Ashford Borough Council case study: transforming L&D

Ashford Borough Council's services include keeping the streets clean, collecting rubbish, social housing, providing leisure facilities and play areas, and processing council tax and housing benefits.

The council employs more than 400 people, and is only one of four local authorities nationally to be awarded a Beacon Award for promoting sustainable communities through the planning process.

Support

Ashford Borough Council is a long-standing customer of Learning Nexus with content to support their learning & development function.

Having assessed various options, Ashford Borough Council decided that Totara Learn was suitable for their needs, thanks to modern functionality and capabilities that would allow them to develop the skills of their workforce.

The challenge

The main element the council required was a robust reporting system.

Previously, L&D staff were spending countless hours producing reports by
hand and collating information from different spreadsheets. They also needed a system through which they could streamline the booking of faceto-face training, rather than manually scheduling events for staff through Microsoft Outlook.

The solution

Since implementing Totara Learn, the sophisticated reporting function has eased the stress of month-end  reporting – saving the team hours of admin time and helping to produce much more in-depth reports.

In addition to reporting, attendance rates for face-to-face sessions has improved, thanks to the automated reminders within the system, a far cry from the previous method of using Microsoft Outlook.

Not only has it saved the L&D team time, but it also brought compliance to the forefront. Previously the team would manually check training records to ensure compliance, but now its front and centre of their dashboard. of their dashboard. Compliance is now also visible to managers, ensuring they take greater ownership of their team's training.

The L&D Officer at Ashford Council said,

“As a council we had been using Learning Nexus for our eLearning provision for some time. Upon joining the council, I was looking for a different solution in terms of an LMS - one that would encompass the need for secure data records and user information retention. This coincided with LN becoming partners with Totara, leading us to believe they could deliver a solution which would meet our needs.

 

I needed an LMS that would allow me to have all user records in one place and accurately record all learning, not just their eLearning. This in particular was to cover our mandatory learning requirements, but also for the more generic job role training.

 

I had previously implemented an LMS with another organisation, and the experience with LN was so much smoother and supportive. The whole implementation was hassle-free, and I was amazed by how little I was asked to do!

 

Sell in to managers was very quick when they realised the benefits the system gave, offered. The data they were asking for previously was now at their fingertips. Staff love it too - it’s now so easy for them to find training, be it face-to-face or online.

 

We’ve gone from not really knowing what our compliance rate was, to now having a glance at it on a daily basis - currently running at 95% which is a
massive improvement.

 

All in all, it has been a great experience working with LN to implement this great solution.

Contact us to find out how we can support your L&D needs.