„Platforms such as JobRouter® Academy will become increasingly important in the future“

1. Who is part of the Academy team and what constitutes your work?

The team includes Patrick Meyhöfer, Bahar Kormaz, and me, Silke Etter. Patrick is responsible for the implementation of trainings, the platform administration, and the creation of Academy contents. I manage the department. Besides the operating business I am also responsible for the management and the administration of the academy and the communication with partners and clients. Our new team member, Bahar, supports us since mid-July. She will be working as an additional trainer for on-site trainings, supporting us in filling our Academy with life!

Additionally, we gain a lot of support from our colleagues here in Mannheim and internationally. We want to make information accessible – for our colleagues, our sales partners, and clients. This is only possible if you are extremely well networked and know who you can get on board for which topic. We work closely together in the creation of the different courses and learn so incredibly much from each other. As a studied linguist, didactics is especially important to me. This means the way, how we can prepare information appropriately for different types of learners.

2. When and why was the Academy founded?

The JobRouter® Academy went live for the first time in early July 2018. But the idea to create such a platform existed long before. We realized that not every training participant is drawn into the active project business after three-day training. And after a while, the learned contents are forgotten. To be honest, who looks at old training material on paper later on?

This is what we wanted to prevent by offering a central online learning platform that is available from everywhere and at any time. Soon the first courses were designed and also our basic course Process Design became an important part of the JobRouter® Academy. Created according to the blended learning concept interested persons have the possibility since then to acquire the basics online themselves. Complementarily to that, they join on-site sessions in Mannheim, to finally finish the course in the form of an online study. This way, travelling time as well as expenses for hotels can be saved. Additionally, they can work much more flexible and target-oriented. Gradually more and more courses were added and contributed to the success and awareness of the JobRouter® Academy.

3. How does the Academy support partners and clients?

By means of the JobRouter® Academy partners as well as customers can retrieve knowledge around the clock to deepen and improve their JobRouter® expertise. It occurs sometimes that you sit at a tricky project and do not know how to proceed. Or you have been participating for a long time, but have only focused on certain topics. Here a glance at the basic training can be an advantage. Users often use the Academy to take a look at the new features of current releases or to learn about different modules. They then approach their responsible partners on their own initiative and enquire about extensions or updates.

4. What results did you reach with the Academy so far?

As of today, over 470 users from more than 16 different countries have Academy access. Due to the Corona pandemic, many people opted for the JobRouter® Academy instead of travelling to trainings. This enables them to work much more independently and only an internet access is necessary to access the offer anytime and from everywhere.

In addition to 19 courses for the DACH area we offer additional 11 courses for the English speaking market. Each course consists of different modules, more than 170 of them are available online. We already covered the most different learning types: we do not only offer videos and webinars but combine them with different text elements, audios, and GIFs. Our aim is to make knowledge transfer as attractive as possible and address really every user.

5. What is the feedback from the Academy graduates?

You can say that all of our users are very satisfied with the offers. More and more often we receive inquiries about very technical topics, which we would like to depict more often in the future. The people also appreciate that they do not have to travel in times of Corona. We receive many signals from the participants that this format not only saves them an incredible amount of time, but also costs. In addition, they would be happy if we were to continue to offer our extensive online service. Of course we are very happy to do so!