The challenge
Starr Companies is a leading global insurance and financial services organisation providing a range of services including property and casualty insurance solutions to businesses and industries across five continents.
With its head office in the UK and nine further offices spread across Europe, Starr needed a modern learning platform to support the company’s exponential growth and provide real-time access to learning. The majority of its training was being carried out in the classroom and Starr wanted to provide staff with a more blended learning experience. It also wanted to make it easier for staff to achieve their CPD requirements and bring all of its compliance training in-house under one centralised system. Starr chose Learn from a shortlist of three companies.
“Learn’s usability really stood out as did its CPD capabilities and the value it offered. Even with the uncertainties of Brexit we are targeting 10% growth this year alone across our European offices, and Learn was clearly a system that could grow with us.” – Phillip Westermeyer, Learning and Development Manager
Learn went live in August 2018 to 220 staff across Europe and has already delivered a number of benefits to Starr’s people and the business.
Helping people meet their CPD requirements
The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) regulations stipulate that everybody working in the industry must complete 35 hours of CPD training every year. For a growing company of Starr’s size it would be impossible to achieve this purely in the classroom. Starr has seen a significant increase in CPD as Learn has enabled staff to supplement classroom training with videos, podcasts, PDF guides, eLearning and microlearning. Staff have been given the flexibility to learn when they want to learn, in the way that suits them best, using their PCs, tablets or mobile phones.
As a result, in the three month period after the system went live, 1,000 CPD hours were completed which would previously have taken over eight months to accrue. And by replacing cumbersome manual spreadsheets with reports that can be generated at the click of a mouse, Starr has saved time tracking CPD too. Having a centralised system has also made it easier to deliver and track the progress and completion rates for compliance training, which is particularly important in the wake of the new Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR), which seeks to ensure greater accountability of staff operating at all levels of the insurance industry for their conduct and competence.
“The feedback we have received from learners has been really positive, particularly around the choice of courses on offer for CPD. A lot of managers have commented on how much they appreciate getting notifications about which members of their teams have booked onto courses. Everybody in Europe is now using Learn and we are getting 100% booking rates for classroom training.” – Phillip Westermeyer, Learning and Development Manager.
Next steps for Starr
Starr currently generates CPD reports every month as part of its HR board reporting. In the future it hopes to use the reporting tools to better understand key learning trends and create personalised learning plans to support individual, departmental and business objectives more effectively.
Starr’s vision is to transition from a learning environment which is grounded in meeting compliance and CPD requirements to an ‘always learning’ culture where people have real-time access to a wealth of content that supports their career development. Learn will be instrumental in helping to achieve this.
