Deloitte launches a high-end onboarding journey for their Major Programmes practitioners with Totara

Deloitte is a leading professional service provider with member firms in 150 countries and territories. Its UK member firm, Deloitte UK, is among the largest professional services firms in the United Kingdom, counting over 20 000 employees with a wide range of expertise and skills who work – day in and day out – to make an impact that matters.

The Challenge

Deloitte provides a vast array of professional services to a client portfolio that is just as diverse. From digital transformation and sustainability expertise to cyber security and financial or legal advice, Deloitte helps clients to address varying challenges and needs.

These challenges have become more complex over the years. From responding to a pandemic to becoming CO₂ neutral, both Deloitte’s clients and society in general are faced with complexities that require a long-term vision and a multifaceted approach that draws on different kinds of expertise.

To tackle these large-scale challenges, Deloitte UK launched the Major Programmes offering. This multidisciplinary offering brings together diverse skills, expertise and viewpoints to help solve a range of today’s major issues, including those having an economic, societal and environmental impact. Underpinned by a trusted and flexible offering called Programme Aerodynamics, Major Programmes helps to deliver some of the most vital transformations of our time.

To ensure that all Major Programmes practitioners are familiar with the offering’s values, culture, ways of working and the different types of projects, Major Programmes wanted to implement an engaging and effective digital onboarding and capability development journey. This started their search for a tool that would allow them to offer learners the best possible onboarding experience, and to track understanding and compliance.

To ensure that all Major Programmes practitioners are familiar with the offering’s values, culture, ways of working and the different types of projects, Major Programmes wanted to implement an engaging and effective digital onboarding and capability development journey. This started their search for a tool that would allow them to offer learners the best possible onboarding experience, and to track understanding and compliance.

‘The exam question I set the Belgian team was how can you help me with an L&D solution which is scalable, educational and engaging?

It needed to land the knowledge needed across a very diverse range of people in my business from all different industries, it also needed to use innovation and cutting-edge technology.’

– Richard Sedgwick, Chief Transformation Architect, Major Programmes at Deloitte

The Solution

Together with Totara Platinum Partner Deloitte Belgium, Deloitte UK decided to use Totara to create their Major Programmes onboarding journey. The technology allowed great flexibility with content and design, provided automated interaction with learners and course administrators, generated the analytics required to provide the insights needed to monitor performance and offered scalability across multiple markets and users.

With the help of Deloitte Belgium, a learning needs analysis was performed to understand the audience and the skills learners should acquire to be successful at delivering major programmes. This served as input to create a twofold hybrid learning journey, each consisting of 5 online modules and a full-day in-person workshop.

The first part of the journey is mandatory for all Major Programmes practitioners and focusses on developing the necessary skills to be able to effectively serve on the team. Once this is completed, a learner is considered certified to serve. Additionally, all managers and up also have to complete a second part of the journey, which centres around the Major Programmes sales trajectory and ensures that they are certified to sell Major Programmes services.

Based on the learning needs analysis, a conscious decision was made to focus on snackable content. Examples include word clouds, podcasts, and videos in which team members share experiences and give a message that resonates with the culture and values of Major Programmes. In addition, the journey also includes fun e-learnings to test learners’ understanding. By choosing short pieces of learning content rather than lengthy learning assets that require a big time commitment, learners can complete the training at their own pace. To provide maximum flexibility, the onboarding journey is also completely mobile-responsive, allowing users to learn whenever and wherever fits them best.

To stimulate personal engagement, learners are also invited to complete personal reflection logs throughout the courses. There they can write down their thoughts and ideas on certain questions. This allows them to solidify their knowledge and engage more deeply with the content. With the click of a button, they can easily refer back to their answers – which are kept entirely private from other learners – at any point in time throughout their learning journey.

Furthermore, learners receive automatic progress emails throughout their journey. This stimulates them to stay on track and complete the mandatory activities, which in turn boosts compliance rates. These emails are based on a communication plan and depend on their progress status (lagging behind, on track, or ahead of schedule).

In addition to the online learning content, the journey also includes an in-person workshop, both at the end of the first and second part of the journey. These allow users to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice, and share their ideas and perspectives with their peers.

Once learners have reached the end of their onboarding journey, they are encouraged to fill out their personal action plan. This prompts them to implement what they learnt in real-life by committing to focus on three action points in the short-term (30 days), medium-term (60 days) and long-term (90 days). Once they have made their choice, they are asked to define how they plan on achieving these goals. Automatic reminder emails are sent out to check in on their progress and reinforce the commitment they made. Learners can also download a PDF file of their chosen action points.

Results

The Major Programmes onboarding journey was launched in April 2022 and has grown into a great success. In the first 12 months, over 500 practitioners from across Deloitte UK have completed the programme, with 85% satisfaction ratings. These practitioners cover all levels of experience in the firm, from graduate trainees to experienced senior partners, work in all industries and come from a range of backgrounds and skills. The success of the programme has become viral, with a further 250 practitioners who have signed up to complete the journey by the summer of 2024.

‘The program has landed remarkably well, remarkably quickly. To the extent that we have never had a program in Deloitte UK that has had such a high impact so quickly among such a diverse range of participants.’

– Richard Sedgwick, Chief Transformation Architect, Major Programmes at Deloitte

In fact, the impact of the program has been so great that the programme is now being rolled out internationally to the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, and the Middle East. This is all using the same Totara platform which shows how scalable the solution really is.

In addition to increasing purpose, collaboration and skill development, the programme has also driven a step change in the conversations Major Programmes has with their clients, generating a number of new sales opportunities since the launch.

‘The program has helped our clients think about and start to execute some of their biggest business and societal challenges in a whole new way, by creating better collaboration, driving insightful and informed conversations with our clients and dramatically scaling up our ability to deliver and execute, which has put us in a differentiator position in the marketplace.’

– Richard Sedgwick, Chief Transformation Architect, Major Programmes at Deloitte