Marrickville Council build leadership and community strength with “Ladder” learning platform

Marrickville Council’s mission is to be a responsive, innovative and efficient Council that provides leadership and builds community strength. Marrickville Council has developed a long term vision for the area to the year 2021, to ensure that it is a place of culturally diverse, forward thinking, inner city communities and neighbourhoods. In order to achieve its mission and vision, the Council acknowledges that its daily actions are important and are shaped and supported by a solid foundation in learning and development.

Challenge

Marrickville Council needed a system that could reach all its staff, including supervisors and indoor and outdoor workers, so that all could benefit from the training sessions and learning resources provided by their Learning & Development department.

The Solution

Marrickville Council engaged the Educational Technology Specialist and Totara Partner, Androgogic, to deploy Totara, known as “Ladder” at Marrickville Council. Ladder stands for “Learning And Development Digital Education Resource” and helps to remind participants that learning enables Council staff to climb up and reach greater heights, both personally and professionally.

The homepage of Ladder displays a visual representation of the “Marrickville Model”, illustrating the interdependence of individuals, daily actions, plans and strategies, including the 2021 vision, and the impact and role of the local government. The image is also repeated in the header, which acts as an important reminder to all participants that learning supports Council’s vision.

Androgogic led Marrickville Council through a series of workshops and phases, from planning, design and implementation stages to testing and training, and successfully deployed Ladder after 6 weeks, one of the fastest Totara deployments conducted by Androgogic.

Ladder now enables Marrickville Council staff to:

• view the training calendar
• apply for training courses
• give feedback on courses
• complete self-paced eLearning courses
• view training that participants have scheduled
• view completed training
• create a learning plan.

It also allows supervisors to:

• approve applications made by their staff
• view training events that their staff members have scheduled
• view training their staff have completed
• view the learning plans of their staff members.

Benefits

• Easy to use
• Easy to manage and run reports
• Web-based
• Easy to access training materials and activities
• Ability to submit assessments

Conclusion

Totara has enabled Marrickville Council staff to easily access training courses, materials and activities that will equip Council to stay on mission and achieve its vision.

“Ladder helps us to promote that Learning & Development at Marrickville Council is more than just sitting in a classroom. It allows us to provide our staff with a range of learning activities, gives them flexibility and autonomy over how they interact with those activities, and presents us with a detailed picture of how L&D is reaching the organisation.”