EcoVadis provides sustainability ratings, benchmarks, and scorecards to businesses across all levels of the global supply chain — from their environmental impacts to their labor, human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement practices. With Docebo’s Learning Suite, they created EcoVadis Academy, a comprehensive e-learning platform that gives EcoVadis customers the tools to improve their performance in all of these priority areas and drive impact within their value chains.
Imagine this: you’re seeing the doctor. After your check-up, you get a detailed report of your blood pressure, cholesterol, iron, and vitamin levels. Your doctor then tells you “you need to improve these figures and be healthier.”
You ask yourself what that even means. Do you need to watch your sodium intake? Drink more water? Run more? Watch your cholesterol?
Trying to figure that out is an impossible task.
Sadly, many businesses fall into this category regarding their sustainability practices. While understanding performance is difficult, improving it is even harder. It’s no surprise that lack of knowledge and skills is often cited as the main barrier keeping small-medium enterprises (SMEs) from improving their sustainability performance.
This becomes a major issue when SMEs make up over 70% of most supply chains and have fewer resources to access sustainability knowledge—creating a disparity between the haves and the have-nots in building informed sustainable strategies.
While there’s a seemingly infinite supply of websites, documents, and videos on the internet about almost every sustainability topic imaginable, the challenge for many lies in not knowing which ones are relevant to their company and specific stage of their sustainability journey.
While governments and stakeholders continue to enact sustainability laws and regulations that all businesses must adhere to, and consumers demand more accountability from brands, SMEs face an increasing urgency to act.
EcoVadis, whose mission is to provide the most reliable sustainability ratings for global supply chains and finance, notices this problem — and driving improvement is at the center of their strategy.
“Data from the Improvement areas that are identified on our clients’ scorecards has increased rapidly with our network growth, and, along with feedback from customers, has given us a clear picture of the most important education and guidance needed to help companies improve,” Emily Rakowski, CMO of EcoVadis. “We knew from our previous experience hosting a set of basic e-learning courses that we needed a solution that was engaging, trackable, and rewarding for learners and scalable for businesses too.”
With the help of Docebo, over 30 EcoVadis sustainability topic experts, and an international creative content agency, EcoVadis created a solution: EcoVadis Academy, an adaptable e-learning platform that provides guidance to tens of thousands of organizations from 180 countries on how to improve.
The E-learning team pulled in experts from a deep bench of over 350 analysts to develop content across key topics in Environment, Labor and Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement. With the training content covering policies, actions, and results (such as how to create effective policies, how to set appropriate targets, and how to track and report progress), EcoVadis Academy was born.
With customized learning paths, engaging courses accessible on mobile or laptop, multi-language options, and end-of-course quizzes, EcoVadis Academy doesn’t only provide the “what” of your performance and score, but the “how” with guidance to improve your ratings and scores.
Let’s take a deeper look at EcoVadis Academy.
How does EcoVadis Academy work?
EcoVadis believes that the key to successful sustainability improvement is setting learning as the highest priority. Each organization is met with relevant educational course content focused on sustainability improvement areas identified in their business, giving everyone from all levels of the business the knowledge to make specific sustainable decisions (rather than just creating strategies at a high level that are siloed under a “Corporate Social Responsibility” umbrella).
In 2021, EcoVadis Academy set out to provide its customers with compelling education on how to best tackle their priority sustainability targets.
However, there is a vast difference between global conglomerates and SMEs — EcoVadis needed its sustainability education program to be customizable, scalable, and relevant to its learners.
EcoVadis pulled in Docebo to help tackle this challenge.
In order to provide an engaging and relevant learning experience, EcoVadis Academy drew from the company’s unique experience and data points from 125,000 scorecards and hundreds of thousands of connections. This information is the essence and building blocks of the EcoVadis Academy courses: meeting companies where they are, aligning to the relevant and material sustainability improvement areas identified on their EcoVadis Scorecard, and/or their sustainable procurement journey stage, and making learning a magnetic and collaborative experience with interactive navigation, videos, and case studies that fully engage learners.
At the end of each course, learners are tested on their knowledge. Administrators are able to track their progress and deliver supplier sustainability improvement programs identified within their company’s scorecard. All courses are aligned with the EcoVadis Rating methodology and the platform works hand-in-hand with the improvement action plan.
With 100% online access, EcoVadis Academy is available to distributed companies and teams in any geography.
Today, EcoVadis has over 30 in-depth sustainability courses in 9 different languages, and over 7,000 learners on the platform with 14,000 courses in progress or completed.
30in-depth sustainability courses |
9different languages offered |
7,000+learners on the platform |
14,000+courses in progress or completed |
The future of EcoVadis Academy
As we know, the only constant in the world is changing, and with ongoing change, sustainability education changes with it to meet new challenges and targets.
For EcoVadis Academy, continuous improvement is embedded in its design.
With the recent doubling of courses and languages, EcoVadis Academy will continue to grow in both the content and solutions that are provided to its customers to support continuous improvement. New content topics include more in-depth sustainability topics, such as waste & water management, child & forced labor, anti-corruption, and more in-depth sustainable procurement.
As a global company with 13 offices around the world and employees from 50+ countries, they aim to continue to grow the Academy to reflect the diversity and globalization of their own business as well as that of their customers.
After all, making sustainability education accessible also means making it available to many people in different countries.
“In our quest to have the broadest impact possible across the rich breadth of our network around the globe, we are acutely aware of the need to localize — starting with the most prevalent languages. As of July 2022, we’ll have nine languages supported, covering a significant portion of our supply base!” says Mark Sugden, VP of Community of Practice.
With their Docebo-powered EcoVadis Academy, delivering quality sustainability education is not only better than ever but powerful at helping organizations drive impact at scale within their value chains.
To learn more about EcoVadis, visit https://ecovadis.com/.
To learn more about sustainability education, tune into Floor 23: The Solarium, our Learning Elevated podcast episode featuring Mark Sugden, Vice President of Community of Practice at EcoVadis.