90% of Royal Mail’s learning recommendations are marked relevant by learners
magpie delivered AI-driven learning recommendations to Royal Mail's learners leading to more frequent engagement compared to a traditional learning platform.
magpie (Filtered’s intelligent learning recommendations engine) launched within Royal Mail 12 months ago, after being introduced to the business by strategic training partner, QA, in 2017. The goal was to test whether a solution combining expert curation with AI-powered recommendations could address the following challenges:
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Too much training content for employees to make sense of.
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Poor analytics data and a lack of insight into learning needs and behaviour.
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The constraints of a small team with tight budgets but big ambitions.
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The overarching task of upskilling managers and leaders in digital transformation.
Solving content overload with curation and recommendations
Firstly, Filtered freshened up the Royal Mail's L&D offering by remapping 430 of the best articles, videos and podcasts on the web against the Royal Mail competency framework. Filtered then combed the Royal Mail libraries and selected 60 courses and resources that met relevancy and quality criteria. As of February 2019, 90% of Royal Mail’s magpie recommendations were marked as relevant. Based on these analytics Filtered is now expanding the curation effort to include large third-party libraries like GetAbstract.
Assisting a data-driven learning strategy
The ROI of magpie is insight: insight garnered from data, which enables organisations to exploit the opportunities for learning, even in organisations where it seems that there isn’t a strong learning culture. Throughout the last 12 months, Filtered have iterated the content within Royal Mail’s magpie instance by spotting usage trends, and consulting with internal stakeholders. This allowed magpie to align with existing initiatives such as graduate schemes or apprentice onboarding.
Filtered used reporting metrics to:
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Create a hybrid competency framework that condensed Royal Mail’s skills framework and renamed competencies based on user feedback to make recommendations more intriguing. The framework allowed magpie to deliver personalised recommendations at a detailed level, while aligning with Royal Mail’s overall development skills framework.
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Prove the value of L&D’s investment in internal content: Royal Mail content receives 2x the engagement compared to external, curated content (TED, HBR, etc). This allowed Royal Mail to double down on their investment in internal content and validated previous purchasing decisions.
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Deliver a strategic engagement campaign to encourage pre-existing positive habits. Filtered emailed learners with curated recommendations on a weekly basis, and ensured the send date aligned with optimum usage data.
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Precisely deliver relevant content: as of February 2019, 90% of Royal Mail’s learning assets were marked as relevant.
When speaking to Filtered, Donna McGrath, Head of Digital Learning at Royal Mail said, "magpie has led to changes in learning behaviour, colleagues are choosing to access good quality learning when they need it, and in the format they prefer, more frequently than they engaged with a traditional learning platform."
Filtered have also demonstrated the power of data in learning in a blog post from the company's Chief Data Science Officer.