How SAS delivers personalised training to 150,000+ learners with Totara

SAS is a global data and AI software company, providing analytics and decision-intelligence solutions to organisations across industries. We make it easier and faster to turn data into insights.

SAS Education provides the training needed for customers to succeed in a data-driven world, delivering hands-on learning for employees, partners, customers, educators, and students.

The Challenge

SAS Education needed a modern learning experience that could serve numerous diverse audiences across multiple countries, languages, and delivery formats while making it easier for learners to discover and begin the right training.

Learners range from internal employees and partners looking to strengthen their knowledge of SAS products, to software customers training and certifying their employees, as well as educators and students gaining the in-demand skills needed to launch careers in data and AI.

The goals were to:

• Modernise the learning platform to support a scalable, user-friendly experience.
• Reduce friction between browsing the catalogue and starting a course.
• Deliver personalised learning experiences for distinct learner audiences.
• Expand training offerings efficiently without increasing complexity for administrators or learners.

The Solution

SAS Education partnered with Synegen to use Totara Learn as the foundation of a modern learning environment that brought the browse, access, and consume experiences into a single platform. This helped reduce friction for learners while giving administrators a more efficient way to manage a broad and varied catalogue.

Totara Learn’s flexible audiences and dashboard capabilities made it possible to tailor the experience for different learner groups and customer accounts, guiding each audience to the content, messaging, and resources most relevant to their goals and training products.

Totara Learn also supported more complex delivery needs through customised plugins, including:

• Live instructor-led training integrations that connect learners directly to virtual sessions and practice environments where they can complete exercises and demonstrations alongside instructors in real time.
• eLearning delivery supporting multiple versions and translations through a customised video player.
• xAPI tracking, providing more granular insight into learner progress and engagement throughout each learning experience.
• Virtual lab reservation systems, tailored to the specific eLearning version being completed.
• Multi-country class scheduling with local pricing that dynamically changes based on each learner’s location.

To further expand learning experiences, SAS Education introduced Totara Engage to provide bite-sized, informal learning through curated playlists and resources. This made it easier to blend structured learning with informal content, allowing learners to engage in the format that best suited their needs.

Playlists were seamlessly integrated into the existing learning catalogue by adapting Tag Collections to use consistent tags across courses, programmes, and playlists.

The Results

Totara enabled SAS Education to scale a highly personalised learning ecosystem, expanding reach, increasing learner access, and supporting a broader mix of training experiences across customer accounts, academic programmes, and live delivery.

Key outcomes include:

• Supporting more than 150,000 learners across 35,000+ organisations.
• 180+ personalised customer dashboards delivering tailored learning experiences.
• 200+ customer courses and webinars available through the platform.
• Three academic dashboards and two free academic software integrations, serving more than 2,200 academic users.
• More than 2,300 live web events delivered through the platform.
• Reduced cost per customer from US$300 to US$68, significantly improving operational efficiency.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 59 for digital learning content.

Together, these results demonstrate how Totara has enabled SAS Education to deliver personalised learning experiences at scale while improving operational efficiency, supporting customer success, and expanding access to training across commercial and academic audiences.