From digital banking pioneer to digital learning forerunner

How Khan Bank became one of Mongolia’s earliest organisations to introduce digital workplace learning

Khan Bank is the largest commercial bank in Mongolia, providing comprehensive banking services to an estimate of 70% of all Mongolian households. Its responsibilities stretch far and wide as one of the top tax-paying companies in the country, an employer to a large workforce spread across 550 branches nationwide, and a trusted banking partner to roughly 2.5 million customers domestically.

Guided by its mission of becoming the country’s most trusted financial institution and benefitting both people’s lives and Mongolian society, Khan Bank was among the first banks to introduce digital banking products and services to the market. Today, 95% of its total transactions are made via digital channels.

Its success in transitioning from the traditional banking model to a technology-enabled digital one is fuelled, in part, by its commitment to supporting the continuous learning and development of its employees.

This desire for greater learning accessibility was what prompted Khan Bank to become one of the earliest organisations in Mongolia to introduce digital learning for its employees. 

The Journey to Digital
The primary challenge facing Khan Bank was how to make learning opportunities open and equal to every employee, given their diverse job roles and physical locations. At this point, the bank had already become quite apt at offering instructor-led training, albeit mainly for professional development. It knew, however, that classroom training wasn’t the only way to learn—that there is high-quality, useful online training available.

Backed by a supportive CEO, the team embarked on a phased approach to digitalise workplace learning. This started with the KB Academy project. KB Academy is Khan Bank’s internal e-learning system where employees can access essential internal policies, procedures and e-learning resources in an equitable and inclusive manner. KB Academy was a soft introduction to e-learning and laid the foundation for the bank to roll out a fully-fledged e-learning solution.

“We started our search about two years ago. E-learning is still quite rare in Mongolia, which is why we looked internationally. After comparing the best solutions in the market, we chose LinkedIn Learning,” said S. Solongo, Head of Khan Bank’s Training & Development Department.

“There were a number of reasons behind our decision. First, of course, is how accessible LinkedIn Learning is—our employees can learn both online and offline, and on desktop or mobile. It is also rich in training resources for both professional and personal development, has up-to-date content by world-class subject matter experts, and comes at an affordable price tag.”

Once the choice was made, the Khan Bank team began an onboarding, activation and engagement programme to help employees to make best use of LinkedIn Learning. 

The Path to Success
To get started, Khan Bank ran a month-long pilot programme with a small group of selected employees. Using insights from this experience and feedback from participating employees, it was able to develop internal rules and procedures for e-learning, design training plans for each employee, and prepare its activation plans.

“We believe that managers are effective learning role models for their teams, so we focused a good part of our efforts in engaging managers,” shared D. Soyolmaa, Specialist, Training & Development Department.

Khan Bank chose to equip its line managers with sub-admin access to LinkedIn Learning, which meant that they are able to create groups, add custom content, curate learning paths and collections, in addition to generating reports.

“Being able to create separate groups is a very innovative feature. We appoint admins depending on the unit and job roles so that the courses shared or recommended are more relevant to each employee. Employees also take pride in adding their learning certificates on their LinkedIn profile, which is helping to strengthen our learning culture,” added Soyolmaa.

With employees motivated to hit their weekly learning goals, Khan Bank is recording impressive results on LinkedIn Learning:

What is also interesting is that its employees are now spending more time on leadership and management courses, compared to role-specific, functional courses - another indication, perhaps, that the deep learning culture that Khan Bank desires is already taking root in the organisation.