Case study
Industry
Professional Services
Company HQ
Paris, France
Number of Employees
11,000
Office Locations
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
Devoteam rapidly upskills 70% of its workforce in AI with Udemy Business
Udemy driving business outcomes
SPOTLIGHT
Case study details
Founded by two brothers almost thirty years ago, Devoteam is an AI-driven technology consulting company that partners with some of the industry’s biggest names to help its clients execute successful digital transformations.
Keeping up with industry trends is essential in the consulting industry, and Devoteam strives to provide an environment where its employees can “learn at the pace of change.” However, with offices spread across 25 countries, bringing consistency to learning experiences has historically posed a challenge.
In 2024, when it became clear that generative AI would be a major industry disruptor, Devoteam’s learning requirements changed. To prepare for the future, the company partnered with Udemy Business to provide rapid, on-demand upskilling for its entire global workforce.
Knowledge sharing, collaboration, and learning at the pace of change
Devoteam’s AI-driven consultancy services are delivered by a team of 11,000 experts spread across 25 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These experts have a single goal: to deliver value and impact through digital disruption.
To ensure they’re equipped for this role, Devoteam places learning at the heart of its company strategy.
“If we’re not constantly adapting and supporting the latest technologies, skills, and capabilities, then how can we differentiate ourselves as a premium company for our customers?” says Simon Ruszala, Group Learning Director at Devoteam.
The challenge Devoteam faced was bringing consistency to learning in a company that’s spread so far and wide. Initially, not everyone had access to learning materials, which meant some skills were siloed. And an array of different learning tools meant it was hard to achieve any uniformity. The company wanted a platform that would enable knowledge sharing, traceability, and communication companywide — and allow every employee to “learn at the pace of change” across many languages.
Learning on demand for thousands of employees
Devoteam began using Udemy in 2022 with an initial aim of upskilling its consultants to help them develop stronger partnerships with the company’s enterprise tech partners.
“We had a few key KPIs for learning, such as 70% of all consultants being certified to demonstrate our strong tech DNA,” says Ruszala. “We wanted our people to get certifications that were directly linked to our hyperscale partners – like Google, AWS, ServiceNow, and Microsoft – as we knew this was strongly linked to increasing revenue and growth. But besides that, we also have a duty of care for our people. We needed a platform that could be a resource for our employees to learn a multitude of skills to help develop them, personally or professionally.”
With its broad catalogue of courses, bite-sized approach to learning, and the ability for consultants to learn in the language of their choice, Udemy provided the ideal platform to support Devoteam’s ambitions. It allowed the company’s experts to keep up with demands in an agile way, regularly learning new skills while on an assignment to deliver a more responsive service to their clients.
“Udemy has a large catalogue of well-curated tech-focused courses, which is where we had our biggest need, and it has a strong link with the certifications we were trying to achieve with our hyperscaler partners,” says Ruszala. “Essentially, if something is going on in the world of tech, whether it’s Red Hat, Terraform, Kubernetes, Artificial intelligence or similar, Udemy will have a course for us to develop our skills.”
One of the most compelling elements of the platform for Devoteam is that it’s endorsed by the partners the company works alongside. “They endorse the courses with their official badges — so you can click on the AWS badge, for example, and with Udemy Business Pro you get everything from learning assessments and labs to practice papers. It’s a turnkey solution with everything in one place to help you pass your exam and gain your certification.”
Using Udemy, Devoteam has gone from having 40% of its consultants with key partner certifications to 70% in 3 years, which has had a significant impact on the company’s competitive advantage.
“Projects and revenue associated with our tech partners are growing at twice the rate of other areas of the business, demonstrating the value of investing in quality education and training in these specific areas,” says Ruszala. “Udemy has helped us strengthen those partnerships. When someone comes away from one engagement, they can quickly identify and upskill their capabilities for their next assignment.”
Extending AI learning across the entire organization
To meet this need, Devoteam extended its Udemy investment, providing Udemy licenses to everyone in the business. The goal was to help every employee gain a “GenAI Level 1” badge, while also encouraging extended learning for consultants.
With Udemy Business Pro and Udemy’s GenAI Skills Pack as its learning foundation, the company set up its own AI Upskilling Program to deliver accelerated learning for everyone from consultants (architects, engineers, data specialists, business consultants, project managers, security experts etc.) to all other departments in the business including sales, finance, recruitment, marketing and HR business professionals.
The AI program was designed from scratch, built, and deployed globally within just three months. A team of business and technology leaders collaborated to create the syllabus, combining off-the-shelf Udemy modules with bespoke content to provide the optimum combination of learning materials.
Through Udemy, Devoteam was also able to provide different methods of learning. An initial virtual classroom-based module in collaboration with Google enabled the rapid training of 2,000 employees, and the company repurposed and augmented that content to provide a similar experience for on-demand learners.
“Our approach was to deliver a few modules in the first month, a few the next month, and the rest of the syllabus 2 weeks after,” says Ruszala. “We had around 4,000 people who had never used Udemy before, so as part of our change management approach, we wanted to structure learning so people would keep coming back to the platform instead of just using it once.”
Group Learning Director at Devoteam
Thousands of users AI-certified in a matter of months
Devoteam soon found that big ambitions can lead to big results. Around 65% of the company — roughly 6,800 people — completed the AI training within the first three months, before reaching 70%+ a few months later. Once they had, learners received a Gemini Pro license, which gave them the opportunity to put their newly acquired knowledge to use and drive new efficiencies in their work.
The program has provided Devoteam with a significant business advantage, enabling its consultants to prove their credentials with clients and support them on their own AI journeys, while allowing non-technical employees to use AI to improve their own productivity within their area of expertise. But it also proved an important point: that it’s possible to quickly deliver high-quality training on a global scale – something that will unlock further opportunities for Devoteam in the future.
Additional benefits of the GenAI Level 1 learning program were a 4% reduction in attrition linked to having enough learning resources for clients and personal development, and an increase in satisfaction through Devoteam’s annual employee satisfaction survey. Here, learning was the highest ranked of 15 topics and the largest gain in the year the program was launched.
With Udemy’s customized learning paths, which enable managers to build bespoke courses aligned with individuals’ career development, the company can target critical topics, like sustainability, corporate presentations, and compliance. And Udemy makes it easy for Devoteam to share these bespoke paths across different communities and countries, bringing that much sought-after consistency to learning experiences.
“This is probably the major feature for us,” Ruszala says. “We use learning paths to build a theme and can include content and resources from multiple sources from Udemy, as well as internal and external sources, and piece it all together.”
In-depth insights into learning activities
Among the most useful features of the Udemy platform are the analytics and insights it provides to Devoteam’s leadership, whether that’s related to certifications, AI upskilling, or future skills. Having this visibility gives those leaders the data from both the industry and its people to make informed strategic decisions going forward.
“We never had any detailed companywide data to understand our learning capabilities and investments across our 25 countries,” says Ruszala. “With Udemy, we can regularly share industry benchmarked insights with the executive committee to highlight the percentage of learning based on technology topics, in addition to what our people are interested in, in their own time.”
This helps Devoteam’s decision-makers identify where to invest next, spot areas of low engagement, and clearly understand the ROI of the Udemy investment. But it can also shine an important light on employee mindsets.
“During Covid, we saw an increase in soft skills related to home working, mental health, and anxiety,” Ruszala says. “Being able to monitor this as a topic and gain an insight into how people are feeling can help us fulfill our duty of care to our employees.”
Group Learning Director at Devoteam
Award-winning learning shared far and wide
With its ambitious AI program, Devoteam has positioned itself to play a major role in the new era of IT, providing consultants with highly credible badging that helps the company sell its expertise to clients and find new efficiencies in its own work.
Today, Udemy adoption rates in the organization are never below 90% and sometimes grow to 96%, with people constantly exploring a range of topics related to both work and personal development. As well as assigned learning, the company sees around 20-25% additional engagement across its workforce.
“Our people have strongly adopted the platform. We’ve had occasions where we’ve been paying for content from external companies in preparation for an exam, and halfway through our employees have switched to Udemy courses and started again because they preferred the learning experience,” Ruszala says.
It’s not just business benefits that Udemy offers though, as Ruszala explains: “Employee satisfaction is a key benefit for Devoteam. In our annual company survey, ‘resources for learning and development’ are now the highest scoring answer. Previously they were ranked sixth.”
As a result of its ambitious learning journey, Devoteam has won and been nominated for several awards since using Udemy and have also led workshops at the United Nations demonstrating the business impact of this approach, including first place in ‘Learning Excellence in EMEA’ from Udemy itself and top ten in ‘Best Learning Technologies Project”’ at the 2024 Learning Technologies Awards.
The company is now investigating how it can open up its internal courses and learning paths to universities and clients with a view to accelerating AI enablement. This will help it attract the next generation of top talent, and help its clients transform into AI organizations. Based on the results over the past 12 months, Devoteam will continue to develop its global, centralized approach to learning.
Group Learning Director at Devoteam
Group Learning Director at Devoteam
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