Epping Forest District Council empowers staff to serve their community with the LMS

Use case: Employee Training, Compliance Training, Leadership Training, Personal Development, Customer Service, Volunteer Training, Instructor-led Training
Industry: Government

Epping Forest District Council is a medium-sized, local authority in West Essex, bordering on greater London. At Epping Forest their mission is to work together to serve their community. They ensure that their customers are at the heart of everything they do and they “will focus on the things that matter the most to local people.” In continued effort to hold this mission true, Epping Forest selected Litmos Training and Litmos Content as their primary route for training.

In 2021, Epping Forest was experiencing training issues across the entire organization. “Compliance training was a real headache to keep track of and report on. Learning and development activity was communicated over many different channels, meaning it was easy for employees to miss out on opportunities. We found it hard to get managers to be accountable for their teams’ training completion. We found it challenging to get employees involved in personal development. Our councilors wanted more access to learning and in L&D we had to have surveys developed for us,” says Julie Dixon, Learning & Talent Business Partner, People Team. Thankfully, one of her colleagues, the Head of People, recommended the Litmos LMS as she had used it in a previous organization.

With 580 employees plus 50 councilors, Epping Forest began using Litmos for their compliance eLearning including health and safety, GDPR, safeguarding, and more. Now however, they use it for everything, including leadership development, personal development, customer service, volunteers, and instructor-led sessions. Additionally, they are in the process of building out a councilor-specific portion of the LMS that will involve a learning needs assessment for what councilors require in their role, including an onboarding program for new councilors. Currently a training program for councilors exists outside of the LMS. In the upcoming months, the learning and development team will work together to review what topics may be moved into Litmos Training. In addition to the required curriculum, Epping Forest will be utilizing the “Teams” feature to provide all the Litmos Content personal development courses to their councilors as many of them have requested courses on subjects such as Mental Health Awareness.

In addition to the LMS, Epping Forest also utilizes Litmos training courses. By utilizing the prebuilt, off-the-shelf content, they have saved many weeks per course that previously would have been spent gathering the content and building out the course.

With Litmos training content, “we have been able to open up personal development for all employees, and use the content to add to preexisting pathways,” states Dixon.

Since implementing the Litmos LMS and online training courses, Epping Forest has seen great improvement in their training processes. They currently experience almost 90% engagement and their compliance training completion rates have increased with Safeguarding compliance now at 94% and Health and Safety now at 80% compliance. When discussing training goals, Dixon notes that “our interest from the rest of the business to develop their own area learning paths has exceeded our initial target and our target to engage with councilors has been achieved.”

When asked about the organization’s next steps and goals related to training, Dixon says “we aim to host all Corporate Learning and Development on the system by the end of 2022. We also encourage our Service areas to use Litmos for their own team’s training. During 2022 and 2023 we will be building career pathways which will open up routes for all our employees to develop vertically and horizontally across the organization.” They plan to grow their engagement levels to 100% and begin building career pathways starting with manager and leadership development.