How ConnectWise Boosted Their New Hires' Learning-to-Use Ratio With 360Learning

Challenges

ConnectWise is a leading software company dedicated to the success of IT solution providers. To stay on top, they need to ensure that their help desk technicians are up to date in an industry that is known for moving rapidly–that’s why they’re always working to ramp up the skills of new hires.

 Here at 360Learning, we know that onboarding new hires can sometimes be tricky to get right, especially when faced with the challenges of shifting to hybrid and remote working. 

 For Lee Savage, Help Desk Trainer at ConnectWise, meeting this challenge meant looking for a way to keep all their onboarding deliverables in one spot and leveraging all the great know-how they had within their subject matter experts to help new hires.  

 We had the chance to speak to Lee about how ConnectWise helps every new hire make an immediate impact through great onboarding and peer-driven upsilling.

ConnectWise had to boost onboarding to match a fast-moving industry

For Lee and the L&D team, a big challenge was keeping all of their training material in a central location. Previously, they were dealing with multiple platforms but by using 360Learning, they have been able to combine everything in one location.

 Fixing that first hurdle, Lee says, meant the L&D team spent less time doing non-training activities. “Speed is a huge factor for us,” he says. “The IT industry is all about rapid change, and being able to update and move things quickly is huge for us.” For example, Lee can now complete his onboarding setup for new hires in five minutes—a huge change.

 “The other major issue,” says Lee, “is putting our IT Nation community together with our technicians.” Adding IT Nation meetings as on-demand style video presentations provided ConnectWise’s technicians with another way to connect to the forum where partners, vendors, and colleagues discuss best practice and product improvement.

 ConnectWise’s experience with 360Learning has helped them chop down admin time, helped people focus on high-value tasks, and leverage subject matter expertise.

Solution

With 360Learning, Lee and the L&D team were able to make ground in four key areas in their onboarding program. These were:

For Lee, these four key areas were critical to helping every new hire make an immediate impact. And with speed being key to their industry, the first area was about creating and deploying courses quickly.

1) Speed: Just 1-2 weeks to build, ship, and update modules

As Lee explains, ease of use and speed was really important for ConnectWise. “With our previous setup,” he says, “it would take us anywhere from a month to two months to set up a course, whether it was a short or a long course.”

But now, their courses are created and uploaded in the same week, sometimes even the same day. “That kind of turnover speed really helped us move a lot faster.”

Next for Lee and the team, with courses built and ready to ship, they focused on getting that training onto the shop floor. 

2) Relevance: Reflecting current market developments

The next benefit was that Lee and the team could make sure the trainings were going where they made sense for an immediate return on investment.

For example, ConnectWise no longer needed to take a technician off the floor for an hour or two for training. They could go offline for two minutes to take a course. “And then they can get right back into the action,” Lee says, “and immediately put what they've learned into place.”

Now they could concentrate on ramping up their content by integrating 360Learning with PowerApps.

3) Integrations: 360Learning + PowerApps

In addition to regular courses, ConnectWise integrated PowerApps with 360Learning to streamline new hire creation and setup as well as auto-assignment of courses.

“We've created a single app that takes care of all of our employee set up for us,” explains Lee. “It sets up our phone system, our ticketing system, our 360Learning [platform], and our desk manual. It makes everything just so much faster. So, another immediate ROI right there.”

In the last step, with their onboarding program moving quickly and efficiently, Lee and the team could enable better collaboration with their subject-matter expertise.

4) Collaboration: Subject-matter experts quickly and easily build courses

In the past, Lee and the team would either have to keep a team's group or an email chain when collaborating to set up a new training. Now, when working with their subject-matter experts the team adds those SMEs and designers as soon as the course is created.

“We all work through the admin chat in that course,” says Lee, “and all the information is right there for the future.”

Through utilizing the 360Learning platform, Lee and his L&D team have been able to create a really impactful new hire onboarding program through peer-driven upskilling.

How peer-driven upskilling enables impactful new hire onboarding

The ConnectWise story is a great example of how peer-driven upskilling enables impactful new hire onboarding:

Results

ConnectWise’s biggest impact has been speed. Because they are able to reduce the size of modules, they don’t need to spend nearly as much time scheduling training sessions. Instead, technicians can complete training between calls or during down periods.

Lee and the L&D team have also been able to create a positive impact on ConnectWise’s retention rates. “Good training and taking an interest in making sure that your employees and colleagues are connected will lead to higher retention rates and to better profits overall,” explains Lee.

ConnectWise has seen less turnover at the help desk for a variety of reasons, including taking a more personable approach to getting their people better knowledge faster. “And that's kept them here,” says Lee.

ConnectWise’s next steps with peer-driven upskilling

What’s next for ConnectWise and 360Learning? Lee explains that they will be focusing on four areas heading into the future.

First, Lee and the team are looking to expand the new hire training so that they can reach other new colleagues. “We want to ensure that the same basic structure and care is given across the board for our expert services,” says Lee.

Lee also wants to focus on expanding their technical training section to help their colleagues get certifications from some of the major IT providers such as Microsoft, Google, and CompTIA. “Going back and updating our technical training,” he says, “will make it much easier for our technicians to get those skills certifications.”

Third, the team is working on establishing the learning needs function. “Just recently,” Lee explains, “one of our technicians hit the learning needs button and said: I need training on Azure.”  The next day, their instructional designer and subject-matter experts started working on a course. “And now, only a short time later,” he says, “we have a really nice Azure introduction course.”

Finally, Lee and the L&D team are looking to post company-wide announcements as on-demand videos to keep everyone up-to-date on their IT Nation activities. “So those types of things will really give us more of a foothold in 360Learning as far as what we're doing,” Lee says. “But it'll also allow us to use the platform in different ways that aren't necessarily immediately obvious.”