Case study
Industry
Financial Services
Company HQ
Greater LatAm
Number of Employees
700+
Office Locations
7+ countries
Comprehensive Online L&D Experience Drives Career Progress, Innovation, and Retention at Kushki
Udemy driving business outcomes
Case study details
With its operations spanning Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and the United States, Kushki—founded in 2017—offers modern, efficient, and secure digital payment solutions to thousands of customers across Latin America. It uses highly skilled developers and innovative technology to create new products and services that help it stay at the leading edge of the region’s digital payment services.
But to be driven by innovation requires the right skills, consistently applied across the whole organization. With a newly developed L&D strategy and a fast-growing workforce, Kushki needed an accessible and scalable online learning solution that would give its people access to the right mix of technical and soft skills they needed — wherever and on demand.
A new accessible and scalable L&D strategy
Kushki was born with a goal to revolutionize digital payments in Latin America, recognizing each country’s financial and regulatory nuances in a way that seamlessly unites online transactions. One of the secrets to its success is its focus on technology innovation, including how its engineering team develops products and services ahead of the competition.
To foster a culture of industryleading tech innovation, having the right learning and development (L&D) resources and processes in place is critical. For Kushki, this means wide-ranging assessable courses and certifications available on-demand — anywhere.
“Operating across multiple countries means our workforce is similarly widespread,” says Alejandra Castro, VP of Human Resources at Kushki. “Working with on-demand technical training initiatives led by line managers, we found it difficult to offer consistent L&D opportunities to our people — which ultimately impacted their careers and talent longevity.”
The cost of putting its developers through certification training and assessments was also consuming significant resources, both financially and in terms of restricting the number of new products and services Kushki could release.
To help it scale its product engineering workforce and meet the demands of offering innovative digital financial services across two continents, Kushki needed a robust online L&D platform that could also give its newly created Tech L&D team the flexibility to create its own courses — and use data to continuously develop its program.
Training Lead
Robust, nuanced online learning that’s available anywhere
After trialing several leading online learning platforms, Kushki’s Tech L&D team chose Udemy Business for its broad range of courses, certification training, and deep-dive analytics.
More importantly, though, Kushki was attracted to Udemy for its Learning Path personalization capabilities. “There’s a false perception that you can just plug and play an online learning platform to solve anything,” says Crisly. “We chose Udemy Business becaus it gives us the freedom to set up individual career paths and create training programs tailored to each team. It’s a complete ecosystem.”
In an industry and region where product and service innovation is a distinct competitive advantage, fulfilling the needs of its product development team was also a key priority for Kushki. Using Udemy Business, the company now has up to 100 people at any one time studying for or taking tech certification exams for certifications in AWS, ISTQB, ITIL, IIBA, and Scrum, helping eliminate the cost of outsourcing.
Tech Performance Enablement Manager
A mix of hard and soft skills courses for a complete L&D experience
And it’s not just technical skills where employees see the benefits. With thousands of courses covering everything from languages to critical thinking and collaboration, Kushki’s employees are closing their skills gaps quickly and effectively.
“Working in such a dynamic and innovative environment, we all need a broad mix of technical and business-focused skillsets,” explains Yesica Cortés, Training Lead at Kushki. “Udemy Business gives us access to the tools we need to do our jobs in modern financial services — such as English language courses and skills that help foster an Agile and scrum mentality. What’s more, many soft courses are in Spanish, making the platform highly accessible.”
With the company going through a period of significant growth across several countries, the way Kushki onboards new hires must be carefully considered. Using Udemy Business, Crisly and Yesica have helped create a team onboarding structure for the product engineering workforce that ensures people have access to the same tools, resources, and knowledge to perform their roles no matter where they’re based.
Little wonder why the time to onboard new hires to the product engineering area has improved by 67%, down from six months to two months — ultimately accelerating productivity. Since these improvements, the company’s Tech L&D team has helped identify key skill gaps, and shared its feedback with recruitment, boosting in-demand skills acquisition in new hires.
Data-driven decision-making driving positive outcomes
Kushki’s Tech L&D team also places a large emphasis on analytics and data-driven decision making. By interrogating multiple data feeds in the Udemy Business dashboard, the company now has a deep understanding of each team’s training needs, combining it with industry trends to steer future product and service development.
In just nine months, Kushki has cut its certification training bill by $21K and increased the number of developers passing exams in AWS, ISTQB, and ITIL the first time by 35% — a process that normally costs $350 per employee. Also, since using Udemy Business, Kushki’s product development team has a 100% certification rate in Scrum. What’s more, the company now has over 600 registered Udemy Business users, with 90% of those actively using the platform.
Talent acquisition and retention on the rise
Adopting an online learning platform has also benefited Kushki’s recruitment program and helped it retain existing employees. “Since using Udemy Business, several new hires have told us it was one of the reasons they wanted to work for Kushki,” says Yesica. “Our retention has also improved significantly. Supported by our leadership who really see the value in online L&D, our entire product engineering workforce is feeling the benefit of leveling up through high quality Udemy content.”
Kushki now has a complete overview of its product engineering employees’ career progressions and can identify their skills gaps and opportunities. Crisly explains how Kushki’s new strategy has also benefited business stability: “We’ve extended consistent L&D opportunities across the whole business using Udemy Business. We can map people’s career ambitions, build appropriate team structures, and even design our own highly technical content to anticipate future needs.
Training Lead
Continuous data-driven improvements for a competitive edge
Always keen to make continuous improvements to its operations and processes, Kushki’s Tech L&D team uses the deep-dive insights in Udemy Business’ analytics dashboard to evaluate learner feedback, better understand its employees’ behaviors, and offer them more innovative learning experiences. The Tech L&D team is also using the insights to make incremental course improvements — ensuring its content is always fresh and relevant.
The company is now poised to implement more practical learning tools across its teams, to help improve development.
Training Lead
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