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Adoption of Diageo's Online Learning Academy Reaches 100 percent

DublinLearning NewsTopClass LMS by WBT Systems

Powered by TopClass, the Diageo Academy offers accessible learning for its 22,000 strong global workforce.

WBT Systems, a leading provider of enterprise e-Learning solutions, has today announced that adoption of the Diageo Academy has reached 100 percent. A continued focus on usability and a blended learning approach that accommodates all learner styles are believed to play a significant role in the successful adoption.

The Diageo Academy is a one-stop-shop for learning and knowledge sharing at Diageo and is supported by TopClass, WBT's Learning Management System. It offers an online selection of 400 classroom events, almost 100 e-Learning courses and 200 virtual classroom sessions. There are also 450 downloadable resources for informal learning and knowledge sharing.

Diageo operates in over 180 markets and has 22,000 employees in 80 countries. Today the Academy is being used across the entire organisation and also by a number of external joint venture partners. It has steadily gained adoption at all levels of the business, from senior management to workers in the bottling plants.

Since the Academy went live, Diageo's Learning team has focused on continuous development of the Learning Management System to ensure it is extremely user-friendly with intuitive screens, customizable views and a very robust search capability, so that information and courses can be found easily and quickly.

Diageo's Academy Manager, Jo Hutchins says, "It's extremely important that the Academy is easy to use and that the courses and content can be found quickly. In the past year we've paid particular attention to the search capability and added a more robust search engine for basic and advanced searching by keyword, date and calendar, and we've also added quick links and categorized our catalog better".

Ensuring that there is support for different learner styles is also considered to be another reason for the successful adoption. The Academy hosts a wealth of topics including people management, leadership development, coaching skills, compliance training, brand knowledge, systems training, change management, functional expertise and career development. The courses and materials are available in a variety of formats and specific content is increasingly available in multiple languages. A vast selection of downloadable documents also accommodates self-driven learning.

Diageo also takes employee feedback on-board and receives input from representatives across all business units to ensure that the system is developed according to the needs of the business and users.

Commenting from WBT Systems, Linda Bowers, VP Customer Services says, "WBT has an excellent working relationship with Diageo. We collaborate both at a strategic level to determine the direction of the Academy, and at an operational level to provide support for new initiatives and features. It's exciting to work closely and contribute to the learning initiatives of a renowned and global company like Diageo and we're delighted that the Diageo Academy has been so successful".