained relevant and aligned with learner needs.

The outcome

Implementing Simplyhealth's L&D program has led to significant outcomes, making training more accessible to all. 

The program resulted in substantial company resource savings and heightened inclusivity. Additionally, transport costs for individuals and the company were reduced by leveraging asynchronous learning styles, enabling employees to engage with training at their own pace, further enhancing the learning experience and accessibility.

2. Arkema

A global manufacturer of specialty chemicals, Arkema designs materials to address the ever-growing demand for innovative and sustainable materials.

The challenge

Arkema's digital learning strategy faced a set of challenges centered around democratizing access to knowledge and empowering internal expertise.

The L&D team’s main objective was to break down the barriers to knowledge acquisition by establishing an open content catalog, ensuring that soft skills training was readily available and 100% on-demand. They also wanted to support content creation by internal experts, especially those at industrial plants.

The solution

To support content creation by internal experts and overcome knowledge barriers, Arkema leveraged our learning experience platform (LXP) with advanced collaborative learning features for its L&D strategy.

The solution transformed how they approached their L&D programs in the following ways:

• Employees can access and leverage the best libraries of soft skills training courses produced by leading institutions. 
• The L&D team can distribute the training programs across 55 countries by automatically surfacing content in the learner’s preferred language.
• The platform’s intuitive user experience empowers internal experts to quickly create training modules, passing on key organizational and industry expertise.

The outcome

As a result of Arkema’s L&D strategy and partnership with 360Learning, the L&D team has expanded its learner base to 9,810 learners—140% above the target number of connected learners.

The training on demand part of the program has seen significant success, with over 2,300 learners completing a training course from the online catalog, outperforming the initial target by 70%. Moreover, their training courses are available in 14 languages, increasing accessibility across all Arkema Group employees.

3. Swapcard

Swapcard is an event and community platform that helps anyone to organize smart and digital-first events, without tech headaches.

The challenge

Swapcard’s goal was to empower all team members to take their professional development into their own hands by diagnosing their own learning needs and leveraging internal expertise to help fill skills gaps. 

However, to reach this goal, the team had to overcome three challenges:

1. Swapcard didn’t have a single source of truth for mandatory training.
2. As the company grew, departments were working in silos, which led to confusion.
3. A reliance on live meetings and training became unmanageable for a company operating across many time zones.

The solution

Swapcard tackled the challenge of empowering learners to take their professional development into their own hands and centralizing its training resources by implementing a strategic approach. 

Recognizing the need for an organized and unified approach to training, Swapcard implemented 360Learning, which was pivotal in establishing a single source of truth for all the organization’s training. 

One of the key advantages was 360Learning’s capacity to decentralize course creation, create learning paths for employees, and train people asynchronously.

The outcome

With the implementation of their L&D program, Swapcard successfully established a single source of truth for all mandatory training, encompassing onboarding, compliance, and performance reviews. 

This approach to learning has been highly effective for the organization, with 20% of authors contributing to course content and a 98% course satisfaction rate. With the implementation of 360Learning, asynchronous learning empowers learners to learn at their own pace and upskill from within the organization. 

4. AlphaSights

As a global leader in knowledge on demand, AlphaSights connects investment and business leaders with a dynamic network of industry professionals whose informed perspectives help clients make stronger investment and business decisions.

The challenge

The AlphaSights team’s challenge was to devise an effective L&D program to onboard, train, and upskill a global team of over 1,500 members. 

As the company grew, they understood that their previous face-to-face employee training programs were no longer fit for purpose. They also knew they had to:

• Tailor learning programs and scale internal expertise to match company needs.
• Measure course progression and impact.
• Centralize training materials and boost attendance.

The solution

The team at AlphaSights set about solving their onboarding and training challenges by designing an L&D program focused on upskilling from within, supported by a modern LMS.

First, their program focused on decentralizing content creation by turning in-house experts into employee and client growth champions. They achieved this by empowering their subject-matter experts to contribute directly to eLearning initiatives and unlocking AlphaSights's organizational knowledge. 

Additionally, the team could scale the content creation process of their L&D programs by leveraging the easy-to-use authoring tool. They could also track learner progress in the programs, assess levels of engagement, and gather feedback on their learning initiatives.

The outcome

AlphSight’s L&D program has significantly improved employee growth, course relevance, and completion rates. 

With the help of 360Learning, the team was able to scale the company’s expertise, increase engagement, and help employees upskill to boost productivity throughout the company. 

Significant impact metrics include: over 300 subject-matter experts have become course authors, the team has maintained a 95% completion rate, and 97% of in-course reactions have been positive.

5. Mitsubishi Electric

Originally founded in 1921, Mitsubishi Electric has 100 years of experience providing reliable, high-quality products and support to installers, specifiers, corporate clients, and consumers worldwide.

The challenge

To maintain its high standard of service as a global market leader in heat pumps and air conditioning units, Mitsubishi Electric needed to train thousands of customer engineers. 

The L&D team faced the challenge of having to deliver more training than they could handle at the time, so they needed an L&D strategy that would serve the sheer volume of customer training that was required from the business.

The solution

Mitsubishi Electric addressed its challenge of delivering extensive customer training through a focused approach in its customer education program.

The L&D program concentrated on five key implementation areas:

1. Blended learning: Implementing an 80/20 model for training delivery.
2. In-house authoring: Developing training content internally using an authoring tool. 
3. Social learning: Facilitating interactions between learners and trainers.
4. Engagement tracking: Utilizing dashboards to monitor engagement and usage.
5. Upskilling the L&D team: Investing in developing new skills and competencies within the L&D team.

The outcome

Mitsubishi Electric's L&D upskilling initiatives and transition to a blended learning approach have eliminated the backlog of customers waiting for courses and increased the training capacity from 200 to 300 people per month. 

This has been achieved with just 10% of the resources previously required, resulting in a 65% reduction in training costs. The L&D program also resulted in a 99% customer satisfaction rate and a reduced wait time for customer training to 30 days.

Leverage the power of L&D programs with the right learning platform

As we have seen in the above five examples of L&D programs, integrating modern technology and a collaborative learning approach is central to their success. 

A comprehensive learning platform like 360Learning will be pivotal in decentralizing course creation, boosting asynchronous learning, and empowering learners to give real-time feedback.

To make a measurable impact, your L&D programs will need to turn your internal experts into champions to ramp up customer, partner, and employee growth to upskill your workforce at pace to meet the business demands of tomorrow. 

With 360Learning, you can leverage the combined power of LMS and LXP capabilities with our collaborative learning Academies to power your L&D interventions and strategies to meet your organization's unique challenges. 

Book a demo to experience the easiest way to onboard and upskill employees, train your customer-facing teams, and enable customers and partners—all from one place.