Giving employees access to broad catalogue of content

Finastra wanted to invest in its people and demonstrate a commitment to skills development that would help retain them and develop their careers whilst furthering the company’s own strategy.

“We asked ourselves: How do we engage employees, develop their skills, and win the battle for talent in an industry where people can go anywhere ask for a big salary and get a good job?” Brock commented. Finastra laid the foundation with an inspiring future-focused strategy with stated goals of accelerating the Cloud product roadmap, becoming a key global player in Banking as a Service (BaaS), and ultimately striving to become the number one Open platform for innovation in financial services.

It was clear that Finastra needed to adopt a skills-based learning and development approach to achieve those objectives. The company examined every inch of the business; it assessed roles in the company and linked skills against roles.

Then Finastra developed a comprehensive Skills Taxonomy; a structured list of skills that underpinned critical business capabilities required to achieve Finastra’s strategic goals. However, once this task was completed, Finastra soon realised that it did not have the horsepower to develop large amounts of training and address skills issues.

Finastra evaluated LinkedIn Learning against other learning platforms and decided that LinkedIn Learning was the best solution because it had a broad catalogue of content and provided employees with the power to take control of their own learning.

“It was a great solution for us to put in place,” Brock added. “We wanted to start developing Learning Paths that people could access and get lost in. We also felt that people could dive into a three-hour course, pausing and stopping content and videos, carving a learning plan for themselves that fitted into the reality of their role and daily work life.”

Added value

In July 2020, Finastra entered into an agreement with LinkedIn Learning. “Our contract started just after the pandemic began, but it did not start because of the pandemic,” Brock explained. “We certainly got much more added value from its adoption because our
employees could access content that helped them to navigate remote working or personal wellbeing, for example.”

Since the adoption of LinkedIn Learning, Finastra has added its own product videos to the platform and it has created Learning Paths and LinkedIn Learning Collections, which have been promoted internally.

A “massive platter” of content

Brock attributed several factors to Finastra’s successful adoption of LinkedIn. “For starters,
we set lofty activation goals,” he said. “We took average activation data from LinkedIn
Learning and increased every figure by 20 to 30 per cent.

“We smashed these figures and ramped up activation quickly. But this didn’t surprise me.
We have 8,500 employees who haven’t had much access to training and skills development
and suddenly, we put this massive platter in front of them and they dived in.

“Our CEO and Chief People Officer also encouraged employees to activate their LinkedIn
Learning license. We pushed and promoted learning every way we could. We created a
group of committed admins to help push training. They received virtual training sessions
from LinkedIn experts on how to optimally perform the admin functions.”

Brock explained further: “What was critical and something I really appreciated was that our
leaders understood the value in what we were trying to do; shifting our learning to a skills-
based approach. They knew the investment was required to enable us to reach our goals.”

Drop Everything and Learn

Finastra’s adoption of LinkedIn has been an incredible success. In fact, Finastra won the Best Culture of Learning (more than 5,000 employees) at the LinkedIn Talent Awards 2021, which celebrate teams around the world that are moving the talent industry forward in innovative ways.

“Our award win validated our investment, and it validated the sentiment internally too. Our people appreciate that our company has invested in them and their personal and professional development.”

Executive leaders in the business have embraced the LinkedIn Learning partnership and have looked to increase the amount of time employees spend on learning and development.

For example, Finastra’s Chief Technology Officer created a programme called DEAL – Drop Everything and Learn. Brock added: “By creating DEAL our CTO was saying: ‘We need to commit’. We’re always so busy and there’s no time for learning. Therefore, he set a day and a time each week where everyone in the product and technology area would carve out time to spend an hour learning something. We had a massive uptake in people accessing LinkedIn Learning and we saw an acceleration of all tech-related content. Several other business functions followed suit and picked up on DEAL. They turned to their divisions and said we need you to learn, and we want you to learn. This helped instill a learning culture.”

Reaping the Rewards

Since the launch of LinkedIn Learning, between 700 and 1,100 employees actively consume learning content each week and spend between 1-2.5 hours per week doing so (on average). Also, Finastra’s leadership team recommends content. For instance, VPs record videos of themselves, discussing and promoting content and Learning Paths. These “selfie videos” are then posted on internal comms channels. Brock concluded: “Once people start looking at these videos, they are intrigued, jump on LinkedIn Learning and start moving around the platform. By using LinkedIn Learning data, we monitor learning hours and each month, we recognise the top three learners, and they receive the equivalent of $50 to purchase items from a Rewards Catalogue. It’s just another way of encouraging our employees to think about developing their skills, and thanks to the hard work of the learning and skills admins and leadership team, 90 per cent of our workforce have activated LinkedIn Learning.”