How Oliver Agency built a successful learning environment for 1,500 employees

The company

Oliver Agency is a successful internal marketing agency, employing 1,500 employees globally. The company offers a creative alternative to the traditional agency model, building dedicated in-house agencies to deliver better work, faster, and helping to drive their client’s business forward.

Emmett Pink, Head of Management Development & Training, joined Oliver Agency to develop the company’s:

• L&D programme, 
• supporting a range of existing compliance, 
• skill development, 
• and careers requirements.

We talked with Emmett about the challenges of building an L&D programme from the ground up and how Go1 has helped to create a successful learning environment for Oliver Agency employees. 

The challenge

Previously, Oliver Agency had been unsuccessful in scaling an effective and impactful L&D programme. Like many companies, the general understanding and importance of L&D was understood, however, how L&D was going to be delivered within budget and to support the entire company was Emmett’s main challenge.

Faced with this challenge, Emmett had to build the L&D plan, budget and tools from the ground up, to put L&D back on the map within the organisation. 

Emmett knew that he could deliver more in the business with the right digital tools and a solution that allowed a wide range of learning content and the agility to deliver on-demand.

The solution

It was clear that Oliver Agency needed a solution that provided a broad range of learning content, covering compliance and soft skills. 

And with their workforce being composed of 80% creative roles, they also needed key marketing training courses to support specific needs around tools like the Adobe Creative Suite.

Emmett spoke to “loads” of suppliers, but the high cost of face-to-face compliance training, coupled with soft skills and creative skills courses from a suite of providers, proved costly and complex. And none really had the specific content or breadth of content Oliver Agency required from their training provider. 

“The decision to work with Go1 was due to the massively extensive library available as part of the per person license fee. The huge variety has meant that as a business we’ve been able to be extremely agile, especially in times like quarantine – where our resource requests have become stranger than usual.

For instance, we were able to add in fitness classes to our Learning Academy, which has been really helpful to provide something ‘extra’ to our employees when many have been going through a stressful time.”  

Emmett was also pleased to find the overall setup process “relatively simple” with Go1. 

“We had a few webinars to understand how to import the content and the rest we were able to do ourselves. The support was always available if we needed it, but overall it was extremely easy to get going.”

When we asked Emmett for his advice to HR and L&D teams on the same journey, he highlighted the importance of working closely with Go1’s support team. 

“Relying on support from Go1 to source and import the content from their large library into the LMS was key to speeding up the creation of learning pathways. This ultimately led to the project getting delivered within the time frame.”

The results

For Oliver Agency, Go1 has met multiple important needs, including:

• reducing training costs
• boosting the reputation of L&D across the business
• keeping employees engaged and motivated with learning content through the COVID-19 remote working period
• seeing staff enrol in 63 different courses 12,500 times in the Go1 platform. 

The company has saved significantly by replacing face-to-face training with digital, and by using an aggregator to access 160+ training providers. 

There’s also been a positive shift in the way in which training is now perceived within the company. Since implementation, L&D within the organisation has moved from being a nice ‘add-on’ to a central component of the business. 

With Go1, the foundation has now been built for future learning initiatives, which can be quickly executed at no additional cost. Emmett has been able to support specific learning needs across the business, building out learning pathways and identifying individual training needs for employees. 

We’d like to thank Emmett for taking the time to speak to us and look forward to hearing more about Oliver Agency’s journey with Go1, as their learning programme continues to grow.

Keen to learn how Go1 can help you provide compliance, professional development, and softs skills training for your staff? Reach out to our friendly 24/7 support team anytime for a chat.