How to Launch and Scale a Successful
L&D Offering from the Ground Up

The challenge: Setting an ambitious strategy for a brand-new L&D offering

Historically, Thomas didn’t have a dedicated L&D offering for its employees. But requests for career development regularly came up throughout the flat organisation.

Towards the end of 2022, the business leaders decided this was a key missing ingredient for their growth plans, and hired Liz Daly as Global Talent Development Specialist. 

Liz was responsible for building Thomas’s L&D offering from the ground up and while this was an exciting project, it was also a huge challenge.

She knew from the beginning she’d need the support of a collaborative L&D partner.

“I got to build that L&D function, which was amazing. But it was a big challenge for my role. We needed to build a centralised hub of learning content which would be accessible to everyone regardless of seniority.”

Liz worked with the business leaders and department heads to identify the organisation’s needs with the new L&D offering, as well as key skills gaps, to help support a set of strategic goals. 

This led to five focus areas which Liz and her growing L&D team had to deliver learning content for and drive engagement at scale. One of these areas was developing management capability, which Liz built a 12-month programme for.

A top priority was designing this programme so the organisation’s managers would have access to short, engaging, actionable learning content directly at the point of need. Liz felt this would be far more effective than rigid programmes that restrict people’s development by dictating when and how they learn.

“I wanted to create an L&D offering that was flexible and easily accessible, less programmatic and more, ‘at your fingertips.’”

The solution: Flexible, engaging content that enhances key learning programmes 

When searching for a partner to provide the solution to these challenges, Liz’s first choice was inrehearsal. Having worked with inrehearsal in her previous role, Liz felt strongly about the value and benefits inrehearsal’s content library could offer Thomas. 

Liz said, “Looking at our five key areas of focus, and our strategic goals, I knew inrehearsal could meet all of them comfortably. Plus, I was really passionate about the value of inrehearsal, and I believed in the company, so I presented it alongside two other options to our CEO and CFO. inrehearsal won hands-down, due to the content, the style, and how simple it was to use.”

Liz and her L&D team introduced the inrehearsal content library into their offering, working closely with the team to identify crucial skills and development priorities. Together, they curated a dynamic range of content to support those priorities and enhance employees’ learning.

“Delivery is very simplified, and the content is short, sweet, and snappy. That’s exactly what we needed. It was also well within our budget, so that works really well for us.”

An example of this was building a people manager playbook, focusing on five manager habits Liz’s team wanted their managers to develop across the organisation.

They supplemented this playbook with short video content and podcast episodes from inrehearsal to great effect. inrehearsal’s content adds another dimension to the learning process by providing employees with a highly credible expert teaching them in short, digestible videos. 

“We enjoy the simplified, practical, authentic style the content offers,” said Liz. “It’s flexible and inclusive for all types of learners.” 

Thomas also used inrehearsal’s masterclasses to drive workforce involvement in celebrating key events like Learning at Work Week and Neurodiversity Week. This is helping the L&D team successfully drive diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) and wellbeing programmes alongside those five strategic focuses.  

Liz added, “inrehearsal is a great platform. It’s got fantastic content.”

The outcome: A successful partnership that’s having a big positive impact throughout the business

Aligning inrehearsal’s content with their five key areas of focus has helped make the launch of Thomas’s L&D offering a success. 

Supporting the strategic goals set by Liz and the business leaders, the inrehearsal library has made a big impact in critical areas of the organisation. A big part of that has been the flexible, digestible nature of inrehearsal’s content. 

“We didn’t want to pile on too much extra learning content,” said Liz. “inrehearsal’s short videos have helped to inform the managers in a simplified, but still very engaging way.”

One of the top priorities for Liz was building a strong people manager community. 

The L&D team are measuring progress with this not by completions of training, but by behaviour change, looking at how managers’ new skills and habits are being used when working with their teams. 

And the skills and habits that have been built through inrehearsal’s content are already having a positive influence on management across the organisation.

Liz said, “Where inrehearsal plays the biggest part, and adds the most value for us, is by using the content to build the habits and skills we feel our people need to develop in the areas of priority. This has a big impact on our business, because the skills inrehearsal is teaching them helps to make positive improvements throughout the whole organisation.”

Going back to the example of the people manager playbook, the alignment of this important asset with inrehearsal’s content has also received lots of positive feedback from the managers themselves. 

Beyond that, Liz and her team have also benefitted from the collaborative, supportive relationship with inrehearsal as true L&D partner. Since inrhearsal’s content is delivered in a wide range of formats and modalities, it offers partners like Thomas the flexibility come up with creative ideas for learning. 

“We really enjoy working closely together with the inrehearsal team to find new ways of enhancing our campaigns with more of their great content. It’s so good to be able to have those conversations. We tell them what we need, or what we’re struggling with at the time, and inrehearsal always helps us curate the right content to deliver on those needs.”