Swapcard's Upskilling Success Story
Swapcard is an event and community platform that helps anyone to organize smart and digital-first events, without tech headaches. The company is committed to creating meaningful connections that grow into authentic, long-lasting relationships for both their clients and their employees.
With 200+ team members working remotely across nine company entities, Swapcard is growing globally. The team recognises that Learning and Development is key to employee tenure, and encourages colleagues to grow and thrive by learning together.
The Swapcard Team
- Lala Edwards, Head of Learning and Development
- Natalia Abril, Head of Impact
- Rafaëlle Stavisky, People and Workplace Experience Manager
- Alexandre Mercier, CISO
- Nikolina Tukic, Quality & Insights Manager
Challenges
Making Learning Accessible To All Employees
Swapcard has experienced rapid growth in the last few years. The team recognizes that it must nurture that growth with Learning and Development opportunities to retain employees. "Things are always changing," says Lala Edwards, Head of Global L&D. "We need to remain agile and have access to learning when and where we need it."
Swapcard's goal is to empower teams and individuals to take their development into their own hands. "Curiosity is one of our biggest values at Swapcard," says Rafaelle Stavisky, People and Workplace Experience Manager. "Every employee has a learning budget, and we aim to reward and recognize employees who actively develop themselves."
The team advocates for employees to be autonomous in diagnosing their own learning needs and attaining knowledge from in-house experts to help fill skill gaps while leaning on managers for support.
But for this decentralized learning approach to work, Swapcard knew they needed to standardize their processes and make it easy for people to learn from and teach each other. The team faced three main challenges with their previous learning solution:
- A lack of one source of truth and process standardization. Swapcard didn't have a single source of truth for mandatory training. As Alexandre Mercier, Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO) explains, "Things were very manual: we had spreadsheets all over the place, and this made it difficult to track and measure course progress and engagement."
- Siloed knowledge and communication across departments. As Swapcard grew, departments were working in silos, leading to confusion, counterproductive work, and an inability to leverage transversal knowledge. They had different practices and processes to do the same things across departments.
- A reliance on live meetings and training. For training, and onboarding in particular, the team relied on live meetings and documentation stored in Notion. For a company operating across many time zones, this became unmanageable.
Swapcard needed to change their approach. That's when they found the perfect solution for them: upskilling from within through asynchronous collaborative learning.
Solution: Leveraging Internal Knowledge To Upskill From Within
Swapcard understood that they needed to implement a Learning Management System early on to avoid disorganization and create a single source of truth. That's when they discovered 360Learning—and the potential to upskill from within.
The main competitive advantage of 360Learning was the ability to decentralize course creation, create learning paths for employees, and train people asynchronously. As Marie Guilermin, Customer Support Partner at 360Learning says, "Swapcard is more than just a client to us—they're a partner, and we have developed a strong relationship based on trust."
The collaborative learning approach has enabled us to create a people-led system, linking teams and the wider organization to thrive and learn from one another.
– Lala Edwards, Head of Learning and Development
Here, the team highlights four key benefits of 360Learning that have transformed the way people upskill at Swapcard.
Creating A Single Source Of Truth
Since adopting 360Learning, the Swapcard L&D team has been able to build a single source of truth for mandatory training: onboarding, compliance, and performance reviews. It has also streamlined their customer training. Employees now have one place where they can create and take training, and share it with other teams.
Swapcard is also able to support customers by offering complete product training packages and accreditation. The platform has allowed them to create clearer processes, have increased visibility of course completion and satisfaction rates, and drive better team collaboration.
Having a centralized place for training courses has also enabled Swapcard to standardize their onboarding process. "New recruits benefit from a consistent onboarding experience," says Lala. "It also saves onboarders time by decreasing the number of one-to-one meetings, whilst also improving ramp up time-to-autonomy in the company."
Creating a single source of truth for training has been instrumental in setting the foundations for decentralized learning at Swapcard. Read on to hear how 360Learning's authoring tool has enabled Swapcard to engage their employees to become course authors.
Onboarding using 360Learning is very easy; our new joiners receive an automatic email which gives them access to all onboarding videos, for example, a message from our CEO, an introduction to each of our departments, and some security guidelines to follow. It makes it seamless and simple both for us and the new joiner.
– Rafaëlle Stavisky, People and Workplace Experience Manager
Empowering Teams With Decentralized Learning
At Swapcard, people are encouraged to take ownership of their learning and development and share their expertise with their peers. As Lala explains, 100% of employees are authors on the platform: this helps them to promote a collaborative learning culture, whilst also saving the L&D team time.
"We have a learning committee, consisting of members of departments that contribute most to internal and external training," says Lala. "We get together and communicate about our projects and share learning with one another."
As Head of Global L&D, Lala provides guidance to authors on how to project-manage course creation in a team but doesn't dictate the content. "360Learning hosts course templates and guidance on how to create content for our teams," says Alexandre. "We can then deliver the training to our teammates and track attendance and scores."
As Lala explains, this is a great way for people to collaborate and helps distribute the workload across team members. "We trust our employees to create learning experiences that are pertinent and relevant to teams and the company."
This decentralized approach is working very well for Swapcard: 20% of authors have contributed to course content, which is significantly higher than the average benchmark, which hovers at around 3%. Lala also sees a 98% course satisfaction rate.
Another benefit Swapcard has leveraged with 360Learning? The ability to train their employees asynchronously.
Paving The Way For Asynchronous Learning
Before 360Learning, Swapcard relied heavily on live meetings for much of their training and onboarding. As a remote-first company with a distributed workforce, it became more challenging to schedule live meetings across different time zones.
With 360Learning, Swapcard is now able to offer asynchronous learning. "People can learn in their own time, and it allows us to train our teams on a global scale," says Alexandre.
As Rafaelle says, "For us, asynchronous learning is the only way we can work." The advantage of a learning platform like 360Learning is that learners can still collaborate with their peers without the need to set up live meetings. "People can ask questions on parts of the course and they can upvote answers," says Nikolina Tukic, Quality and Insights Manager.
And as Natalia Abril, Head of Impact adds, "This gives us the opportunity to have open dialogue with our peers and helps us to understand the positive impact collaborative learning can have on our organization."
Increasing Engagement Through Useful Product Features
The Swapcard team uses a number of 360Learning product features to increase program engagement and efficiency. These include:
• Learning paths – 360Learning makes it easy to build and assign learning paths that are personalized—without the headache that comes with enrolling people individually and assigning due dates.
• Discussion forum – The discussion forum allows learners to ask questions and provide feedback on courses. "As a course author, the ability to collaborate directly in the course even once it's been published is very helpful," says Alexandre. "This ensures that feedback can be collected at the source and applied where it's relevant."
Results
By leveraging Swapcard's internal experts and encouraging knowledge sharing across the organization, the team has been able to standardize and scale their employee and customer training with demonstrable results. These include:
- 100% of employees are authors on the platform, with 20% actively contributing to courses (360Learning's benchmark is 3% employee contribution)
- 98% course satisfaction rate
- 98% relevance score on courses
As Natalia explains, "I see 360Learning as an evolution of the peer-to-peer learning culture we've always had. At Swapcard, having the humility and open-mindedness to acknowledge how much we can learn from each other has been a strong pillar of our company's DNA. By adding better-suited tools like 360Learning to this experience, we can appreciate the importance of learning and growing together."
The Future: Upskilling From Within To Increase Employee Tenure
As Lala explains, this year, the team is going to focus on upskilling from within to increase employee tenure. "We want our employees to be much more involved in the development of their teammates, and that starts with engaging leaders. We're going to roll out leadership training to help support our managers and their team members."
360Learning will continue to champion Swapcard on their journey, helping the team to build impactful employee career paths where everyone can upskill from within.
Want to see similar results? Get a personalized demo to find out how 360Learning can help your organization achieve smarter and more impactful L&D.
