How SberUniversity trains digital team leaders and keeps them motivated and engaged
A digital platform built on Talent Rocks helps SberUniversity train managers effectively, taking into account the course’s target audience and the challenges facing the program’s designers.
Client
SberUniversity is a major learning center that trains thousands of people every year: Sber employees and top managers, partners, and anyone who wants to stay on top of global trends in business development and future skills, and build a career.
SberUniversity creates unique educational products with a perfectly balanced mix of in-person, remote and e-learning formats.
One of these products is the “Digital Team Leaders Academy,” a two-year, six-module program for IT managers at every level.
Vakhrusheva
SberUniversity
Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of hiring the right IT specialists at the right time and building highly effective teams. IT projects far outnumber managers who are skilled at hiring IT specialists, integrating them into the team, unlocking employee potential and creating a supportive team atmosphere. As a result, valuable IT specialists leave.
The main goal of the new “Digital Team Leaders Academy” project: quickly train a large number of the company’s managers in effective practices and approaches to managing digital teams.
Challenge
While developing the training program, the SberUniversity team faced several challenges:
- Training employees without taking them away from their jobs. Synchronous formats (coaching sessions, trainings) had to fit around work schedules, and learners had to build their own path through the program.
- The program had to combine many different learning formats: remote and e-learning courses, trainings, workshops, in-person sessions and group coaching, while remaining clear and convenient for learners.
- The program design had to keep learners motivated and maintain the pace through the modules; learners had to stay up to date on the program and remember assignment deadlines.
- For the duration of the program, learners needed a space for communication, group work and networking.
Solution
The answer to these challenges was a digital platform for the “Digital Team Leaders Academy” program, built on Talent Rocks.
The platform became a single access point to all activities and materials, a mobile portal and a “control center” for each learner’s personal learning path.
- Schedule. Learners can see the full program schedule, which syncs with the calendar on their mobile device so nothing is missed or forgotten. All required materials and links to online streams (whatever digital platform they run on) are one click away from the schedule.
- Synchronous programs on a personal schedule. Learners must attend one coaching session per month and the trainings for each topic, but they choose the date and time from the available slots. Once a slot is selected, the session appears in the participant’s schedule with all the access links and materials they need. The booking can be changed if needed.
- My group. The platform holds information about every member of the learning group. Learners decide what to show in their profile and whether to use the program for networking or focus purely on learning. In the team’s private chat, members can discuss group assignments and reports with each other and with their facilitators.
- Gamification and leaderboard. Gamification adds extra motivation. On the platform, learners can see their place on the leaderboard, plus the full history and rules for earning “tori” (points of success named after the program’s symbol, the torus, which stands for continuous development).
- Materials. All learning materials are organized by topic and always at participants’ fingertips.
- Push notifications. They remind learners about deadlines and bring their focus back to learning.
- FAQ and News. Answers to the most common questions and a feed of the latest program news help learners navigate the flow of information, focus on what matters and not waste time on logistics.
Vakhrusheva
SberUniversity
With the Talent Rocks platform, we were able to bring learners together, give them a space for team communication, and enable personal schedules, event announcements and reminders.
The digital platform allowed us to bring together all the elements of a complex, multi-component program and give it a convenient, user-friendly interface.
Summary
The first of six modules for the first cohort of the “Digital Team Leaders Academy” program wrapped up in May 2022. More than 250 learners moved on to the next module. Meanwhile, enrollment for the second cohort filled up in less than a week. SberUniversity plans to train more than 1,000 managers through the program over the year.