Totara Learn elevates Depaul’s compliance and training procedures for supporting the homeless

Depaul is a cross border charity, working with people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Depaul employs over 600 staff delivering specialist support to help the most vulnerable in our society in 37 accommodation and community-based services.

The main areas of Depaul service provision are High support accommodation, Health & Rehabilitation, Prevention, Families and Young People, and Housing.

The Challenge

The complex nature of that work means that Depaul needs to provide staff with high-quality compliance training, and because Depaul operates both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the compliance training requirements vary from one jurisdiction to another.

While their previous Learning Management System fulfilled their initial needs, as the scale and complexity of operations increased, having a more streamlined process around compliance training and reporting based on organisational structure became a necessity. The pandemic also fast tracked the vision of Depaul’s digital learning strategy, as the demand from their staff for online training and professional development grew exponentially. After conducting a comprehensive analysis of Depaul’s new learning requirements, Enovation, Depaul’s eLearning Partner, proposed to migrate their system to Totara Learn, a flexible platform with a rich array of functionalities that would support their growing learning and compliance requirements.

The Solution

Deliver great learning, compliance and reporting

With the help of organisation and position frameworks and audience functionality, Depaul’s staff members and volunteers are assigned the training that is relevant to them – a task that was previously done manually and led to a massive duplication of efforts for the L&D team. Totara Learn’s Certification functionality is also used for scheduling recurring training which sends automated reminders to staff members and their managers. With compliance being a strict regulatory and governance requirement, Totara plays an important role in ensuring that Depaul can continue to do its work in a safe manner.

Another key reason to move to Totara Learn was the need for Depaul to decentralise the reporting capability to allow for managers – who are non-administrative users of the platform –  to generate their own reports to track and manage mandatory training of their staff. Thanks to Totara Learn’s flexible reporting functionality paired with its hierarchy feature, automated and timely reports are now generated and accessed by managers, which means that compliance is now the responsibility of all staff members, not only of the L&D team.

By switching to Totara Learn, Depaul can now see records of learning in one unique place. All the learning assigned to a member of staff through programs or certifications are displayed with a summary of the progress, instead of previously having to go into each course to check the completion status.

While the compliance and reporting requirements drove the project, the focus was also on creating a platform that would promote professional development through a blended learning approach. This is where Totara Learn plays a crucial role and acts as a true means of communication across the organisation. Depaul’s ‘Hubdate,’ available from the home page and main menu, displays all organisational news and updates on a weekly basis. It includes courses, online and face-to-face, that members of staff can enrol in to develop their skills in specific areas such as Wellbeing, Personal Effectiveness, Managing People, Interviewing skills, etc.

The Results

Increasing engagement while reducing training costs

By migrating to Totara Learn, Depaul has not only streamlined their learning process from onboarding to compliance training and reporting based on two different jurisdictions but it has also been a key tool in helping them invest in their staff’s development so they can better serve people confronted by social exclusion and homelessness.

The new Totara theme created specifically for Depaul by Totara partner Enovation helps create a seamless user experience and helps learners identify new professional development opportunities. Its responsive design means that staff members who are on the ground can still learn on the go and at their own pace. In addition to providing ongoing support and hosting of their platform, Enovation also provided training to Depaul to help them make the best use of their LMS.

Not only was Totara Learn’s implementation by Enovation successful and well-received across the organisation, it has also contributed to significantly reducing the in-person training time for staff, while keeping training costs to a minimum, overall allowing for more flexible learning opportunities across the organisation.

The streamlining of training mixed with a flexible and powerful solution is having a measurable impact that can be tracked and reported on and, most importantly, it is giving Depaul’s staff members the skills they need to help end homelessness and change the lives of those affected by it.

“Depaul has had to grow quite quickly to support the most vulnerable in our society, through a pandemic and now a cost of living and housing crisis. Totara Learn helps us to support new joiners and existing staff in adapting to the more varied and complex needs of our service users.”

– Sarah Reeves, Director of People and Organisation at Depaul.