How BPP use inrehearsal to support learning at scale

BPP is a leading global education group, delivering courses for career-focused learners and the world’s leading employers.

When it comes to internal L&D for their employees, the inrehearsal content library plays a key role and we discussed how with Lee Beck (Head of Talent and Learning) and Laura Taylor (Learning Partner).

The challenge: Supporting L&D as a small team in a growing company

When Lee joined five years ago, BPP had around 1,500 employees. Today, that number has doubled and means their six-person L&D team now supports almost 3,000 employees.

Small L&D teams at scaling companies will recognise some of the challenges and accomplishments the BPP team has seen on that journey.

• When Lee joined, digital learning was quite simple and largely compliance-led, with people talking over slides.
• They quickly decided to start making their own compliance content in house, using their skillsets and knowledge as an education provider.
• They had access to content libraries that weren’t always used or effective.

They weren’t actively looking for a new provider… and then they came across inrehearsal

“I was incredibly impressed right away! The user experience was amazing, but the thing that stood out at the time was the high quality of the content.

“I showed a few people around the business and again, people thought it was great.”

“It was different, refreshing, and modern. And there were no videos over 10 minutes.

“I think it’s important to know that we weren’t actually looking for something. It’s that good that it’s always made the business case for itself.” – Lee Beck.

Four ways BPP embed inrehearsal into everyday learning

1. Embedding inrehearsal content “in everything we do because it’s such good quality.”

Lee and Laura’s team are responsible for learning across the entire employee lifecycle, and they’re keen to create as many entry points to inrehearsal content across that journey.

This has meant embedding it in:

• The welcome email, where they first get access, and inductions.
• On employees’ ‘Your Career Development’ page and internal sites.
• In HR updates (where they promote our live masterclass events).
• To support management programmes, days, and workshops.
• Responses to queries in their inbox, when they connect people to relevant content.

Content engagement is often a struggle for L&D teams and awareness is often cited as a key issue.

But by ensuring minimal friction and maximum awareness, the likelihood that BPP employees aren’t aware of inrehearsal is low.

So when it comes to any questions around engagement, the content can speak for itself:

“Once they’re in there, we tend to get the good signals, and everybody loves it.” — Lee Beck.

“As a team, we’re very much on the same page in how we all really rate inrehearsal. We all champion it, which I think makes it easier to promote… and because we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s got that momentum.” — Laura Taylor.

2. Scaling inrehearsal mindfully: From 20 to 1,290 BPP employees

While Lee recognised inrehearsal was giving BPP “quality content out of the box”, they chose to scale how they used it and took a different approach:

“We basically didn’t tell anybody about it. We decided to slowly feed in what we wanted and show people the quality of it.” – Lee Beck.

This meant embedding inrehearsal content in existing learning, like videos to support pieces around coaching or having difficult conversations. 

That subtlety and the connection to current challenges led people to engage with content and the feedback that followed was great:

“People started to say, I really like these videos. We could then launch it across the whole organisation and it went from strength to strength. 

“I remember it going from 20 to 50 people, 100 to 200 and it was at 500 people using it within the first nine months, which was about a third of our employees at that point” — Lee Beck.

Today, almost 1,300 BPP employees are using inrehearsal content, driven by that organic growth but also the acquisition of other companies. 

And with inrehearsal operating on a one organisation, one fee model, this is helping them scale learning:

“Almost straight away, we can give these acquisitions access to inrehearsal, and that’s huge. These companies are generally small, they’ve never had any L&D, and suddenly we can go, bang, have that library with no extra cost.” — Lee Beck.

3. Promoting inrehearsal’s expert-led masterclasses to an already-engaged audience

Inrehearsal customers get a full-calendar of live masterclasses with experts from our library. This allows them to plug quality sessions straight into their L&D strategy, without the hassle of organising or running them internally.

Attendance is really high with BPP employees, with Lee and Laura crediting a combination of the session quality and how they promote masterclasses at BPP.

“I think it’s because people have seen the content, they know it’s good quality, and you’ve got a really credible speaker, so it makes it easier to promote those workshops.

“People may have gone in and seen a boxset or they might have seen something on a manager programme and gone, that’s really good. 

“So when we promote the workshops, they’ll say, I’m going to jump on because I know it’ll be great and I’ll learn quite a bit from it.” — Laura Taylor

4. Supporting internal programmes for management, AI and more

“It’s not often that we’ll find a subject we’re covering at BPP isn’t covered in some element by inrehearsal, so we’re using it to complement the training.” – Lee Beck.

A great example would be how they’re supporting their four management programmes:

• Leading with purpose: For very senior management.

• Aspire: For people that aren’t managers but are thinking of going into management.

• Elevate: For new managers that have been in position for six months.

• Stepping into leadership: For those more experienced managers.

“All the way through, for all those stages, there’s something from inrehearsal that you can use.

There’ll be pre-work, post-work… handpicked videos from certain boxsets which might be on communication or topics like that.” — Laura Taylor

We’re adding new content to the inrehearsal library every month, based on emerging skills and customer feedback. Our customers are then safe in the knowledge that they have access to relevant content, across core human skills and trending topics.

“As we’re adapting to new workplace skills and how fast everything changes, we can use what inrehearsal is doing along with it. And frankly, I look at what’s coming next at inrehearsal to say, this is going to be important, have we got a way we’re covering this at BPP?” – Lee Beck.

The Impact: A partnership that’s driving around 300 logins every month

BPP knows what quality education looks like and, with inrehearsal, they’ve found a partner who can deliver similar quality, a message that’s consistent with their values, and support that helps make their initiatives successful.

“The whole relationship just works very well from a learning perspective. I think the integration between our values and your content, the user experience and how easy it is for people to access, the quality of the boxsets and new content.” — Lee Beck

Because our library focuses on human skills and topics, which aren’t industry-specific, and is delivered by credible experts, BPP employees can explore the full library on their own terms.

“There’s no content on there where we’ve ever said, don’t watch that because it doesn’t fit with our values or the way in which we like to train people, and it’s very well made in the fact that it doesn’t ever touch specifically on an industry.” – Lee Beck.

This partnership, based on quality content that’s supporting new skills, is a key reason BPP has used inrehearsal since 2021 and we can’t wait to see how they use our library next…

“We don’t really know what’s around the corner. That’s the thing, inrehearsal are pretty good at keeping up with the trends. And that’s why, year after year, we’ve kept coming back as well.” – Lee Beck.