Leveraging an integrated HR platform to build a robust learning ecosystem

Learning has become more targeted, inclusive, impactful and accessible across Royal HaskoningDHV since they partnered with Cornerstone. Their learning now aligns with their organisation’s strategy and empower their learners to fulfil their learning needs in the innovative, personalised and engaging ways.

Royal HaskoningDHV (RHDHV) is an independent consultancy which integrates 140 years of engineering expertise with digital technologies and software solutions. RHDHV’s mission is to ‘enhance society together’ to develop sustainable solutions for local and global issues related to the built environment. RHDHV has a workforce of around 6,000 employees spread across 25 different countries.

In 2019, RHDHV embarked on a learning transformation with the need to anchor their upskilling and reskilling priorities in their company goals and objectives while offering personalised, inclusive, self-directed and digital learning opportunities.

Royal HaskoningDHV also wanted to leverage the power of technology to facilitate its learning transformation ambitions. With Cornerstone, they found their ideal centralised learning ecosystem with a clear overview of what is available and how to enrol. They also found a learning system that provides meaningful analytics, offers an inspiring on-demand catalogue and, ultimately, enhances learner experience and engagement.

RHDHV wanted to introduce a solution that made use of technology to tackle the rapidly changing skills needs of the organisation. It sought a solution that could satisfy its complex learning strategy elements, like offering cutting edge learning academies, strengthening social learning, fostering curiosity driven learning and ensuring learner experience is at the heart of the entire learning ecosystem.

Upon implementing Cornerstone, RHDHV centralised all its learning resources of various modalities — face-to-face, virtual, eLearning, videos, etc. — under one roof, promoting structure and aggregation for all learning offerings. This enhanced scalability and inclusion because all the employees now had equal and relevant learning opportunities irrespective of location.

Furthermore, RHDHV wanted to streamline their routine operations and admin tasks and increase the learning team's capacity to deliver things that bring the most impact. This was made possible with different workflows offered in the learning management system, for instance capturing registrations, interest list, assigning training courses, managers actions, emails triggers, reporting, and more.

And lastly, unwavering learner retention and positive experiences were integral in their strategy. Cornerstone offered tools like playlists, banners, AI-based recommendations, learning curriculums, learning forms, evaluation forms, and event calendars as ways to innovative and create a differentiated learning experience which best suited to RHDHV.

With Cornerstone, RHDHV built a robust on demand catalogue with 8000+ eLearnings to meet learning needs anytime, anywhere. This encourages learners to design their individual development plans, driving a self-directed culture of learning. The total number of hours invested by learners rose by 140% from 2019 to 2021.

To propagate a culture of learning, RHDHV launched Learning Week — by the people, for the people. This week-long event showcases expertise across different topics, spanning the company. Since its launch, enrolments into Learning Week have been climbing steadily — from 1282 in 2021 to 1800 in 2022.

RHDHV conducted an employee engagement survey that showed 75% of employees were happy with the learning and development opportunities which is 11 points up in comparison to high-performing organisations’ norms and a great achievement against industry benchmarks.

Cornerstone analytical tools helped RHDHV measure learning engagement against its KPIs and supported them in data-driven decision making. From 2019 to 2021, overall learner engagement measured via total course completions dramatically grew by approximately 350%.

Centralising learning offerings and being able to open for colleagues in APAC, South Africa and Australia helped RHDHV offer scalable and equal learning opportunities for all.

RHDHV launched four academies — Digital, Commercial, People and Project Management — each with several bespoke learning paths. Learner engagement in the academies grew exponentially. For instance, training completions for programs developed for the Digital Academy grew by 380% and People Academy grew by 7500% from 2019 to 2021.