Developing professional skills

A global pharmaceutical company needed to build the capability of 3,000 business partners working across HR, Finance, Procurement, IT, Legal and other functions. Classroom training could not move fast enough or reach far enough, and the cost per participant was climbing. The brief was to replicate — or improve on — the classroom experience in a fully virtual program that scaled.

We used our learning experience platform, SmartLab Learning, to host a six-month virtual learning experience running cohorts of 600 simultaneous learners. Structured modules provided the spine; around them sat shared resources, discussion, learning team sessions, virtual classrooms and ongoing one-to-one support courtesy of Ludic Faculty’s Extraordinary League of Coaches, alongside a series of masterclasses.

The element that did most of the work was the business partner challenge: practical problems drawn from the participants’ own functions, solved in learning teams and discussed openly. Gamified progression and community features kept 600 people moving through the same six months together rather than drifting apart at their own pace.

The program achieved a 98% completion rate across 3,000 targeted business partners. Key stakeholders praised it as instrumental in accelerating the organization’s time to value of the shared business service center from five years to three.