Today, an accepted tenet in business is that an organization’s most valuable assets are its intellectual property and its people. So how about this brilliant concept: a way to capture the knowledge only people possess and share it with their colleagues through formalized, peer-to-peer learning.

 

That is the beauty of 360Learning’s Collaborative Learning, now available on SAP Store. The learning platform enables fast upskilling, especially in environments where the business is changing quickly and new learning needs are arising constantly. Anyone, even those who aren’t confident in their presentation skills, can create, deliver, and collaborate on courses together. This way, courses are delivered quicker; employees, customers, and partners learn faster; and time isn’t wasted. 360Learning calls this “Upskill from Within,” and this capability could not be timelier given the current talent shortage.

 

Better Efficiency and Knowledge Transfer Through Collaboration

 

However, the talent shortage was not the prime motivator for CEO Nick Hernandez when he came up with the idea for a peer-driven learning platform about 10 years ago. Instead, Nick told me, he was inspired primarily by two principles that had imbued his life. First was the love of learning, instilled while he was “in the womb” by his parents, both educators who had immigrated to France from South America to take advantage of academic opportunities.

 

The second was the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, discovered while Nick himself was studying computer science and philosophy. Nick summarized Foucault’s take on the conjunction of knowledge and authority: “If you think about how science is built, the framework is intuition. Someone has an idea, but it’s controversial; there’s no way to prove it will work. In the end, though, the science is ultimately accepted through a process of peer review. I thought, ‘Let’s build a tool that helps peers learn from each other’” – in short, providing the means to mine the collective knowledge residing in the enterprise and accelerate that process. “Instead of bringing in an outside management consultant as ‘the authority,’” he continued, “recognize that the essential knowledge is within the workforce. And peer-driven learning is much more efficient and cost-effective than external content providers.”

 

Scalability to Support Thousands of Content Creators and Consumers

 

He and co-founders Guillaume Alary, CRO, and Sebastien Mignot, CTO, all recent university graduates, spent two years building the product based on their own intuition while looking for potential sources of revenue. Once they found the product/market fit and after testing and absorbing feedback, the team incorporated a means of validating and controlling content, since “a company is not a democracy.”

 

“Education radically changed my parents’ lives, and as a consequence, mine,” said Nick. “I channeled my interest in learning into the founding of 360Learning. While the tech world is full of shiny new technologies, what we’re doing here is much more personal to me than a cool B2B SaaS tool. I truly believe learning changes lives, and everyone should get that chance.”

 

The initial launch was through inbound marketing, with plenty of content to explain the concepts, and it wasn’t long before 360Learning landed a major contract. Business came in naturally, drawing people who understood the vision. The next big challenge was to enable scalability for large enterprises; today, one customer has more than 100,000 users, with 1,200 content authors alone. A robust infrastructure is crucial to support that volume and powerful capabilities like artificial intelligence to automate processes. Courses are improved on an ongoing basis by peers who identify out-of-date content or suggest additions. Feedback and data from interactions within the course are pushed to coaches, who facilitate learning by ensuring that courses are easily accessible, intuitive, actionable, and impactful.

 

The platform is now available in 14 languages and counts some of the world’s best-known brands among its advocates. 360Learning has more than 400 employees with offices in New York City, London, Paris, and Karlsruhe, Germany.

 

Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Learning for Data Intelligence

 

Other key leaders are Bruce Mazza, head of global partnerships, and Dewey Fleszar, product marketing manager, who joined my discussion with Nick. Dewey noted that inbound marketing continues to be a paramount strategy – which is now considerably more structured under his leadership, Bruce added.

 

"With the additional focus on partner marketing and integration with client’s HR systems, now we can extend collaborative upskilling capabilities from 360Learning to a wide range of large enterprises,” Bruce said. “We have a process and repeatability, and can solve that together with SAP. We are finding customers where our platform complements SAP offerings, focusing on the experience of the experts who create the courses and the learners who benefit.” SAP has a great talent suite, Mazza remarked. “Integration with SAP SuccessFactors HXM and SAP SuccessFactors Learning allows us to extend upskilling from within to clients that have compliance needs, as well as wider employee data intelligence needs – for example, linking skill gaps to expert engagement and authoring.”

 

360Learning’s Collaborative Learning Platform is tagged as a “sustainable solution” on SAP Store because it supports social responsibility through capabilities development. I asked Bruce to explain more. “The context is the full well-being of the employee and the high level of employee engagement the platform supports.”

 

See for yourself how Collaborative Learning Platform supports employee skill development – and a lot more – by watching the video on SAP Store