Overview
Marika Spediacci (Associate Program Manager, Technology Marketing Products Learning) and her Tech & Products Learning team of 3 at Salesforce are able to make it possible to offer and manage hundreds of classes every quarter, for 4 different organizations at Salesforce. More than 18,000 Salesforce employees around the world use the PlusPlus platform to find, book, attend, and grade the classes they need to grow.
The key to make it possible to scale learning to more than 18,000 Salesforce employees around the world, with thousands of classes to choose from, has been to use the PlusPlus platform to make the experience easy on two fronts:
- Easy for the user: so they can find, book and attend the training they need without friction
- Easy for the learning manager: so that the dozens of small tasks that go into making a class available and successful can be automated and fully integrated with the organization systems
The 5 takeaways
1. When the learning management team used an LMS (Learning Management System) to offer classes, they spent too much time and effort coordinating all the small things that were required to make them available and successful for their organization. The result was a limited number of classes, attended by a limited number of people.
2. PlusPlus replaced the old LMS because it made it possible to offer the huge number of classes our people needed, and make it easy for our people to find them. All the small automated things that the PlusPlus platform has – and LMS lack – add up to save learning managers huge time and effort, and eliminate friction for users.
These include features such as:
- Categories & Catalogs
- Notifications (via email, Slack, and Google Calendar)
- Timezone
- Pre- and Post-event Surveys
- Automated Waitlists (In-Person and Online)
- Easy Check-in
- Reports & Dashboards
3. At Salesforce, internal instructors are trained on best practices before they can post and program their classes directly in the PlusPlus platform, this ensures that important aspects like taxonomy, integrations, information, and features are consistent and keep the user experience simple so people can easily find and attend the classes they need. The learning team curates the experience for outside trainers, so all they have to do is show up to teach.
4. The entire platform is designed to eliminate friction for users. For example, the Timezone feature enables any Salesforce employee around the world to see class offerings in their own time zone. It also enables learning managers to ensure each time zone where Salesforce operates has the classes those employees need. There are dozens of other features like this one that together make it for a seamless experience that boosts participation that ultimately results in a smarter organization.
5. The ability of the PlusPlus platform to seamlessly integrate with the systems Salesforce employees and instructors already use is key to both making it easy to manage (no email invites to send, no follow-up required, etc.) and making it easy to post, know of, find, attend, and administer classes.
