Bovemij supports self-directed, continuous development with Totara Learn

Bovemij is a Dutch finance and insurance company offering liability, business premises, legal aid, and mobility insurance. Bovemij was founded in 1963 as an insurance company.

Today Bovemij is not only an insurance company, but also helps its customers with financing to start up their own lease fleet, with legal assistance and various data solutions. Bovemij has a strong focus on thinking digital, and is well known for its excellent service and customer centric approach. They help customers to be successful within the mobility industry offering tailored financial solutions and advice.

The Challenge

Bovemij started with online learning back in 2009 when they realized how much time and money it would save them by switching their traditional face-to-face training to online learning. They started looking for a partner to acquire a learning management system and partnered with UP learning.

UP learning initially implemented Moodle for Bovemij so they could create e-learning for their connected mobility businesses. Bovemij still uses Moodle as an external learning platform to date. Over the years, they launched lots of new products, expanded their business, acquired new companies and moved away from purely B2B operations to start selling to consumers. As the company grew, they needed a system for their internal training, and in 2015, they decided that Totara would be better fit than Moodle, especially given their complex organization structure.

They were really impressed to see what they could achieve with Totara and UP learning. UP learning implemented their Totara Learn platform so Bovemij could train their 800 employees in various departments, job roles and with various learning needs. They decided to call it the Bovemij Campus.

“We’ve been working with UP learning for 10 years now. They help us develop creative solutions to a problem and understand our business really well. They are e-learning experts and ask great questions that help us to reflect about what we are doing now and what problems we might run into later. UP learning not just thinks about our needs today, but also our organizational needs in the future.” – Susanne De Waal, Training Coordinator, Bovemij

The Solution

Thanks to UP learning’s speedy implementation, Bovemij were able to start using Totara Learn out of the box for their onboarding needs. They created a single platform where all staff in the organization can go and learn, and they started using all of the standard features of the LMS along with making their own SCORM programs. Bovemij’s onboarding program covers their mission, vision, strategy, structure, board members, the property plan, handy tips and much more.

After this, Bovemij moved onto offering mandatory product training via the LMS. They built fun, visually appealing e-learning modules to teach staff about their financial products.

Along with the onboarding and product training, the courses currently available on the LMS include financial law, leadership and office training. They also offer online workshops, which they record and share in Bovemij Campus, making it easy for new employees and those who cannot attend every session to catch up with the available learning.

“I love that with Totara all our staff in various job roles can use the platform. It’s all ready to go. They can start anytime and anywhere, and learn at their own pace.” – Susanne de Waal

By the end of 2019, Bovemij had increased their use of Totara further by making use of the performance management functionality. Managers needed to receive data, videos, forms, interviews and more, so Bovemij built them a digital toolbox for performance management.

But Bovemij needed more. They were previously using Totara Learn 2.9, and decided to make a big upgrade to Totara Learn 12 in February 2020. One of the main reasons for the move is that they wanted to use targeting, cohorts, reorganization and audiences. Bovemij has 378 job levels and a complex organizational structure. Initially they had all these job levels in the LMS without any branching or hierarchies. Fortunately, working with their Totara Partner made it easy to upgrade their LMS from a relatively old to a much newer Totara version.

Bovemij also wanted to take the next step and wanted to focus on more self-directed learning and continuous development. UP learning supported this effort by building new custom themes for their Totara Learn site and they taught Bovemij how to use Lectora, an authoring tool which allows them to make beautiful e-learning as quickly as possible.

“The look and feel in Totara Learn 12 is amazing and so much better than our previous version.” – Susanne de Waal

UP learning also implemented beautiful dashboards and new reports for Bovemij’s managers and team leaders and turned it into a data-driven platform. Now they have a much better overview of who has or hasn’t fulfilled their mandatory training among other essential data.

“We love working with Bovemij. They’re professionals, they have a very driven team and ask all the right questions. Their IT and L&D staff are focused, knowledgeable about the LMS, know how to use it and have lots of dreams and wishes.” – E-Learning Implementation Consultant, UP learning

Until recently, Bovemij Campus was mainly used as a compliance system. Bovemij now wants to take a different approach and appeal to the intrinsic motivation of the employees and learners. They have created a communication plan, a communication calendar and developed new themes and courses with a focus on how staff can develop themselves, work smarter and prepare for the future. Bovemij is building a winning culture which encourages continuous learning instead of complacency.

The Results

Bovemij launched Totara Learn in 2016. They currently have 789 active users in their LMS and they offer more than 200 courses to their entire workforce.

Studytube grants everyone free access to more than 250 online corporate training courses and 500 microlearning modules. Bovemij are running a pilot on their portal for six months to motivate staff to start to learn for their personal development. They would like their staff to develop and manage their career paths and provide them with more self-directed learning opportunities that allow them to train in ways that work best for them. Employees are more engaged when given the autonomy to pursue their own development goals. If the pilot is successful, they will transfer everything and offer it on the Bovemij Campus at the end of this year and roll it out to the entire company.