Momentum Metropolitan

Building Employee Skills with Online Learning Paths to Retain Top Talent

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.

Challenge: 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.”

Momentum Metropolitan’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.

Solution: A robust catalog 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 an easy decision for us.”

“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.”