A good learning platform thrives on two things: Good content and the motivation of 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 a part of the corporate culture.

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

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

The SNIPES Campus has been around for over a year. 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 people can educate themselves independently. At the same time, we also use Blended Learning, especially in the area of Customer Service. The content varies widely: We have some mandatory courses – for example, onboarding – but mostly voluntary courses.

In addition, 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 on the other.

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

The decisive factor was that we are not tied to external partners with blink.it and can create our content as quickly as possible ourselves and flexibly design our courses.

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

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

SNIPES is growing incredibly fast. It is usually essential to have the management in our stores engage in onboarding conversations several times a week, which would take quite a bit of time. So, we wanted to simplify the daily business for all employees and their supervisors.

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

An insight into the SNIPES Campus: In addition to the mandatory onboarding course (see image), many voluntary contents are also offered.

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

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

By analyzing the courses, we quickly realized that anything accompanied by video material is much better accepted. That’s why we immediately reconsidered our strategy and have since worked strongly in an audio-visual way and reduced the text content to an 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 start! So actively, in fact, that some employees have started creating video material, such as product training, on their own, which we upload to the Campus after careful review. Thus, users create their own content – and without compulsion, just for fun! For us, it's a definite win-win situation!

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

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 the one hand, we believe that the platform should also be fun, meaning that we incorporate entertainment and create incentives to regularly check the platform. In the entertainment area, there are for example informations about events sponsored by SNIPES, or new cool product videos that we produce in collaboration with our industry partners. Once our employees are regularly engaging on the Campus, they also automatically engage with the voluntary learning content.

On the other hand, we show transparently 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 welcome to do so!

We are also very keen on regularly bringing new content and keeping the platform always up-to-date. New employees grow up with the Campus: It becomes quite natural for them to work with it.

The E-Learning concept of SNIPES with blink.it

New employees thus know from the very beginning that there is the Campus and some mandatory courses – How do you practically introduce them to the learning platform?

It’s quite simple: Our employee data is synchronized daily with blink.it. This means that the employee receives an invitation email for the Campus even before their first workday.

The onboarding is a welcome course with short video tutorials about the platform and how blink.it can be saved directly on the home screen of the smartphone like an app. The mandatory courses are basically structured like a video game, where one works through from level to level to ultimately receive a certificate from their store manager.

During the first days of work, colleagues on-site in the stores and we in the T&D Department assist if our new employees have questions about the courses or usage. In general, it holds true: Our E-Learning platform is simply part of the corporate culture!

Thank you for the interview, Nico and Hendrik!

Conclusion: Know your employees! To excite them for a learning platform, the content must be tailored to the target group. A diverse offering and the right format are essential for the success of E-Learning and Blended Learning in companies.