Case study
Industry
Technology
Number of Employees
5,500+
Office Locations
22+ countries
Valtech Grows its Talent Base and Nurtures Wide-Ranging Skills with Udemy Business
Udemy driving business outcomes
Case study details
Operating across more than 60+ locations worldwide and with clients such as L’Oréal, easyJet, and Volkswagen on its books, Valtech is one of the world’s leading business transformation companies — with expertise covering strategy consulting, marketing services, digital platforms and connected experiences.
But tasked with a goal to rapidly double its headcount and expand its operations in Ukraine, the country’s Learning and Development (L&D) leaders realized the company needed to scale its training and talent nurture program, helping maintain its growth trajectory and build its local skills base.
In-person training unequipped for rapid expansion and changing demands
While Valtech’s operations across the world are extensive, the company prides itself on leveraging its scale to provide localized services delivered by experts who truly understand the regions in which their clients operate.
For Valtech in Ukraine, this strategy has been essential to its rapid growth, significantly scaling its workforce to meet clients’ demands for services requiring the latest technology and platform expertise. But with the company’s goal to double its headcount in Ukraine by the end of 2022, Valtech’s L&D team realized it had a significant task ahead. For example, its existing training program was inconsistent, relying on infrequent, in-person mentoring that didn’t fit the requirements of modern tech skills nurturing.
What’s more, the company was acutely aware that it had a senior skills base that outweighed its junior talent. They wanted to create engineering specialisations, helping it give hands-on opportunities to promising graduates and hopefully nurture the best prospects into fully-fledged employees.
To help modernize its outdated L&D strategy and nurture junior talent at scale, Valtech in Ukraine needed a blended learning solution that could offer the breadth of courses its broad workforce needed, as well as provide more personalized learning tools tailored to individual roles.
Head of People & Culture, Ukraine
Online learning that’s designed to nurture skills and talent
We were already aware of Udemy Business because many of our technical colleagues used the platform to study ad-hoc courses and certifications,” says Nataliia Taylor, Head of People & Culture at Valtech Ukraine. “We knew it would help us decentralize our L&D to give our people more freedom, build our own programs, scale niche technical skills, and ramp up the growth of more junior specialists.”
With Udemy Business in place, Valtech set out to create its developer internship in Ukraine — Craft Studio — a two-month fast-track learning program designed to assess the capabilities of recent graduates and give them an opportunity to build their skills.
The reporting features in Udemy Business were vitally important for the L&D team, helping it design KPIs to measure the program’s success. “We set out to achieve less than 10% attrition,” says Nataliia. “When our pilot program finished, we’d achieved 5%. What’s more, using Udemy Business, we were able to collate intern, trainer, and mentor feedback to quickly identify who could move seamlessly into junior roles at Valtech. Our trainers feel more engaged, and we’ve reduced our hiring costs substantially.”
Global Learning & Development Director
Knowledge sharing for agile growth
And it’s not just junior specialists who benefit from Valtech’s new L&D strategy. Udemy Business is now embedded in all the company’s learning processes in Ukraine, meaning its consultants can choose the courses they want, with the company also retaining control over stock competencies for its soft skills program.
The company has also identified a significant shift in its skills needs. With its development services in greater demand than ever, Valtech is using Udemy Business to help it upskill its developers and allow comprehensive knowledge sharing across teams.
“We don’t sell physical products — our people, skills, and retained knowledge drive our revenue,” says Christian Haahr Sigsgaard, Global Learning & Development Director at Valtech. “Our L&D team in Ukraine has inspired the rest of the company to use knowledge for growth and accelerate opportunities. And Udemy Business has given us the right tools and flexibility to make this happen. The time to market is incomparable to any other platform.”
The flexibility to let talent flourish
An important aspect of Valtech’s L&D strategy is the ability to monitor the types of courses its people naturally want to engage with and identify any skills gaps that need addressing.
Another initiative Valtech has launched for its developers is its “MACH” program. Designed to help the company develop its delivery of microservices, Valtech based its MACH program around Udemy Business to ensure all developers’ skillsets are up to scratch for their upcoming projects.
“We needed to create a seamless learning culture, and key to that is the ability to experiment,” says Arturas Kvederis, Managing Director at Valtech. “To get the most out of Udemy Business, you need a strategy that fosters experimentation. The platform needs to be embedded in all your processes, and you need to understand exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
Seamlessly scaling with demand
Following the success of its intern program and enhanced consultant L&D initiatives, Valtech is well on track to achieve its goal of doubling its headcount in Ukraine by the end of the year. In fact, of the 100% interns in its pilot program, 95% now work as junior specialists, bringing fresh ideas and energy into a team that’s going from strength to strength.
Head of People & Culture
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