Waterloo’s Axonify introduces Employee Knowledge Platform to improve workplace learning

Waterloo-based corporate learning innovator Axonify has unveiled the evolution of its eLearning solution, a full-scale Employee Knowledge Platform designed to help companies solve the challenge of workplace employee knowledge.

If you think of the last “workplace training” experience you sat through, it might have looked like one of those poorly produced case studies shot and edited during the 1990s.

Things are different today.

“Our platform makes employees smarter so that they can perform better,” says Axonify CEO Carol Leaman. “It’s no longer just about having a way to deliver content more effectively to a large group of people. With Axonify, every one of our customers can ensure their employees get the individual knowledge they need, right at the point they need it. We sustain it, grow it, allow them to share it, capture how they apply it and we measure the outcomes. Axonify is transforming corporate knowledge itself—going way beyond just eLearning.”

Leaman implies that Axonify is almost leaving the category of eLearning behind and moving into a broader category of workplace knowledge, supported by a patent-pending Learning Model built on principles of brain science, adaptive learning, microlearning and gamification that feeds a spacing algorithm to optimize knowledge growth and retention.

What sets the platform apart from traditional eLearning, aside from erasing the boundary between the corporation and its previously separate learning division, is that progress can be measured through the impact of knowledge growth on employee behaviour and business results.

Spending on corporate learning in the United States grew to $70 billion last year, according to the Forbes 2014 Corporate Learning factbook, a 15% increase over 2013, and over $130 billion worldwide.

Over 70% of companies in the U.S. cite “capability gaps” as one of their five primary challenges, adding that for most companies it takes 3-5 years to make an employee fully productive.

Parallel to the increase in investment in corporate learning, a technological revolution has also occurred, with the rise of eLearning, in-house online communication channels, and MOOCs.

For advanced companies, as much as 18% of their corporate training is delivered through a mobile device.

Combine employee “capability gaps” with loss of revenue to safety incidents, inadequate customer service or poor job performance due to lack of training, and it all spells significant losses for companies running into millions each year.

Axonify’s eLearning platform is already in use by Walmart, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, the John Hancock Group of Funds and Bloomingdale’s.

“Axonify is giving us the ability to educate associates, and demonstrate changes in behavior to really make a safe environment,” says Bloomingdale’s Vice President of Loss Prevention and Risk Management, Chad McIntosh. “We’ve had a lot of success with the program and, in the process, it has saved our organization $2.2 million this past year alone.”

Axonify’s new Employee Knowledge Platform is already in-market with 80 customers who have received it as part of an upgrade.

The platform is priced per user and also depends on what software package level a company chooses.