AO

Background

From what started as a £1 bet in a pub in Bolton, founder John Roberts has evolved AO into a major electrical retailer, specializing in household appliances. With over 4,500 staff and millions of customers, it operates in the United Kingdom as AO.com and in Germany as AO.de.

Challenge

With a successful internet-based business, a logistics business and a high demand for white goods during the COVID-19 pandemic, AO has experienced rapid growth over the last 12 months.

The Learning & Development team had already invested in a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) but required new content to meet the demands of the business. Particularly, there was no compliance content available, and the management development, leadership and soft skills content consisted largely of PowerPoints and PDFs.

The L&D team had the capability to create new content but not the resources to provide all that was required so they needed to bring in some training catalogues to meet the demand.

Solution

To efficiently meet the demand for quality training for AO’s 4,500 staff, the L&D team purchased an array of Learning Pool’s off-the-shelf catalogs, including Management Development, Future Skills, Foundation Skills and Future of Work.

They draw upon this bank of courses to support their content development, enabling them to meet the demand as it arises by utilizing a predeveloped course. The company also uses Learning Pool’s authoring tool to customize the content per AO’s needs. This includes adding in its own branding, tone of voice, additional content and links to further resources. This enables the L&D team to deliver training in a much shorter time frame – typically one week – without needing to engage subject matter experts to help develop something from scratch.

In turn, they are able to still provide the business with a piece of learning that is in line with the corporate brand, its messaging and needs.

Response

“We needed a fast, off-the-shelf content solution that we could use as a base to then customize training to our needs and Learning Pool Library Content gives us just that. The editing functionality we get from these catalogs is different from other off-the-shelf content that we use, and it allows us to quickly offer quality, predeveloped content, hugely cutting down our development time but also allowing us to present it in a bespoke way, ensuring internal process, brand and additional resources are all included. It has become the content of choice of the AO L&D team when looking to fulfill a training need in the business. I personally have had a relationship with Learning Pool for many years through my previous two organizations and they have always shown great innovation and have delivered a high level of support.”

Jamie Egan
Digital Learning Lead

Results

The feedback received from the business about the Learning Pool Library Content has been very positive. With Learning Pool Authoring enabling AO to customize each course to reference internal processes, speak in the right tone of voice and include links to further resources and contacts within the business, it has meant that engagement with the learning has been far greater.

The modern scrolling style of the Learning Pool Authoring-tailored content has been well received by the users, who are largely a young population of employees, and there is an increased appetite to consume content in this way, rather than in a more traditional linear style.