Coats: Thread manufacturer helps employees sew their own career path

Coats is the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer. At home in more than 50 countries, Coats employs 19,000 people across six continents.

Coats’ pioneering history and innovative culture ensure the company leads the way around the world: providing complementary and value added products and services to the apparel and footwear industries; applying innovative techniques to develop high technology Performance Materials threads and yarns in areas such as automotive, composites and fibre optics; and extending the crafts offer into new markets and online.

Headquartered in the UK, Coats is a FTSE 250 listed company on the London Stock Exchange. It is the Official Thread Supplier to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Coats prides itself on its pioneering attitude and has a vision to provide employees with an environment that offers them growth to reach their maximum potential. In 2013, the company implemented Cornerstone Learning Management and Performance Management to help drive this vision forward and to modernise its way of doing compliance training. However, in 2016, internal feedback showed that more people sought developmental training too and Coats needed a solution.

Why Cornerstone?

Coats had been using Cornerstone’s solutions for several years with successful results in compliance and performance management, so it was a natural decision for it to want to make use of Cornerstone’s Learning Management platform more broadly. Around the same time, Cornerstone had also recently introduced its Content Services offering, which allows companies to have a one-stop shop for delivering content that’s carefully curated and from the world’s leading providers.

Coats implemented Cornerstone’s Content Services offering in 2017 to complement its existing Cornerstone solutions, as it knew it would allow the company to deliver developmental training quickly and effectively. It wouldn’t require Coats to manually upload any content itself, which could have slowed down the process, and it liked that Cornerstone would manage the content updates too. Coats also knew that its people would need to be able to search for and filter learning content to find what they want, and Cornerstone’s Content Services platform would allow this and also enable it to create specific learning playlists for people to ‘follow’.

The Results

Global content bank: By implementing Cornerstone Content Services, Coats has enabled cross-country learning for its staff around the world. Its employees can now access more than 5,000 pieces of learning content, on a variety of subject areas and in up to 12 languages.

Improved compliance and internal communication: Cornerstone Learning Management allows Coats to track and ensure that its workforce is compliant in essential areas such as anti-bribery, competition law, ethics, data protection, cyber security and more. Cornerstone Content Services is also helping the company provide further information and education on internal changes, such as through a new playlist on change management.

Greater employee collaboration and productivity: Cornerstone Content Services is driving innovative ways of learning and greater employee collaboration among its workforce. After seeing the playlists on the platform, the Coats Digital and Technology team asked to create a playlist to answer frequently asked questions about its new service portals. This playlist meant the Digital and Technology team could direct employee queries to the playlist, allowing them more time to carry on with strategic tasks

Enablement of self-directed learning: Through Cornerstone Content Services, Coats employees now have access to learning content from more than 30 learning content providers, including Skillsoft, Skillpill, CEGOS and Litmos Heroes. Employees can now take charge of their learning journey beyond just compliance, while Coats can also ensure talent readiness among its people and grow its leadership pipeline.