Red Hat chooses Totara Learn to support its open source ethos

Open source powers innovation through community and shared experiences

Red Hat is a leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

The Challenge

Five years ago, Red Hat’s learning management system was proprietary and closed. All of the organization’s learning platforms existed as islands with limited integration and provided a mediocre user experience. The organization’s challenge was three-fold:

• Create a great user experience for learners.
• Integrate multiple siloed platforms to a create frictionless learner journey.
• Maintain a user-centered approach while improving alignment to the needs of the business.

The Solution

Over the past five years, Red Hat has been on a journey to meet the goals of both users and the organization.  Users were demanding frictionless user experiences and flexibility to own their own development and the organization is motivated to close critical skills gaps.  The Red Hat team has embraced the open-source ethos and upped their support of the organization’s needs with Totara at the center of their strategy.

• They’ve integrated their disparate learning platforms to enable the free exchange of data
• They’ve created workflows that bridge multiple systems to create a superior user experience
• They’ve implemented new learning pathways to address critical employees transitions and skills development.

Red Hat’s learning ecosystem consists of more than just an LMS. Red Hat leverages content from third-party libraries, user-generated video content, virtual classroom tools for delivering online classes, and virtualized labs. Red Hat took a two-stage approach to integrating these platforms.  First, they implemented Totara as the hub in of their ecosystem. As the hub, Totara is the system of truth for data across these systems which allows Red Hat to leverage Totara’s robust reporting capability. Second, Red Hat built a learning experience platform (LXP).  This new functionality creates seamless user journeys across these platforms.

On the other hand, to meet the skills and talent needs of the organization, Red Hat has embraced the tools in Totara create powerful learning journeys.

• Dashboards are used to create personalize homepages
• Programs are leveraged to create robust curricula.
• Audiences are used to auto-enroll learners from one program to the next to create progressive learning paths for key transitions like new manager development and sales onboarding.

While Red Hat is still very much on a journey, they’ve made significant strides toward maturing their learning culture over the past five years.  They’ve understood that this required moving forward on multiple fronts – back-end integrations, adding a learning experience platform (LXP) and adding more structure and rigor to development paths – and take great strides toward both creating a more compelling proposition for employees and meeting the skills development needs of the organization.

“At Red Hat our employees are as important as our products for our success in the marketplace. Therefore, we invest heavily in the ongoing training and development of our employees. Totara is at the centre of the learning ecosystem to power that employee development.” – Tesh Patel,  Director of Learning Platforms at Red Hat

The Results:

• Red Hat aggregated data from 4-5 systems with Totara for simplified and more powerful reporting
• Red Hat integrated access to 4 content systems into a single interface to simplify the user experience.
• Red Hat has set up countless programs around key learning journeys and records thousands of completions every year,
• Red has set up complex audiences to enable personalized learning journeys based on data new hires, hiring and promotion to management, sales onboarding, developing technical sales specialists and many others.

“Red Hat is not only an open source software company but our core culture exudes open collaboration. Deploying Totara Learn was a huge step in moving to an open LMS platform. As we thought about the next chapter in our journey, we knew we needed to create an open learning ecosystem. A system that would allow us to continue to mold the learner experience to our unique needs and a platform that would mask the complexity of the many Learning tools we use to craft a rich learning experience. That was the inception of the Red Hat University and we were fortunate to find a partner that was able to leverage the openness of Totara Learn’s API, and help us build an open learning experience platform that will continue to deliver value to the business.”