How Talent Rocks helped Gazprom Neft raise the completion rate of its management programs to 100%
The 2020 lockdown and the forced move of talent development programs online showed that video courses and webinars alone don’t deliver the right learning quality or participant engagement in self-development. New mechanics borrowed from content, social media audiences and blogging came to the rescue. A mobile app built on the Talent Rocks platform became the learning hub.
Until 2020, Gazprom Neft’s modular management training programs were mostly in person. Once a month, participants gathered for several days of in-person sessions, and the rest of the time they studied materials and completed assignments on their own.
For participants, one of the main benefits of the programs was the extensive interpersonal communication and interaction with colleagues from other departments, while the content was secondary. Participants often gained more practical value from talking to each other and lively discussions than from lectures by guest speakers. But in 2020, in-person meetings became impossible.
Client
Gazprom Neft employs about 70,000 people, and more than 60,000 of them receive training at the company each year. Continuous staff development is one of the strategic priorities of Gazprom Neft’s sustainable development. The company follows a modular adaptive learning concept: programs are not monolithic but consist of sections — modules on different topics, each limited in time and structure. Programs can be assembled from different modules depending on needs.
When the lockdown hit, for the first couple of weeks we thought demand would shift sharply toward the online courses on our “knowledge portal,” an internal resource with e-learning courses. But that didn’t happen.
Mandatory courses like “Workplace Safety” are one thing. There, it doesn’t matter at all how the content is delivered — employees get assigned the course and they complete it. But when it comes to learning content for managers, where training effectiveness depends directly on engagement and involvement, that approach doesn’t work.
Goals
The Gazprom Neft Corporate University team was looking for a way to make its online programs more engaging and bring energy and emotion to remote learning.
The idea emerged to use the same content and audience mechanics in online programs that social media uses.
- Content needs to be broken into short, high-quality, “hooky” chunks.
- A lively, active community needs to form around the training program so participants can talk freely with speakers and each other.
- The training program should become part of participants’ daily lives without getting in the way of their core job duties.
- Program curators should always be reachable and able to inform participants quickly, guide them and manage communication.
Solution
It quickly became clear that the best way to achieve these goals was to move the programs to a mobile format.
The Gazprom Neft Corporate University’s own branded mobile app, built on the Talent Rocks platform, became the hub for its modular learning programs.
Unlike building an app from scratch, using a ready-made builder allowed the Corporate University team to launch in the new format in less than 2 weeks.
Today, modular program training through the app runs like clockwork. It’s built around unique content we create in the app, where instructors, participants and course managers also interact constantly. After each module, participants meet at online events to talk and share ideas and experience.
The Gazprom Neft Corporate University is convinced that making interesting content isn’t enough to deliver this learning approach — it’s important to think through every touchpoint with participants in the app and create an engaging learning environment.
The wide-ranging functionality of the Talent Rocks builder makes this possible: an internal private social network with features like popular messengers, the ability to join groups and access content based on group membership, plus an extensive knowledge base and learning materials always at hand, a gamification system and scheduled push notifications.
Mobile learning requires deep involvement from the University team, but the results are worth the effort.
The program completion rate has become absolute. Even in in-person programs, participants often dropped out halfway. Now we have a 100% completion rate. And we receive three times more applications for our programs than there are places.
Next steps
Even after all restrictions on in-person meetings were lifted, Gazprom Neft plans to keep using the apps as part of its blended learning concept, as well as in hybrid programs where some participants attend in person and others learn online.