How to make Learning Easier?
Skimple: OpenKnowledge Digital Academy
15 November 2022
4 min.
The world of learning is changing, but not only for the new technologies that are making their way into the field and activating new dynamics. Think of the well-known but often misunderstood Gamification, the use of VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), up to the debate on the future implications of the Metaverse, but also for the concept of learning itself, which is taking a different form.
Until a few years ago, companies’ primary goal in terms of training was to provide a catalog compliant with legislative requirements. Today, the focus has shifted towards the direction of competencies [1]. It is no longer enough to have an e-learning system as a warehouse of courses, now it’s necessary to know how to design a fully immersive learning experience that allows the development of people’s talents and skills. “Academy” is the word to describe this increasingly popular approach.
What is an Academy?
An Academy is a learning ecosystem based on an LMS (learning management system) platform that can offer engaging and interactive learning content, an easy user experience and tracking user activities.
What’s the Purpose of an Academy?
There are several purposes of an Academy, often depending on its specific use, but we can summarize them in three main points:
Performance: An Academy is an ongoing learning system that supports the company when facing new business challenges and meeting its expectations for professional growth.
Workplace: The focus is not only on training employees but also on positively evolving the work environment by transforming it into a physical and virtual place of discussion, creating newfound knowledge and innovation.
Change: Creating a lean and quick structure allows adopting organizational and strategic changes through modern and innovative training processes that help people develop today's and tomorrow's skills.
Expanding our view of the learning market and the trends impacting the L&D area the most, it’s clear that the exponential growth of recent years still shows no signs of stopping. It’s estimated that global spending on corporate learning is about $360 billion, with the average company spending more than $1,500 per person per year (and much higher for senior and executive figures). [2]
Between 2020 and 2022, due to the pandemic and disruptive economic growth, companies have increased this spending by more than 10%, reflecting the need to realign their company population towards new priorities, technologies, and ways of working. [3]
As we see from the image, in the last two years there has already been an increase in digital learning at the expense of classroom training. [4]
This means that there is a growing need to purchase learning objects or to create their own. This is the big alternative that organizations find themselves evaluating nowadays. Is it more cost-effective to produce in-house materials with one’s own content expertise and know-how, or to outsource the process and make ready-to-use content available? This is the so-called “Make or Buy” dilemma.
Analysis of market data reveals a considerable tendency of organizations leaning towards “Make.” Despite the growth of big content vendors (companies such as Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Coursera and hundreds of others), nearly 70% of all content is developed in-house, probably because each company has its own processes, products, security procedures, strategies, and compliance rules. However, with the rapid evolution of business processes and value chain transformation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up, especially for big organizations. This complex, extensive and ever-changing need for training is pushing companies to move towards a Buy perspective. So, organizations must purchase as much “off-the-shelf“ content as possible and constantly invest in updating and renewing their content as the company and business processes evolve. [5]
To meet this need and to make people’s learning experience more efficient, at OpenKnowledge, we have developed a Digital Academy that aims to offer ready-to-use and available learning content in an agile way: Skimple.
Skimple – Ready to Learn: The effortless, ready-to-use SaaS solution designed to immediately access a learning catalog produced by the best digital transformation experts. It’s a catalog that is always up to date on the main digital topics (upskilling/reskilling) to successfully create a solution for the different challenges of a hybrid workplace, in an easy and immediate way.
Easy access to this type of technology makes it possible to efficiently reduce development costs and implementation time, thanks to a Learning Management System with learning content that needs to be included.
Efficiency, however, is not the only aspect to consider. As we have seen, organizations have an important issue to resolve when it comes to learning. Customization the underlying reason why organizations nowadays choose more Make than Buy. The custom experience of training paths, which ranges from the inclusion of brand identity to the need to control the learning content that requires continuous updating, is often indispensable for organizations. For this reason, the Digital Academy is also available as a stand-alone solution in the Cloud version, customizable and manageable in complete autonomy.
Skimple – Custom Made: The complete Cloud solution with unlimited access, ideal for taking the first steps. It is an LMS platform at the complete service of the client (by subscription), which can be managed independently and customized with the brand identity and desired content. It also provides the ability to monitor, manage, administer the platform in total autonomy (directly from the backend) or leave everything in our hands.
This formula represents the ideal solution for those organizations that don’t already have an LMS but need a dedicated system for internal learning, to support specific change, adoption, and upskilling/reskilling initiatives, and that want to do it in a short time frame and at low cost. In both cases, we intend to offer an end-to-end solution that meets the client’s needs. We can create value for all stakeholders involved in the learning process, from the manager to the HR contact and, obviously, the learner.
The Digital Academy represents not only the technological solution that is conquering the market but also a mindset that moves towards agile learning, capitalizing on internal knowledge and looking to the future.
Are you curious to discover the functionalities of Skimple in depth? Do you want to know how Skimple can help your company and projects?
Sources:
- The Josh Bersin Company, Learning Technologies and Platforms 2022 and Beyond, 2022.
- The Josh Bersin Company, The Creator Market for Corporate Learning, 2022.
- The Josh Bersin Company, The Creator Market for Corporate Learning, 2022.
- Linkedin Learning, 2020 Workplace Learning Report, 2020.
- The Josh Bersin Company, The Creator Market for Corporate Learning, 2022.
Author
Jacopo Mancini