A good learning platform thrives on two things: Good content and the motivation of the participants! Nico Adorf and Hendrik Hinsken from SNIPES reveal how these two core elements are connected in the SNIPES Campus – and why a good learning platform is part of the company culture.

Note: This article was published in July 2019 and last updated in November 2020.

About the authors: Together, Hendrik Hinsken and Nico Adorf are responsible for the Training & Development Department at SNIPES.

Your SNIPES Campus is actively used every month in a total of 9 countries by more than a thousand employees.

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It's been over a year since the SNIPES Campus was launched. What formats and content do you offer your employees there?

The platform is used for almost everything: We have classic e-learning content where our employees can educate themselves independently. At the same time, we also use blended learning, especially in the area of customer service. The content is quite diverse: We have some mandatory courses – for example, onboarding – but mostly voluntary courses.

Additionally, we have an event area where we promote our events and present news about the latest campaigns or products. It has truly become a platform where we offer diverse learning content on one hand, and also an entertainment area.

That sounds exciting! Why did you choose a learning platform from blink.it for this concept?

The deciding factor was that with blink.it, we are not bound to external partners and can really create our content as quickly as possible and flexibly set up our courses.

We can shoot videos, use PDFs, and upload PowerPoints – so, utilize all the content that we already have in our daily work. Blink.it is exactly what we need to communicate quickly and agilely with our people.

Your largest course is the onboarding course for new employees. Why did you move the onboarding to the digital CAMPUS?

SNIPES is growing incredibly fast. It is usually essential to conduct onboarding discussions with management in our stores several times a week, which would take some time. So we wanted to simplify the daily business for all employees and their leaders.

For this reason, we designed the onboarding course and various onboarding schedules that conclude with a small learning success check at the end. This way, we can transfer the same knowledge as quickly as possible and legally protect ourselves that all employees have been informed about important topics.

Insight into the SNIPES Campus: In addition to the mandatory onboarding course (see image), many voluntary content is also offered.

In the courses, you provide a lot of content in videos. Why do you use this format in particular?

Initially, many PDFs and PowerPoint presentations were used in the courses. However, our very young target group is used to receiving learning content presented somewhat differently.

Through the evaluation of the courses, we quickly noticed that anything backed by video material is received much better. That's why we immediately reconsidered our strategy and have since been working strongly audio-visually, reducing the text content to the absolute minimum.

Now that we have tailored our content to our employees, we also see that the campus is being used much more actively than at the beginning! So actively that some employees have started creating video material like product training on their own, which we also upload to the campus after careful review. Thus, users create content themselves – and without pressure, just for fun! For us, it’s an absolute win-win situation!

With videos, we have another advantage: When we notice a particular topic during our analyses or meetings, we can react quickly and flexibly. We create a concept, shoot a short clip, make a tutorial out of it, and send it promptly to the devices of our employees all over Europe. This process can be completed within a few days.

Editor’s tip: Creating learning videos yourself is neither difficult nor expensive! Get our free guide to video creation with a smartphone:

In addition to the mandatory courses, you also offer many voluntary learning contents. How do you motivate your employees to actively participate in these voluntary courses?

On one hand, we believe that the platform should also bring joy, so that we include entertainment and create incentives to regularly check the platform. In the entertainment area, there is information about events sponsored by SNIPES, or cool new product videos that we produce in collaboration with our partners from the industry. Once our employees are regularly active on the campus, they automatically engage with the voluntary learning content.

On the other hand, we transparently show how the career path at SNIPES can look through the campus: We emphasize in the mandatory courses that initiative is rewarded – with various advancement opportunities. Anyone who wants to learn is allowed to learn!

We are also very interested in regularly bringing new content and keeping the platform up-to-date. New employees grow up with the campus: It becomes quite natural for the new people to work with it.

The e-learning concept of SNIPES with blink.it

New employees thus know from the outset that there is a campus and some mandatory courses – how do you practically introduce them to the learning platform?

It's quite simple: Our employee data is synced daily with blink.it. This means that the employee receives an invitation email for the campus even before their first day of work.

The entry is a welcoming course with short video tutorials about the platform and how blink.it can be saved directly as an app on the smartphone’s home screen. The mandatory courses are structured like a video game, in which you progress from level to level to ultimately receive a certificate from your store manager.

In the first days of work, colleagues on site in the stores, as well as we in the T&D Department, support if our new employees have questions regarding the courses or how to handle them. In general: our e-learning platform is simply part of the company culture!

Thank you for the interview, Nico and Hendrik!

Conclusion: Know your employees! To inspire them for a learning platform, the content must be tailored to the target group. A diverse offering and the right format contribute significantly to the success of e-learning and blended learning in companies.