Stuart Builds Comprehensive L&D Program to Develop Careers at Scale

Already a Udemy Business customer, Gemma wasted no time in scoping a prospective L&D strategy, matched to employee needs and Udemy Business’ capabilities. “From day one, I noticed our talent needed greater L&D support,” says Gemma. “This is why we focused on scaling our learning offerings, internally branded as Stuart Academy, and cementing its five core pillars in line with the company’s digitalization goals, with Udemy Business at the heart of each pillar.”

Known internally as “Stuwies”, Stuart’s employees now have access to a comprehensive L&D program that’s designed to the exact needs of their roles while also taking into consideration their career aspirations and new ways of working on a hybrid work model.

For Gemma and her team, it was critically important for employees to feel empowered enough to lead their own development, while also having the support of their line managers and opportunities to develop with Stuart Academy, our internal L&D offerings. “Every Stuwie has their own individual needs, so it’s vital we provide the tools for Stuwies to take the lead of their own growth,” says Gemma.

With a well-developed learning strategy, referred to as “Upwards with Udemy”, Stuart’s L&D team have been able to optimise the adoption and engagement of Udemy Business internally by 89% to enhance Stuart’s learning culture and boost performance through supporting the development of core, technical and leadership skills.

The team places a significant emphasis on Udemy Business’ reporting features, which enable them to recognise champion learners, update senior management, and continuously develop their program in light of changing requirements or developing trends.

For example, the L&D team creates quarterly learning reports that offer a global view of employees’ learning that are also segmented by department — allowing for more nuanced insights. The reports contain everything from highlighting company-wide and department champion learners — who also get featured in the Company monthly All Hands, L&D team’s regular newsletter and the company’s Slack channel dedicated to recognition — to key statistics, hours of learning, top courses taken, and best practices to increase learning such as implementing a weekly learning hour into work calendars.

“Our quarterly reports ensure our L&D efforts are communicated effectively around the company to inspire individuals to take learning into their own hands and to also create healthy competition between teams,” says Gemma. “We’re certainly seeing positive engagement, progression, and ROI. This is further supported by our learning survey last year where 62% of our people said Udemy Business was the company’s most impactful learning initiative.”

Growing careers and inspiring talent

Designed to create holistic learning experiences and encourage growthoriented mindsets, the L&D team has also partnered up with other areas of the business to create learning paths that encompass the company’s values and sustainability mission, and are assigned to all Stuwies. Udemy Business Learning Paths have been created with custom content on topics that include sustainability, DEI and mental health. Most recently, Gemma and her team have created tailored learning paths for People Managers to cover management development, offering training courses for running performance reviews, tools for managerial success, and how to deliver effective feedback.

With many of its employees working in tech-focused roles, the company naturally emphasises maintaining and developing these skills to keep pace with industry and market developments — using Udemy Business’ knowledge sharing capabilities to ensure no area of technology, no matter how niche, goes underserved. In fact in the first half of this year, 68% of time was spent on developing technology skills, of which 343 learners spent a total of 2415 hours dedicated to upskilling on topics including web development, programming languages, data science, machine learning and analytics.

Improved engagement and productivity — and happier employees

Since designing its L&D strategy to get the most from Udemy Business, Stuart has achieved significant performance benefits and fostered an increased number of internal promotions. What’s more, it can hire better talent more quickly, not least because Udemy Business is now listed as a company benefit and serves to attract the brightest minds who value career development investment.

“We wanted to ensure we were leveraging Udemy Business to its highest potential,” says Gemma. “Instead of just offering Udemy Business as any other employee perk, we dedicated a lot of time and effort to develop a robust program around it to ensure our people make the most of the platform. We now have in place a high value learning solution that offers something for everyone regardless of position or level.”

Indeed, the company’s new L&D program, coupled with nuanced tools in Udemy Business, has already helped countless employees progress in their careers and move to new roles as part of Stuart’s internal mobility program, in ways that would have been much more challenging previously. Salome Plaza, Talent Acquisition Associate at Stuart, highlights the benefits as she moved from Customer Support to Talent Acquisition: “Udemy Business allowed me to acquire new knowledge, key skills and essential automatism in my new field: Talent Acquisition. The platform has given me a technical background that has allowed me to familiarise myself with the world of human resources, but also to better understand what is expected. Udemy Business truly contributed to change the direction of my career.”