Digitalization of training on the fast-track

The Challenge

Corona as an accelerator of digital transformation

The Corona pandemic has shaken up a lot of companies. Not everything was negative – the best example of this is the kitchen trade. For although many other industries suffered sales losses, demand from kitchen manufacturers increased during the pandemic: Lockdowns and travel bans led people to focus on beautifying their own four walls.

This presented the baumann group with a special challenge: As demand among customers increased, so did the demand for training among retail partners. However, face-to-face training was no longer possible from one day to the next. All training courses for the retail partners, which before 2020 were mainly held in person at three training centres and were organised by the baumann academy, therefore had to be transferred to the digital world as quickly as possible.

The baumann group shows how to set up a large and high-quality e-learning offer quickly and pragmatically with which external partners can be trained flexibly, even with limited personnel capacities.

The solution

Quickly create learning content even without prior knowledge

After the baumann group had introduced a learning management system (LMS) with the support of youknow to distribute learning content efficiently, the next step was to fill the platform with learning content. Producing e-learnings in addition to classroom training and online seminars is a challenge for the academy team. This is where knowtion, the smart authoring tool from youknow, comes into play. Within the academy, Lukas Benz, a trainer at baumann academy, is one of the main people responsible for creating digital training content for the retail partners. Although he is a new in using authoring tool, he manages to create entire training courses on his own within a very short time. Especially for totally new trainings, the guided setup in knowtion is a great advantage, which guides newcomers to content creation through the process from the beginning and supports them with context-sensitive tips. The assistance in defining learning objectives, for example, ensures that the quality of the training is consistently high and helps in reducing complexity.

The trainings are very well accepted by the retail partners, as the courses provide them with important technical knowledge about the products and at the same time give them the necessary sales skills. Both are pre-requisites for inspiring end customers. In addition, acceptance is increased through various marketing measures, such as information on e-learning in regular newsletters as well as at seminars. In the future, participation in digital trainings is to be additionally increased by the fact that a face-to-face seminar is only considered to have been passed when the learners have completed the associated e-learning. This is a good example of blended learning – the mixture of face-to-face and online training.

And the story goes on

Internationalization and a growing team

knowtion enables the baumann academy team to provide a lot of learning content in a very short time. Therefore, an expansion of the training content for internal and external learners is planned for 2023. A fixed item on the program is the communication of new products. Furthermore, baumann academy will become even more international: in addition to the current German and English language learning system, French, Spanish & Portuguese are planned for the beginning of 2023. The success speaks for itself: from a small team of 3 people, the baumann academy has grown into a strong team with a total of 8 employees.

Conclusion

Easy entry for e-learning beginners

baumann group and the baumann academy team have shown that – with the right authoring tool – even as an e-learning beginner you can create high-quality content yourself quickly and without much effort.