STORY

BAC Credomatic is one of the main financial banks in Central America. With headquarters in Costa Rica, the company is home to more than 21,000 employees, with additional operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.

Juan Carlos Barahona, Manager of Regional Talent Development at BAC Credomatic, says the company has always been known for innovation, as it was the first financial institution in Central America to introduce a virtual branch. One of the pillars of BAC Credomatic’s strategy has been innovation in technology, coupled with a drive to provide the best banking experience to its customers.

Technology is not the only key to achieving this, but also having a well-qualified workforce, something that has been achieved thanks to the company’s focus on corporate training and the professional development of its workforce.

BAC Credomatic is a great example of an organization with excellent learner adoption rates, having a high number of active employees consistently taking training courses and following their learning plans in various areas, such as professional development, change management and management succession. With a plan that gives access to 19,000 active users every month, BAC Credomatic sees a 95% monthly active user rate within their Docebo Learning Platform. Always focused on the development of its workforce, the Corporate University of BAC Credomatic began to understand the potential of virtual training 8 years ago.

It launched a pilot program at its Costa Rica headquarters using a local platform to deliver certain content via SCORM / AICC packages that was used mainly to deliver courses for regulatory compliance requirements.

In 2016, the company realized that the world of digital learning in had advanced significantly. By this time, it had the practice of webinars consolidated across the organization, making multiple virtual regional activities, including one week virtual conferences with 50 different speakers and participation from all locations in the region. The objective was to position virtual training and webinars as an effective learning tool.

Equipped with a particular interest in adding a virtual component to its training programs, which were purely on-site, the company began to work with an open source learning platform.

CHALLENGES

BAC Credomatic paid significant attention to video-based content delivery and its benefits to engagement compared to other elements they had tried before. Based on this, the company developed a digital learning strategy that would include elements, such as video, to turn learning into a more pleasant and effective experience for its employees.

At the same time, BAC Credomatic also wanted to decentralize the responsibility of training courses that traditionally fell upon the human resources department to manage.

“In our human resources department, we had very operative personnel dedicated to managing logistics of requested courses and a few advisors who actually worked on the strategy at the organizational level to see to provide training for the development of skills that employees needed,” said Juan Carlos.

BAC Credomatic saw the way to solve these needs when developing a learning strategy through digital media. With this strategy in hand, the company started to look for a tool that would allow them to manage this type of desired content, become its central repository, and encourage user autonomy, plus become a solution that would allow it to manage and drive its training strategy. A Learning & Development team was created with representation from each country in the region where BAC Credomatic has operations, and together they designed their training strategy, as well as selected the best tool they found in the market to deploy their programs.

SOLUTION

The Docebo Learning Platform allows BAC Credomatic to manage its training programs, not only by department, but also by country. They launched a 6 month pilot program in Honduras and once Docebo had proved its effectiveness, the company made the decision to implement it in all the other countries in the region. Being a flexible and versatile platform that allows it not only to have guided processes, learning plans, surveys, social and collaborative learning, but also allows the company to experiment with different types of tasks.

“That type of versatility that the Docebo learning platform offers, in some cases, has equipped us with a kind of Swiss Army knife that allows us different uses beyond the traditional ones” Juan Carlos Barahona, Regional Talent Development Manager, BAC Credomatic.

BAC Credomatic managed to decentralize the responsibility of learning by certifying different areas and employees. To date, the company has certified 100 trainers across the Central America region. BAC Credomatic also established the “Instructional Design for Virtual Environments” program, which provides all elements of design, content and layout so that when they design courses that are going to be used in Docebo, the look and feel of each course is consistent to provide a pleasant and effective experience for every learner.

These trainers, who are experts in their respective fields, are employees generally in charge of certain training tasks or manage these functions in some capacity from human resources, and are people who replicate good practices to influence course design, by either hiring providers or teaching others within the company how to use Docebo’s authoring tools for their own needs.

“Much of the adoption of Docebo comes by that line, the ability to have empowered people in different areas and employees who can manage their own learning,” says Juan Carlos.

RESULTS

BAC Credomatic has significantly reduced the time and costs incurred by corporate onboarding. Previously, onboarding was completed during a period of 3-5 days on site, with travel expenses, food, hotels, and others. With a blended learning approach, the company now provides new hires access to organizational information before they even start working at the company. This helps new employees familiarize themselves with relevant introductory information needed to accelerate initial ramp up.

“Today, the virtual strategy has positioned itself to the extent that we are already delivering the same amount of training virtually as we are on-site (50/50), whereas three years ago, that ratio was 73% on-site, in-person, with only 27% via digital means. By the end of this year, we hope to increase digital to 60% of our learning mix,” says Juan Carlos.

In the same way, branch employees, for whom training takes three months to ensure they are experts in the company’s products, processes, systems and services, now use small virtual learning units (microlearning). This is fundamental to this group of employees, who are short on time and spread across multiple countries to ramp up. Carrying these activities out without the support of a learning platform, such as Docebo to facilitate online learning and communication among employees, would not have been possible.