BNP Paribas Fortis is one of the leading banks in Belgium. Sven Joris, Learning & Development Advisor at BNP Paribas Fortis, explains that five strategic pillars form the basis for the further development of the bank. These pillars relate, among other things, to sustainability, service provision, investing in employees, and financial growth.
Learning & Development obviously has everything to do with investing in employees. In this connection, all internal training courses of BNP Paribas Fortis – both digital and classroom-based – are linked to one or more of those pillars. ‘This ensures that the participants are well aware that the objective of the training course is connected with the bank’s strategy,’ Sven Joris explains.
The L&D Department has around 30 employees. In order to work more efficiently, they were looking for a tool that allows them to create digital content relatively quickly. Coincidentally, at that time, there was an event of Stimulearning where the 100 best tools for learning were presented. ‘We went there with four colleagues and saw a lot of tools. From those we put together a top ten, which we presented to the entire L&D team,’ Sven Joris says. FLOWSPARKS emerged as the winner.’
L&D’s five-strong Digital Learning Experience team in particular is focusing on the implementation of FLOWSPARKS . They are helping the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) of other departments to create their own e-Learning modules. They do this by analysing which templates are best used to achieve the proposed learning objectives. Also, they constantly monitor the educational robustness of the modules. For the rest, the teams of other departments are given a fair degree of autonomy when creating e-Learning, and this yields surprisingly high-quality results. The implementation went smoothly, and this can be seen in the figures. After just nine months, 18 different departments have already created content with FLOWSPARKS and 60 different modules have already been made.
L&D employees
colleagues to educate
online modules
‘At the moment we actually see five main purposes for which FLOWSPARKS is being used,’ Sven Joris says. ‘We mainly use it to shape learning pathways. A fun application of this is the quiz module with a wide variety of questions, such as multiple-choice questions, drag-and-drop, clicking photos, etc. We also use the video module for learning pathways. What’s great about this is that in longer videos you can insert breaks to ask specific questions and involve participants in the course material in an interactive manner.’
Another important purpose for which BNP Paribas Fortis uses FLOWSPARKS are the ‘Digital Snacks’. These are very short digital training courses, e.g. on the occasion of lectures by external speakers. FLOWSPARKS is also used to create fully-fledged e-Learning modules and to store information. It allows you to transfer all information about a particular theme to a THEMEPAGE. ‘That’s handy,’ Sven Joris explains. ‘It allows you to upload a particular document which is then instantly live, without having to update your LMS (Learning Management System). That saves a lot of time.’
Another useful application of FLOWSPARKS is for making level assessments. For example, the Global Security Department asked to sound out employees about their cyber security knowledge. Employees were then tested through a survey in the form of an e-Learning module. With these results, the security department knew exactly which points still required attention and where.
FLOWSPARKS has a short learning curve. At first, it may seem difficult because, after all, it is a software platform, but once you have mastered the basic techniques, you can start playing with it. It’s also easy to explain. The user-friendliness of FLOWSPARKS gives the other departments a certain degree of autonomy to create their own modules.
BNP Paribas Fortis definitely sees time-to-market as a major advantage of FLOWSPARKS . ‘We see that ideas are developed much more quickly. The Learning Formats & SMART Templates are very easy to use,’ Sven Joris says. ‘The smooth way in which FLOWSPARKS handles languages saves a huge amount of time.’ And they see the responsiveness as a major advantage: it makes the modules easy to follow on a tablet or smartphone.
‘FLOWSPARKS also has a short learning curve. At first it may seem difficult because, after all, it is a computer system, but once you have mastered the basic techniques, you can start playing with it,’ Sven Joris continues. ‘It is also easy to explain. The user-friendliness of FLOWSPARKS gives the other departments a certain degree of autonomy to create their own modules.’ At BNP Paribas Fortis, they are also very enthusiastic about the ease with which FLOWSPARKS can be integrated into other tools. ‘We work with SCORM connectors (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) so that one program can communicate with another without having to exchange a lot of data. If you update something in FLOWSPARKS that has already been published in the LMS, the content is updated immediately. We loved it.’
