For more than 170 years, El Puerto de Liverpool, the Mexican retail chain, has put the needs of its customers at the heart of everything it does. Its principles are rooted in quality, value and service; it leads from the front, giving its customers a high-quality fashion and homewares experience as well as an uplifting retail journey.

This is just one of the reasons why El Puerto de Liverpool chose to invest in employees. It firmly believes that learning and personal development is of great importance if it wishes to stay at the forefront of the FMCG market and deliver a first-rate service to its customers.

Bárbara Sierra, Learning Manager at El Puerto de Liverpool, concurs: “In the retail industry, the market changes constantly. El Puerto de Liverpool is always at the forefront, which is why a solid and articulated learning strategy is key in the development of employees.”

Establishing a learning strategy

El Puerto de Liverpool was looking for a learning platform that would provide relevant and current content on different topics, including soft and technical skills. The training had to appeal to a broad spectrum of employees but it also had to place the employee at the centre of their learning.

Bárbara continued: “Our main challenge was to make employees responsible for their own personal development. To do that, we created a learning strategy and established a learning culture.”

Campaigns, content and culture

El Puerto de Liverpool adopted LinkedIn Learning. The platform was easy for the user to navigate and easy for the learning team to administrate. Furthermore, the retail company was able to integrate LinkedIn Learning with its own learning management system.

“We created programmes with target audiences and curated content according to specific skills. We also established goals so that we could track participation and progress,” Bárbara said.

“Each programme also had an incentive; a digital badge that employees could share on their social networks, providing evidence of the skills obtained.”

El Puerto de Liverpool ran weekly campaigns, recommending content aimed at specific skill sets. For example, El Puerto de Liverpool’s learning and development team has two divisions – one is focused on technical skills and the other division is focused on the leadership development. The leadership team experienced particular success. In fact, of the top ten courses completed by El Puerto de Liverpool employees, six focus purely on leadership, leading with Emotional Intelligence being the most watched programme.

Exciting times

El Puerto de Liverpool has a close relationship with LinkedIn Learning and has worked with the platform for three years. In year two, the company had 2,500 LinkedIn Learning licenses. That number now stands at 3,000.

Now, El Puerto de Liverpool is trialling LinkedIn Learning’s new intelligent skill building platform, LinkedIn Learning Hub. It uses data and insight to steer users in the right direction in terms of personalised content and community-based learning, making learning paths easier to find. El Puerto de Liverpool is excited to see exactly what impact LinkedIn Learning Hub will have on its employees’ learning and development and is proud to be the first company in Mexico to be part of the trial.