Virgin Media Testimonial

Virgin Media and Jenison: long-term learning partners

Virgin Media is part of the Virgin group of companies and is the largest Virgin company in the world, with circa 13,000 employees across the UK and a turnover of circa £4bn. They have almost 10 million customers, and are the largest residential broadband provider in the UK, the UK’s largest mobile virtual network operator and the second largest home phone and pay TV provider.

The Need

In order to maintain the quality of its services Virgin Media employees need excellent business and management skills and the provision of learning resources across these areas is key to the company’s success.

The time pressures on staff are such that the company must constantly find new and more effective ways of delivering high quality, consistent learning interventions to staff. Whilst it was acknowledged that traditional classroom training would always play an important role, e-learning was identified as offering the potential to deliver complementary and innovative learning intervention and improve access to knowledge and skills training on a UK basis as part of a blended approach.

The Solution

Jenison own and provide a library of e learning resources that numbers in excess of 200 management and professional development titles: all contain audio to engage and retain user attention and two of the portfolios use video to illustrate key outcomes. Uniquely all the resources contain an integrated reflective notes feature that encourages staff to think about, reflect and list actions they are going to undertake as a result of working through the resource.

Mike Leavy, Virgin Media’s Technical Learning Solutions lead outlines the company’s initial motivation for acquiring generic elearning resources:

“Our aim was to capitalise on the positive response we have had for e-learning. We wanted to build a rich catalogue of content that would meet a variety of learners needs. This required high quality solutions that engage the learner whilst meeting the learning objectives. Due to the ever changing nature of Virgin Media we also wanted to be able to adapt the content ourselves and not have to refer back to the provider. We identified Jenison as being able to match our needs and began working with them late 2009.”

As experts in delivering e learning solutions, Jenison has the experience and capacity to meet the generic elearning needs of Virgin Media. Since 2000, Jenison has provided interactive and intuitive e-learning resources covering a range of topics including as business & leadership skills, change management and performance development through to helping with writing and presentation skills.

This range of short, easy to use and high quality range of e-learning solutions proved to be very attractive to Virgin Media as Mike Leavy explains:

“We liked the ease of use and the variety of topics Jenison offered. It uses a mix of audio, video and graphics to deliver user friendly behavioural and skills based training. “

The Approach

The concept of learning ‘on-demand’ has also been introduced at Virgin Media. Learning is designed to take place as and when it suits staff. This is via Ignite, the Virgin Media Learning Management System, and thanks to this more informal style of learning, staff spend less time away from the office whilst improving their individual performance.

Because the Jenison library of resources is delivered via Ignite training expenses and time away from the office are significantly reduced thereby ensuring that Virgin Media is achieving a better return on its learning investment.

The Results

The value of the Jenison elearning resources has certainly proven its worth and resulted in measurable business outcomes at Virgin Media.

Mike Leavy affirms that,

“A blended learning approach is a key strategy for the Talent and Development team and the Jenison e learning resource has combined perfectly with other mediums such as social learning to help us develop our staff to improve the quality of service we provide to our customers”

Virgin Media has also been able to cut back on expenditure.

Mike Leavy outlines that, “The e-learning courses have saved us hundreds of thousands of pounds in travel, accommodation, classroom and opportunity costs, had we attempted to deliver the same volume of training face-to-face.”

Learner uptake at Virgin Media has been excellent. As a result the overall skill level of employees has been enhanced. In the last quarter alone over 8,000 accesses of Jenison resources have been logged on the Ignite Learning environment.

Mike Leavy concludes,

“It’s important that our learners can access training whenever and wherever they need to. This was demonstrated by 20% of our learners choosing to take this training on the go and we can only see this increasing as we move more towards incorporating mobile learning. This flexibility for the audience and the ability to make amendments ourselves enabled us to develop our staff so they can provide the best service to our customers. I can only see our relationship with Jenison growing as we move into the future.”