“We want to provide learners with the right content, at the right time, for the right purpose, when they need it most.”
This content strategy directs how Regions Bank L&D builds and offers learning to more than 20,000 employees.
But what if nobody knows how to find that content? L&D success requires more than flipping the content on-switch. Indeed, the internal marketing of learning opportunities to employees plays a huge role in making their development happen.
Have you ever wondered why people aren’t engaging with your curated content? They might not know it exists, the analysts at Training Industry recently noted. “Unfortunately, this is a common question among many L&D professionals and training departments. They invest time and money to design and develop the training without a marketing plan or strategy to ensure participation.”
At Regions—a Degreed client and member of the S&P 500 Index serving customers across the South, Midwest and Texas—L&D leaders made sure their people knew where to find the learning they needed. In a campaign that won a 2024 Degreed Visionaries Award, the Regions team took home Silver for Learning Marketer of the Year. Join us for our Q&A with Lanie Jordan, Learning and Development Curator, as we take a look at why ten times as many Regions employees as expected participated in the bank’s Degreed 5-Day Challenge.
The Regions Bank Story: Wildly Successful Employee Engagement
Degreed: Congratulations on your award! Your story and incredible results will help other organizations looking for ideas on how to boost employee engagement. Let’s start with an overview of the campaign. What was the main objective?
Jordan: Thank you. The Degreed 5-Day Challenge was a week-long campaign designed to promote the benefits and features of Degreed. We focused on how to leverage the platform in your personal upskilling and development, whether that meant upskilling for a current role, preparing for a next role, or solving problems in the flow of your daily work.
Each day began with a podcast interview with active Degreed users who shared their positive experiences with Degreed, followed by micro-learnings explaining how to navigate key functions, and finally tailored exercises for completing key tasks and activities designed to support career goals. Each day took roughly ten minutes to complete, helping our associates to use the platform for upskilling and reskilling, personal development, and career planning.
At Regions, we really see a culture of continuous learning as essential to our organization’s long-term success. And that means providing our associates with upskilling and reskilling opportunities in a variety of options such as articles, podcasts, videos, courses—but they need to know about all those opportunities.
Degreed: Let’s go a little deeper. How was The Challenge conceived? What was the thinking behind how it was designed?
Jordan: We wanted it to be a fairly light lift. The goal was to make each session brief but also impactful. The sessions focused largely on how to use Degreed in effective ways, the idea being that familiarity with the platform translates to ease of use, which in turn makes the actual learning that follows easier to accomplish. In that sense, our goal was to help reduce any initial friction people might feel after logging in.
To deliver the campaign content, we created a Skill Plan in Degreed that contained welcome material as well as a Pathway for each of the five days, and each of those days had a different theme.
Day 1 discussed career-building resources including our Degreed Featured Page, which connects associates with relevant learning content and resources that support organizational objectives along with their professional growth. It enables them to take charge of their own development.
Day 2 discussed leveraging skills in Degreed, so in other words a look at creating and rating skills as well as focus skills and skill targets.
Day 3 focused on content recommendations, personalization features, and “making learning uniquely yours” to reinforce the idea of self-directed development.
Day 4 looked at using Degreed to upskill with an emphasis on finding content.
Day 5 discussed leveraging Degreed for social learning, in other words ways our associates can join Groups, follow each other, and share content to learn together using the platform.
Degreed: That makes a lot of sense. With your goals in mind, how did you go about pulling it together? What did the planning process look like?
Jordan: We socialized our plans to HR business partners and our learning architects in advance of the launch date, and those teams helped to refine and support the program through feedback, communications, and more. To reinforce and ensure alignment, we created and delivered a one-page overview and postcard to all of them, which was helpful.
Importantly, we partnered with our Head of Learning and Development, who was our executive sponsor and advocate for the campaign. And we featured her twice, first in an introduction to the program entitled Growing Your Career at Regions, a podcast in which she shared several key resources, including Degreed, that are designed to help associates in personal and professional upskilling. She also was featured in an inaugural, Day 1 podcast.
We also partnered with Corporate Communications to market the campaign via internal news channels and email. As part of that, a midweek reminder was sent to all associates in which colleagues from across the bank shared success stories and best practices using Degreed. In addition, Jen Stewart, our Degreed Client Success Manager, participated in our final review. She helped to ensure that our daily themes, program flow, resources, and Challenge activities were aligned.
Degreed: Now this all leads to, hopefully, good results, right? And this is one area where the campaign really shines. Your results were tremendous. Can we break it down a bit?
Jordan: Yes, we were really pleased. Our initial goal was to have two hundred learners participate. However, over 2,000 associates participated in the campaign. Degreed usage increased by over 50% after the campaign.
Moreover, we saw sustained usage and engagement with the campaign. Both new and long-term associates still access it as a resource. And we had another really great outcome. Continuing Professional Education completions increased by 1,150%. CPE credits are offered for designations in SHRM, HRCI, PMI, CPA and other areas. And this is beneficial because when our associates leverage internal resources for CPE it reduces the need for external spending on travel, conferences, and other out-of-office activities.
Degreed: And our understanding is the program was so successful you replicated it specifically for your people leaders?
Jordan: That’s correct. Given the success, we launched a campaign for people leaders one month later. It focused on leveraging Degreed Skill Coach to support the career and development of direct reports. The impact was consistent with the initial launch, with 20% of our people leaders participating. And data shows that Skill Coach usage skyrocketed.
Degreed: What are some of the key lessons you learned deploying this campaign? Or put another way, what advice would you give other L&D professionals hoping to do something similar?
Jordan: By breaking Degreed key features into bite -size learning and having associates share their stories and experience and how they benefit from engaging with the platform—whether that be how they upskill in their current role, solving issues in the flow of daily work, or preparing for their next role—it really resonated.
Sharing associate successes with Degreed can be done in countless ways from internal news channels, promotion announcements, and, in our case, how organizations provide learning on how to leverage the platform. The ideas are endless.
We are thrilled that a large percentage of Regions associates accepted The Challenge! Associates invested in themselves, became engaged during the week, devoted their time, added skills, requested feedback, set goals, and shared the Pathways and content with their team members, making those that participated the real winners.
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