Case study
Industry
Financial Services
Company HQ
Centurion, South Africa
Number of Employees
15,000
Office Locations
National network of branches across South Africa
Momentum Metropolitan Builds Employee Skills with Online Learning Paths to Retain Top Talent
Udemy driving business outcomes
Case study details
Listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), Momentum Metropolitan exists to help businesses and people from all walks of life to achieve their financial goals and aspirations. The company provides financial solutions — from savings and investments advice to long-and short-term insurance, health insurance and employee benefits — for people, communities, and businesses across South Africa. While the company is dedicated to providing the best possible services to its clients, a global shortage of professional IT skills meant that Momentum Metropolitan needed a proven way to deliver customised, comprehensive training programs to its employees, helping it to boost retention and develop its workforce to move into more skilled and senior roles within the company.
Retaining and attracting the best talent for future growth
Like most companies with skilled IT teams, Momentum Metropolitan is no stranger to the global war for talent. With its own youth development programs, regular skills audits, and remuneration reviews, retaining and attracting the best talent in the market has always been a key priority for the company.
“With IT skills in high demand across the globe and digitalization making it easier to work wherever you want, attracting and retaining talent will only become more critical,” says Eugene Brockman, Technical Talent Manager. “What’s more, we’ve also got a responsibility as a business, to do right by our people and give them the right training and skill-building opportunities they need to progress their careers.”
While employees of Momentum Metropolitan’s Group IT Operations Division (GRIT) had access to some skills development courses, those available were in high demand, with employees often on a waiting list for access. Additionally, with no formal training modules to prepare for major certification tests, the process was often inefficient and incurred unnecessary costs to the business.
GRIT’s executives wanted to improve internal mobility and offer training not just in hard skills for specific jobs, but also soft skills that people could use to enrich their entire careers — helping the organization to continually up-skill to develop its own talent pool and reduce its reliance on costly recruitment.
Leading the initiative, Brockman realized that to achieve all this in a cost-effective and nuanced way, the company required an online learning solution that could offer a broad range of courses across multiple disciplines.
This was especially important as GRIT covers a wide range of technical skills, ranging from networks, infrastructure and storage, DevOps, platforms and middleware, end user computing, and information security. Leaders of GRIT also needed access to unique datadriven insights to help its 13 business units tailor their learning programs to individual and overall team needs.
Technical Talent Manager
A robust catalogue of online learning courses available to thousands of employees
Following a trial of leading online learning solutions, Brockman chose Udemy Business, initially trialling the platform with licenses across the company’s Group IT Operations team. “With so many courses available, Udemy Business is like a YouTube for learning,” says Brockman. “New courses are created as soon as new tech is released — often months before other solution providers can react. And the fact it is instructor-led, made going with Udemy Business an easy decision for us.”
Integrated with IKM TechChek, a skills proficiency testing tool, Brockman and the digital learning team can now set technical proficiency testing based on individual tech stack components, enabling them to help keep employees’ skills relevant to the needs of the business. Test results were then custom-built into Udemy Learning Paths to ensure the learning program closed critical gaps in technical topics where there were areas of weakness, helping Brockman tailor learning paths and assign relevant lessons to specific teams.
“Because we offer a third of study hours back to employees in paid leave, we needed to ensure the time spent was relevant and worthwhile — not just for the company, but also for our employees’ career paths,” says Brockman. “Rather than call out individuals’ knowledge gaps, Udemy Business has enabled us to better identify where to focus our learning and development resources. It’s greatly improved efficiency and training efficacy.”
But this approach to workforce development requires significant buy-in from employees right across the business. It’s why Brockman, GRIT’s broader Human Capital team, and Momentum Metropolitan’s internal communications team worked hard to build enthusiasm for the learning platform ahead of its release. Using regular email newsletter updates and incorporating Udemy user statistics as part of individual KPIs, most employees adopted the platform straight away.
“We’ve found our regular internal “Learning Heroes” updates to be a huge motivator for many in the company — it’s promoted healthy competition between teams,” says Brockman. “We also encourage employees to use the Udemy mobile app whenever and wherever they choose, which has boosted our adoption rate even further.”
Technical Talent Manager
87% active learners and clearly defined career paths
With the number of active licenses having increased 500% since deployment, Brockman and the online learning team are helping everyone access the right training they need to progress their careers and maintain the company’s competitive market position.
“Where many companies struggled to maintain regular training and support during the pandemic, thanks to Udemy Business, we’ve actually seen adoption and engagement grow,” says Brockman. “More people now have access to a wide range of training programs and we’re retaining more highly-skilled staff. We’re even using the platform’s metrics to help make better job role promotion decisions.”
To understand the impact of online learning across the business, Momentum Metropolitan conducts regular adoption and digital skills surveys, helping it adapt and improve its learning and development initiatives as the needs of the business change going forward.
And it’s not just the strong internal feedback and 87% active learner metric that reinforces the program’s success. Momentum Metropolitan achieved internationally recognised 2021 Top Employers Institute certification for its commitment to an outstanding workplace experience and empowering all employees to reach their true potential through learning.
“We were so pleased to gain industry recognition for our employee experience efforts. It means that we’re in a much better place to attract new talent — and develop existing,” says Brockman. “My advice for anyone looking to adopt Udemy Business is to integrate the platform into company culture, you’ll more than reap the rewards.”
Using data to close skills gaps and map talent
With Udemy Business well-cemented in the company’s processes, Brockman and the team have ambitions to use the full breadth of the platform’s reporting to identify and resolve skills gaps across the business quicker than ever.
The company is also looking to take a more HR-centric approach to employee development, with succession planning and talent mapping a key priority for the future. “We have so much incredible talent in the business, so it makes sense to invest and recruit internally,” says Brockman. “By using data to proactively identify what roles and skillsets we’ll need in the future, our people have even more opportunities to grow their careers with us thanks to Udemy.”
Technical Talent Manager
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