
JTI: The route to onboarding success

Onboarding newcomers, whether newly hired or moving from other activities within the company, is a critical process that determines the speed and readiness to perform in the new role.
However, it can be a costly affair, especially for large companies where onboarding schemes must be regularly repeated, and internal trainers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and relevant stakeholders need to be constantly and repeatedly engaged and available.
Global reach and alignment
This was the issue facing Japan Tobacco International (JTI), who wanted to create a more agile approach to onboarding newcomers to the Marketing and Sales (M&S) functions, globally available and accessible, enabling all employees to get aligned knowledge and understanding of the M&S strategic activities. The idea was to transform the existing local onboarding in-person initiatives into a fully digital onboarding program that all employees could access at any time and place they choose.
The result was M&S XPlained – a comprehensive digital learning journey, composed of a series of interactive, self-paced learning paths.
This digital learning journey covers the essentials every JTI employee must know about the M&S Strategic Framework focus areas.
By focusing on the must-know essentials, the learning journey creates full alignment with the business strategy and subsequent learning needs. This is crucial to the long-term relevance of learning content and avoids the constant need for updates.
Agile design
A digital learning journey offers more flexibility to the learners to delve into the content as they need, wherever and whenever they want – within the agreed timeframe with their manager.
However, when the live environment is replaced by a fully digital program, the learner experience must be carefully crafted to engage the learner, and the content meticulously curated by subject matter experts to ensure they gain all the relevant insights, knowledge and understanding to perform well in their new role.
This can be a significant challenge but is perfectly achievable with a multidisciplinary team of experts – from SMEs who curate the content, to instructional designers who transform the content into effective learning, to web developers and multimedia designers who make it come alive in the most engaging way
The M&S learning team at JTI and the Cegos Swiss Learning Excellence team joined their expertise and adopted an agile approach to create dynamic content that would hit the spot. They employed a Design Thinking methodology to make sure the learning journey was relevant.
The key to the success of M&S XPlained lays in several areas:
- Co-creating content with a cross-functional team of SMEs ensures its applicability and relevance.
- Integrating the digital learning journey into the company’s ecosystem enhances access, visibility, and progress tracking.
- Using a robust Digital Learning Framework not only ensures a highly engaging and effective learning experience, but it enables the scalability and sustainability of the learning journey.
- Embedding a consistent evaluation system that enables the learners to confirm and consolidate their knowledge and understanding. It also allows the learning team to systematically track progress and reaction, to continuously improve the experience based on feedback and to make informed decisions.
The learning journey was tested and improved, before being rolled out across the world. It achieved an NPS score of 44.5 based on input from more than 300 learners who completed over 3,300 single learning activities and obtained over 600 learning badges.
Celebrating Success
“The content was created in partnership with Cegos and internal Subject Matter Experts,” says Olga Fatkhi, M&S Learning Manager at JTI. “This helped ensure it is straight to the point, and we can manage content updates when necessary. It is a live tool that evolves as we evolve as a business. Cegos applied a solid digital learning framework to ensure that content and the learning experience is engaging and efficient.”
Not all onboarding programs can be directly transferred to digital delivery in this way. However, where it is possible, the efficiencies and improved engagement are worth the initial investment in time and money.
This outstanding project has been recognized by the Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards. This global program rewards innovation and achievement in the field of Human Capital Management. The group recently announced the project run by JTI and Cegos as winner of a Gold Award in the category of Best Custom Content Learning Development.
If you would like to know more about how Cegos Group can help your company create onboarding programs that make a difference, contact us today.