Royal Bank of Canada scores high with Adapt

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Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

95% user satisfaction and 38% saving in production time are impressive stats. Find out how Adapt has been making a real difference at Royal Bank of Canada.

In October 2015 I had the pleasure of bumping into Jeremy Pearce at DevLearn in Las Vegas. I was there with Deborah and Mark to explore the opportunity around authoring and find out what was exciting in the market.

It turned out that the most exciting thing in this space, or at the conference, was actually on Mark’s laptop that day and the highlight of our trip was talking to Jeremy about how we could use Adapt to help Royal Bank of Canada address some business issues and deliver value.So two years later I caught up with Jeremy to review the progress they’ve made and get some insights into his journey. Turns out he’s been quite busy…

So Jeremy, who are RBC?

The Royal Bank of Canada is a Canadian multinational financial services company and the largest bank in Canada. The bank serves over 16 million clients and has 86,000 employees worldwide.

The L&D team is largely based in Toronto with team members also based in the US, UK, Caribbean, Luxembourg, and Malaysia.

What does the Learning and Development look like at RBC?

We have a large team of roughly 230 L&D professionals who support our various lines of business. This includes relationship management, design, development, facilitation, administration, innovations, and marketing.

That being said, we have 24 design/developers with a core team of eight building content using Adapt. They support all areas of the business from compliance to leadership and induction programmes and use a range of tools and technologies to create online learning content. Last year the core team built 114 pieces of content that are mainly delivered on our corporate LMS, or intranet.

We’ve had four new developers get up to speed on Adapt and in the first half of the year they built 38 pieces of content with Adapt. We’re very happy with the volume of content we can build using Adapt and it’s an important part of what we’re planning to do in the future.

You’ve been using Adapt for almost two years now. Why did you pick the technology?

Like lots of people, we looked around at the open source framework and authoring tool and became interested in the output we could generate in Adapt, the flexibility of the technology and the roadmap of developments.

Working with Learning Pool made sense to us because we could benefit from a completely hosted solution and rely on you guys to take care of updates, maintenance and security measures which are vitally important for us.

We also liked the online support that you guys have built with Learning Pool Academy and we’ve used that a lot to get our designers up to speed.

Finally, we loved that Adapt gave us the flexibility to be creative by changing menus, configuring different themes to change the look and feel, and adding extensions that give us specific functionality like bookmarking and search.

What have you used Adapt for?

It may be easier to tell you what we haven’t used it for. Of course, we have used Adapt for formal learning content; onboarding, leadership, agile, compliance, and product training are all topics we have tackled using Adapt.

However, I think that the magic of the tool is also in its flexibility. For example, we have created:

• single web pages that are used for performance support or continued reinforcement
• learning hubs for larger curriculums that act as a single source for curated content
• games for monthly campaigns that are used to lightly engage and reinforce concepts like cybersecurity in an informal and fun way.

Two years later what have you achieved?

We started using a trial of Adapt in March 2016 so it’s not quite been two years just yet… That said we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made.

My design and development team of six has built over 100 pieces of content using Adapt and we’ve reduced the development lifespan by 35% across six end to end projects that we measured.

I would venture that a total number for all RBC users is over 150 when we take into account the users outside my immediate team. We are somewhat a victim of our own success.

When we started with Adapt the pilot was constrained to my design and development team, but we have since deployed it to other teams and parts of the organisation.SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

The speed of development statistics are really impressive. How can you be sure you can deliver this consistently?

We wanted to know that Adapt could give us reliable efficiencies in how to produce e-learning content so we ran an experiment. We gave one of our senior IDs – who’d been trained on Adapt through Learning Pool Academy – a project to complete in parallel with a team delivering the same content in another tool.

We gave the ID double the time and no pressure to deliver. We timed every part of the project to get tangible data and for that reason, we’re happy that our savings stand up to scrutiny.

But what do learners think?

Learner reaction has been great. Adapt courses deployed across the corporate LMS have scored an average rating of 4.74 out of 5 which we’re really happy about.

The feedback from the business has also been great and we’re really just getting started.  We’re excited about assisted revision for annual recertification in areas like capital markets. This new feature will help us challenge the business to rethink how we deliver training by testing up front, pointing learners at what they don’t know, retesting and letting them get them back to work.

This is an enormous win for a business like us where we know that every minute we take our people off the job costs in the region of $56,000… that’s an incredible number and Adapt helps us save by reducing the time required for training.

We’ll also explore xAPI seriously over the next few months to mine the data created in Adapt to give us question level metrics that we know we can use to drive real business impact.

Accessibility is a big deal for you guys. How does Adapt give you what you need?

Accessibility means a number of things to us from device accessibility to support for multiple languages and enabling employees with various disabilities and learning needs. We need our content to run across any device and Adapt meets that need better than any of the other tools we use.

The way Adapt supports multiple languages also works really well for us. Adapt allows us to create a course with several languages as a single learning or SCORM object.

This helps a lot when we deploy the learning to our LMS and it also helps improve the learner experience because we have a lot of multilingual users.

Lastly being WCAG AA compliant, and having native functionality for things like content structure, aria labels, and keyboard access enables learners while reducing the author’s need to manually ensure those standards are in place.

What does the future look like for L&D at RBC?

The new game components have opened up a door in terms of what we can achieve. Traditionally we have built high end, custom campaigns around key priorities like cybersecurity and wellness campaigns.

Adapt gives us a different set of solutions to replace some of this investment with something more agile, quick and cost effective and we’re excited about working with the business to achieve that.