Of course, Telenet needs no introduction. The company was founded in 1994 to break Belgacom’s monopoly position as a telecom provider. Telenet is now a fully-fledged media and entertainment company that wants to remain at the forefront of the digital world with a streaming service and its own TV channels. The company strives to connect people and create experiences for a better quality of life.
Telenet employs more than 3,500 people in a very wide variety of roles. Telenet aims to support all these employees in their growth. This means that people can take their career into their own hands and choose to specialize in a field, to broaden their knowledge, to reskill, to take a step back if they need to…
‘Obviously, as a media company, we want to support that with technology as much as possible,’ says Duncan D’hondt. As a functional and business analyst at Telenet, it is essential for him to be able to collect and visualize employee data. ‘I want to know which skills our people need or want to develop, which skills enter and leave the organization… and FLOWSPARKS is a crucial tool for mapping all of this out.’
Before the arrival of FLOWSPARKS, Telenet used multiple tools to create e-Learning modules and share knowledge. ‘Some of them were complex so it took too long to create training sessions. Others were hardly used. Departments were working with different tools…,’ D’hondt explains. There was no uniform policy. ‘As a result, it was virtually impossible to collect data.’
Telenet therefore went in search of one tool that could replace all the others and had to meet an extensive set of requirements. ‘It’s important to us that the employees are at the helm of their own development,’ D’hondt says. ‘Furthermore, the tool had to be data-driven and extremely flexible. We have employees at head office, but also in our shops, in the support centers, we work with external partners, etc. They must be able to use the tool at any place and any time. After all, many employees do not have the opportunity to go through an hour of uninterrupted digital learning modules, but do so between two customers or two phone calls.’
Finally, Telenet wanted the available e-Learning courses to be easy to find based on skills. And for it to be easy to create e-Learning, even for people who don’t have an L&D background or experience with content management systems.
‘Due to the many requirements, limited resources and many other tools and systems, it was rather difficult for us to start using FLOWSPARKS,’ says D’hondt. ‘The FLOWSPARKS team did a great job coaching us in this. They really had a lot of patience with me. We were able to spar extensively with them about how we would set everything up, how we would set up the learning environment around skills, about suitable formats and templates, about our policy, etc.’
So there were a few hurdles to overcome before Telenet could get started with FLOWSPARKS. These were in addition to the resistance of some employees to a new application. ‘Many experts in our organization were attached to the tool they had been using for years and that perfectly met their specific needs, even though the creation of e-Learning modules with these tools was a time-consuming activity. The extensive workshops and the fact that FLOWSPARKS already had many customers that we could ask about their experience with the tool not only eliminated the resistance, but gave people a lot of confidence in FLOWSPARKS,’ says D’hondt.
The access management of FLOWSPARKS is very simple. You gain good insights and you know clearly who does what and how people build their skills. FLOWSPARKS fits in very well with the architecture of our HR landscape and offers a personalized learning experience.
In the first quarter of 2022, Telenet started replacing the old tools with FLOWSPARKS and migrating the existing content. ‘This means that we had to move no fewer than 400 training courses to FLOWSPARKS. We also received a great deal of guidance in the brainstorming exercise on how we were going to migrate the existing content to FLOWSPARKS.’
By Q3 2023, we want to have trained 50 employees in FLOWSPARKS. ‘We’ve started capturing data since the fourth quarter of last year. With the data that we collect thanks to FLOWSPARKS, we hope to acquire strategic insights into the skills in our organization in 2024.’
Although Telenet has not been using FLOWSPARKS for very long yet, the balance is very positive. ‘FLOWSPARKS offers a flexibility that we did not see with other tools. You have many templates and possibilities to integrate different forms of learning into your study program very easily,’ says D’hondt. ‘The access management of FLOWSPARKS is also very simple. You gain good insights and you know clearly who does what and how people build their skills. FLOWSPARKS fits in very well with the architecture of our HR landscape and offers a personalized learning experience.’
