Presentation Panel

Best Practices in Creating Sticky & Disruptive Corporate Learning Journeys

Beyond the development of “toolkits” for employee or user training lays a new horizon of creating learning experiences that exceed company borders, either because they become a wider used reference or because they transcend into the private atmosphere and not only makes us better employees but better humans. In this session we look at practical case studies of exemplary and agile designs to equip both users and employees with future-ready skills.

Stephanie Voss

Senior Manager Training and Coaching Oncology, Daiichi Sankyo Europe GmbH

At the moment Stephanie Voss works in the position of European Senior Training Manager for Daiichi Sankyo Europe and in the past she worked as Head of Training at Novartis Oncology in Nuremberg, as adult educator at Janssen Cilag in Neuss. In her responsibilities she focused to established blended learning concepts, topics of self-management and communication and product relevant training. She won the Human Excellence Award in the field of Learning and Development for an innovative virtual training programme. Her expertise lies primarily in the development of innovative learning concepts in the area of virtual training and classroom training and as a book author for business relevant training topics.
From her background, she holds degrees as Dipl. Oecotrophology, Master of Art in Adult Education and a Master of Art in Organisational Development, is an e-moderator and designer, Agile Culture Coach, Systemic Coach and Change Manager.

Moderator

Creating a Blended Learning Journey for Transformational Interactions in a VUCA World, Stephanie Voss

This presentation introduces participants to Daiichi Sankyo’s unique approach of business-related communications training that fits to the needs of a VUCA environment and is delivered as a blended learning journey for employees and leaders and into digestible chunks of virtual learning only for new employees.

In our communication training for customer-facing and leadership roles, our approach towards conversations moves away from the more traditional but not realistic "linear" or "stimulus-response" approach towards a more circular approach, more aligned to a normal conversation. We believe communication is more like a "dance" instead of a "march".

We have called this approach 'oncore building stakeholder trust' and our development programme is based on improving interactions in a communication to discuss more as peers and less like a one-way monologue or a hierarchically driven opportunistic dialogue. We want to develop the mindset, attitude and behaviours in a communication, not a toolkit to influence the thoughts of the customer.

Daiichi Sankyo's wholistic picture of a conversation brings together different disciplines and mirrors in some esteem the agile manifesto and agile principles. Our approach offers a frame to inspire the communication, resulting in a solution coming from within during the discussion. This attitude, behaviour and mindset changing approach fits to the needs of a VUCA environment, is implementable and relevant for various industries and business-related communications and could as well improve our private discussions. As the training entails a shift in mindset, it also has the potential to create organisational change.

METHODOLOGY

For employees and leaders, we developed this training as a blended learning approach and for new employees we developed a virtual learning journey.

The blended learning approach was structured as

An interactive introduction: a virtual meeting to create curiousity with many self-leaded break out rooms, where participants discuss topics and reflect on question.
A plenary where key points were discussed with all participants.
A self learning e-learning module.
Another virtual classroom to refresh the main points, again with break out groups to convert theory into practice.

The learning journey is based on 6 modules:

Make a plan to achieve mutual goals.
Create an engaging atmosphere.
Facilitate a conversation to discover opportunities and beliefs.
Work in partnership to co-create and enable beneficial solutions.
Agree and find alignment.
Review or record and self-evaluate

Participants are always flanked by a trainer and work on the topics as a tandem. At the end of the training, we offer scenarios for conversations and train some dialogues, to convert everything into practice.

Afterwards, the participants regulary receive podcasts with realistic examples of interactions and a newsletter to read the content again and reflect on it.

Nearly the same learning journey was developed for leaders, although it was more directed to improve their observational skills and questioning behaviour. For new employees we implemented mini-modules that break the 6 modules into digestible chunks, with reflecting exercises in between and a face-to-face meeting for two days to bring the essence of the content into practice during different role-play scenarios.

How to Build A Successful Company User Training from Scratch

In this talk, Guy Shtub (Head of Training at ScyllaDB) will explain the journey of creating Scylla University, an online, free, self-paced learning resource center for the users of their software.

When I started working at ScyllaDB, we didn't have any formal methodologies for training. The training was done ad-hoc or we would even refer our users to other sources of information. During the past 3 years, I led the effort to create “Scylla University”, an online, free, self-paced learning resource center for our users.

Scylla University is now a leading source of NoSQL training and is widely used. In this talk, I will cover our journey in creating Scylla University and share tips, lessons learned, metrics, and more. I will also talk about how we use blended learning and a mix of self-paced and live training to enhance the user experience.

Overview

Evaluate different delivery platforms for learning content.
Pros and cons of different delivery methods such as video, text, slides, hands-on labs, hands-on learning platforms.
Learn from our mistakes and get inspiration and ideas on how you can improve your training, and how you can leverage new technologies for e-learning.