From SME To Author In A Day: How Michelin Built A Community Of Learning Champions

Challenges

Driving global impact with user-generated content

In 2016, Michelin’s marketing and sales teams began using 360Learning to train their customers–with great success. Five years later, 360Learning continues to be the Michelin Group’s training solution of choice to share its corporate culture and technical course content across the organization. By 2020, Michelin had successfully digitized 30% of its training courses.

User-generated content is at the heart of Michelin's Digital Learning strategy. Each employee possesses unique subject-matter expertise and Michelin needs to be able to share this with as many people in the company as possible. The company identified two major issues:

• The training initiatives put in place didn’t support quick responses to specific upskilling needs. They needed to be able to easily deploy actions as close to the field as possible.

• Out-of-date SCORM modules made it difficult to share knowledge internally. To create a process that keeps improving, training needs to be constantly enriched with relevant learner feedback.

Michelin’s challenge was making an immediate impact across its global organization with user-generated content in its learning strategy.

Solution

For Joffrey, the answer was obvious: Create and lead a community of learning champions. He shares the 3 steps that led to this success, with the help of the 360Learning platform.

Step 1: Break down the barriers to creation

First off, internal experts need to be able to share their knowledge in a few hours. Just under four hours, to be more precise. Joffrey explains:

This is a complete paradigm shift, compared to the six months typically needed to set up a SCORM course, which is also difficult to update regularly.

Without any prior request to a manager or to the training team, an employee can upgrade his skills on 360Learning in complete autonomy, directly from the HRIS portal.

Once an employee completes these online tutorials, the L&D team is notified by email and the learner is immediately validated. Thanks to this online training, the Michelin team has created a group of more than 100 champions who can support the demand for local upskilling needs.

Joffrey also explains that the decentralization of course content creation would not be possible without the architecture of the 360Learning platform that facilitates easier learner access.

To illustrate this, Joffrey gives the example of an employee at the Roanne factory (in central France) who noticed his colleagues weren’t respecting safety rules when handling a dangerous product. His team’s safety training was delayed, so he took matters into his own hands. Using 360Learning, he created a module detailing formal safety procedures to follow. One week later, 70% of target learners had completed the training, and product handling was corrected. The result? Their team saved time, increased efficiency, and avoided work-related accidents.

Breaking down the barriers to course creation has two major benefits:

• Constant improvement: Training content that resonates with learners' immediate learning needs generates a lot of engagement. As these courses are delivered, learners share reactions and feedback to improve them. 

• Less admin for the L&D team: For every 120,000 employees, Michelin has just two platform managers for their LMS. Yep, two.

Step 2: Proactively recruit internal champions

The Michelin team identifies internal learning champions thanks to the achievements distributed to power users on the 360Learning platform. These badges are used for communicating proactively with targeted users, when inviting them to join the learning community.

Step 3: Build community loyalty

The Michelin team keeps the learning community's process straightforward and motivating. This is the best way to grow a pool of candidates through word of mouth.

Another important point is to guarantee community members tangible and exclusive rewards with participation. For example:

• Skill validation in the Michelin internal reference system

• Training content visibility on a global level. The training team maintains complete control over operations,  with easy management of user permissions. Michelin’s L&D team is responsible for administering access to courses at the Group level.  

• Access to exclusive content: a dedicated Microsoft Teams group, early access to content and new features...Once or twice a year, the community meets for a few hours to learn about the platform's statistics, attend inspiring conferences, and participate in workshops.

Results

The Michelin Group’s results speak for themselves:

• 22,000+ active users: this figure has doubled every year over the last 3 years, thanks to their network of internal champions. 

• 40,000 hours of training completed online, without any mandatory training. According to Joffrey, it would be impossible to reach these figures with training courses only designed by the L&D team. 

• 9,000 courses created with and through the network of champions

• 50+ modules available in 14 different languages, the ultimate proof of decentralized training on a global scale

• An 86% completion rate, which Joffrey attributes to the peer-to-peer effect: "We listen more to those who have relevant roles to our own.”

What's next for the Michelin team? Continued growth of their successful learning community. Driven by the company's mission to deploy a culture of collaborative learning to its fullest potential, they want to continue recruiting learning champions and driving positive growth internally to meet upskilling needs.