Glasgow City Council "Goes for Gold" with learning platform

For efficiency gains and improvements in customer care, how do you train over 35,000 learners successfully internally in one go? With GOLD, that's how.

• Large target audience - over 35,000 learners concurrently being trained
• Ability to create, launch, and maintain internal content with ease and host 3rd party solutions
• Fully tracked with more than 4,700 courses implemented in 6 months
• Streamlined training reduces staff time and logistics problems for efficiency gains

The background

With over 35,000 employees, Glasgow City Council's training needs to be designed for a wide target audience making training delivery a bit of a challenge both for time and logistics.

As part of its new 'People Strategy' commitment to Developing and Learning, Glasgow commissioned workplace learning specialists Brightwave to help them implement a new learning platform to enable them to take charge of their internal e-learning training needs.

The solution

Brightwave's solution, a customised e-learning platform, enables staff at Glasgow City Council to create, launch, track and report on in-house and 3rd party e-learning programmes. As well as including a 360 feedback tool and evaluation centre, Brightwave's tool suite is aimed at any organisation with a desire to create industry standard e-learning in-house without extensive technical knowhow.

Known as GOLD, Glasgow's Online Learning Development suite was rolled out in the summer of 2009 to over 35,000 employees. Including tracking and management capabilities, it enables the council to take full control in the design and delivery of its training needs.

"GOLD is a brand new ground-breaking opportunity for all our Council employees as part of our deep commitment to learning and development." explains Sandra Wilson, e-Learning Manager at Glasgow City Council. "e-Learning is an excellent way of ensuring everyone is up to date with all the key messages. Having the ability to create the content in-house gives us greater control over how and when we reach our employees. Using Brightwave's suite of tools we are able to make sure training is more accessible to staff as well as identify future training needs through the integrated tracking, feedback and evaluation."

To date, over 4700 courses have been implemented via GOLD from 3rd party content, to solutions created via BILD, Brightwave's Interactive Learning Developer, part of the learning tool suite.

The benefits

One of the courses created internally through BILD was Glasgow CARES. The mandatory course, covering the council's customer care charter was one of the first courses to be undertaken by all council employees.

"Glasgow CARES is a good example of benefits to the Council. We used a blended learning approach as we would not have been able to train all 35,000 staff in the Council face-to-face. The e-learning system (GOLD) has allowed us to at least partially achieve our commitment to create flexible learning and development for all staff" explains Sandra.

Robert McLeish, Social Work Services explains "Over the last few months I have completed a range of courses that really helped me deliver a large piece of work more effectively. It is a fantastic resource and so accessible. I have definitely improved my skills which have improved my service delivery, an overall benefit for me and the Council."

Brightwave's view

"Our philosophy is about listening to clients so we can provide the right learning and development experience. With Councils such as Glasgow, there is great need for continual training as policies and messages update constantly. More Councils should realise the power and knowledge they already have when it comes to training their employees. With our simple solutions we can create engaging content or organisations can create their own. As we have seen with the councils who use our tools, training messages can go a long way effortlessly." concludes Michael Dalglish, Senior Technologist at Brightwave.