3 Lessons on Driving Learner Adoption and Proving the Value of Learning from Siemens' Bas Puts
Discover best practices and tactics for engaging learners and proving learning ROI from Bas Puts, Global Head of Learning & Skill Architecture at Siemens.
By Trena Minudri, VP & Chief Learning Officer, Coursera
As learning leaders, we know that we need to prove the value of our learning initiatives in order to preserve and increase our budgets, secure our place as strategic partners, and ensure that we’re able to continue driving organizational impact.
But before we can prove the effectiveness of our learning initiatives, we must first succeed in driving learner adoption and engagement for them.
In the production of our recent white paper, How to Evaluate the Business Impact of Learning, I had the privilege of hearing from Bas Puts who is the Global Head of Learning & Skill Architecture at Siemens.
Bas strongly believes that people determine the success of business transformation, and he’s right. With insights and proven strategies from Bas, this article will cover three best practices for driving learner adoption and proving the value of learning. Together, we’ll explore community-based learning, democratization of content creation, conceptual modeling, and more.
Learning from Siemens and their learning ecosystem
For context, Siemens, a Coursera customer, is a best-in-class technology company with a bold purpose: “We create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone.” 320,000 employees work toward this purpose, and the company has more than $84 billion (or €78 billion) in revenue.
As the leader of Siemens’ Learning & Skill Architecture team, Bas is responsible for making sure hundreds of thousands of global learners find and engage with learning content.
“My team and I contribute to the Siemens Learning and Growth Ecosystem, the one-stop shop for L&D [learning and development]. Several academies at Siemens contribute to the ecosystem with content. We cover a wide range of topics, from the traditional to the emerging. The ecosystem includes our learning experience platform where anyone who can offer L&D knowledge can publish content to reach their target audience,” notes Bas.
Learning at Siemens isn’t a one-way street where the L&D team assigns training and expects employees to drop what they’re doing to learn. Rather, Siemens has built an excellent culture that encourages a growth mindset among employees. They’ve achieved high learner adoption and business results because The L&D team at Siemens:
Aligns with leadership to prove learning plays a vital role in overall business success
Democratizes learning, so anyone in Siemens can curate valuable content
Creates one central learning experience for all learning initiatives
Regularly measures KPIs such as learning hours, skill adoption, and internal mobility
Through Siemens’ ecosystem, they’ve seen impressive results—including 23 learning hours per employee in fiscal year 2023. By providing access to over 170,000 learning resources and empowering any employee to curate targeted learning pathways called “knowledge boards,” Siemens puts learning directly into the hands of its people. This strategy has led to impressive engagement, with over 1,500 employees curating 3,300 knowledge boards, and an average of 10,000 daily users on their platform.
With an average learning experience platform (LXP) satisfaction score of 4.4 out of 5, it's clear that Siemens' approach resonates deeply with its workforce. These findings are further expanded on through the Siemens Global Engagement Survey, which poses questions around access to learning opportunities and the degree to which employees feel prepared with the skills and abilities needed for the future.
I’m truly inspired by how Bas and the learning team at Siemens is fostering a culture of learning and I’m excited to share these takeaways from behind the scenes with you.
1. Reduce barriers to entry for learners across your organization
The first step in driving adoption? Make sure your learning platform is a space where your employees will actually want to learn. The platform interface should have a sleek, simple design and promote a strong user experience.
Reducing barriers to learning at Siemens
“We have a learning experience platform within our ecosystem as the overarching layer. This piece is designed for the user,” notes Bas Puts. “Because time is the biggest currency, leaders need to fight for the organization’s attention and make this platform so compelling that it becomes a place people love to be.”
Their AI-driven learning platform, My Learning World, provides a personalized learning experience that’s accessible 24/7 to employees. It houses more than 170,000 learning resources across a variety of topics and formats to meet the global Siemens team’s varied learning preferences and requirements.
“Our people enjoy multiple learning formats, including videos, e-learning modules, virtual training courses, technical literature, podcasts, and e-books.”
This is the crux of Siemens’ strategy: Leveraging a learning experience platform, they have created a learning ecosystem that offers open-ended, learner-directed instruction.
Key considerations for you and your team
“Of the 170,000 items we have on the learning experience platform, many are self-paced, virtual, and hybrid-based in instruction,” notes Bas. A key reason Siemens’ L&D approach is so effective is that it encourages people to learn, to stay curious on new developments. For, instance, learning initiatives and progress might be part of discussions between learners and their managers. And there are few truly required learning initiatives at Siemens and these are mostly related to compliance or IT security related topics.
To reduce barriers to learning as Siemens has, focus on aggregating all of your learning, coaching, virtual training, webinars, and upskilling into one platform that prioritizes a seamless user experience.
2. Democratize content curation
Coursera research found that 46% of L&D and HR leaders are building their L&D programs from what feels like too many learning content options—and 58% feel that there are too many learning initiatives to measure. This sense of “content chaos” is one of the most prevalent problems facing the field.
To solve this, embrace the democratization of learning to remove the time-consuming loop where L&D talks to a department head to get the information to create an initiative, then runs the semi-completed initiative by the department head for approval, and then endless revisions ensue. Instead, leaders from these functions—learners who deeply understand their roles—can create tailored, meaningful content that connects to core skills.
Democratizing content curation at Siemens
Siemens’ L&D department democratizes learning so anyone in the company can curate learning content. This decision resulted in the creation of more than 170,000 learning items from 1,800 content curators.
Parallel to such broad success with democratization, Siemens launched a more targeted learning initiative called “My Skills” for employee upskilling. My Skills is embedded within the My Learning World (LXP). “With our 240,000 learners, we focus on steering strategically toward skills and placing targets on skill adoption,” shares Bas. “Targets could be related to skills we believe are critical skills or foundational skills, such as AI or blockchain or quantum computing.”
The “My Skills” program leans on more than 200 skill managers to own and define these vital learner skills. L&D then measures learning outcomes from these skills, including how long it takes a learner to adopt them and proficiency levels for target groups.
“We measure how long it takes somebody to adopt that new skill,” Bas notes. “At the moment, it's still all based on self-evaluation. We measure the existing level, and then after the intervention, another self-evaluation takes place.”
Key considerations for you and your team
Alongside democratizing curation, Siemens promotes community-based learning to boost engagement and adoption—and this is a mindset shift all L&D departments should consider implementing. Bas comments that many of Siemens’ learning hours stem from the initiative of learners supporting the skills development of other learners: “If an Engineering leader invites the entire Engineering unit of 500 to a webinar about the latest Python best practices, many people will go because they already trust the leader. This has boosted impact more than a leader outside of their function trying to do the same thing.”
While the democratization of Siemens’ learning experience platform was initially done out of necessity to boost the L&D team’s capacity, it had a secondary, unexpected benefit: It created frictionless, meaningful, and even inspirational experiences within their learning and growth ecosystem.
3. Encourage employee-led learning
We’ve seen digital learning accelerate in recent years, in large part due to a pandemic-prompted shift in how we deliver our learning programs.
Bas and the Siemens team have done a great job capitalizing on the opportunity to roll out (and better measure) their programs in a way that doesn’t feel forced or burdensome to employees.
Employee-led learning at Siemens
“We added more digital training programs, modules, and courses,” Bas shared, “with the intention of ensuring broad-based participation and providing learners with flexibility.”
All people at Siemens are encouraged to have a (MyGrowth) dialogue with their manager on their personal growth. These conversations are forward-looking and strength-based to support both individual and organizational growth, as well as performance and well-being. In short, either the manager or the employee takes the initiative for the dialogue. The frequency of these dialogues are determined together and tailored to the needs of the respective person.
“Support materials like short videos, questions for self-reflection, and workshop templates help our people, teams, and managers maintain an ongoing, respectful, and encouraging dialog on personal development and learning."
This approach guides Siemens away from prescriptive learning targets like mandatory learning hours, and instead, it gives learners a chance to advocate for what they want and experience some accountability from their managers. “The more meaningful a topic is seen by the people at Siemens, the more willing they are to start learning on the topic,” shares Bas. “If you make it part of the strategy of the unit at hand and the people understand why that is relevant a topic becomes more meaningful.”
Key considerations for you and your team
While there may be times when mandated learning is key to your organization’s strategy (such as our CEO-led generative AI training initiative at Coursera), providing learners with the autonomy to choose relevant topics and set their priorities can be a powerful lever for growth.
True, not all employees will be receptive to this self-directed approach. But it enables those who are already interested in learning to more freely follow their curiosity.
Enable and empower your learners for the long term
If you feel like Bas and his team have built a world-class L&D ecosystem, you’d be correct. But he and his team still have their sights set on a better, brighter Siemens future. They specifically want to understand learning’s impact on employee performance and business outcomes using what he calls “conceptual modeling:”
“Conceptual modeling means you can create a model that leverages data to relate to a tangible business outcome.” Using a wealth of company data, this approach would help his L&D team determine their impact on learner adoption, and subsequently, core business outcomes. For example, business leaders could learn how company culture or a specific L&D initiative directly leads to an increase in productivity.
To prove the value of your programs and gain buy-in from executive leadership as well as Bas has, learning leaders need to work the system and prioritize measurement tactics like this. Too often, learning leaders go immediately to “How do we communicate value to the learner?” without igniting and activating the system around the learner that allows them to thrive. It’s imperative to connect your learning goals to business and individual outcomes if you want to successfully align your executives on the value of L&D.
When you widen the aperture toward the entire learning experience, you encourage everyone in your organization to default to a growth mindset.
This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.