GCA expands training by 500% whilst dramatically cutting member training costs

The Garden Centre Association (GCA) was established in 1966 to act as a forum and catalyst for communication between its members from the garden retail and supplier communities. Today, there are over 205 full (garden centre) members and 152 associate (supplier) members, who all benefit from exchanging ideas and sharing experiences with like-minded individuals. The GCA’s mission is to connect the best garden centres in the UK, to inspire and support them to grow and adapt.

The challenge

Due to the seasonality of the industry, many of GCA’s full members recruit temporary staff, including those where English isn’t their first language, to help out during the busier times of the year. However, as these seasonal staff are only employed for a short period of time, more often than not they will have little or no knowledge and experience and therefore lack even basic training on the plants and products their garden centre sells.

Due to the costs of training (which are often higher in this industry as horticulture training is more specialised), a lot of smaller garden centre members weren’t able to provide their employees with adequate training and as a result, the GCA proposed to create a centralised training portal that can be customised to accommodate various languages and accessed by all members’ employees to provide them with consistent and easily accessible training.

The solution

Totara Learn provides the perfect solution for the challenges GCA faced, especially as each of member required their own training space within the site, which is provided by Totara’s multi-tenancy feature. The GCA and our members benefit from:

• A secure and robust platform
• Ease of use for learners and administrators
• The ability to change the default language at user level, ensuring that the system is available to all users, regardless of their native language
• Reporting capabilities that enable admins to measure learner activity and progress
• Improved user experience to bring people back to the learning programme time and again

A scalable LMS that delivers centralised, standardised, reliable, and consistent training to learners across the membership group

As well as horticulture and customer service, health & safety and food safety training is also essential for GCA members, as is the ability to retake them periodically. The certification programs which make it easy and hassle-free for them to ensure that their staff stay up to date with their compliance training.

Many members also use programs to create bespoke training plans for their new employees, dependent on what area of the business they will be working in. This has proved to have been an important feature as it provides the employee with a clearly defined set of courses that they must complete and enables the business to monitor their progress and development.

The result

Even before the system was launched, 10 members, representing 25 garden centres, agreed to join GROW based on the concept alone, reaffirming the need and desire to change the way that they trained their employees. GROW has increased membership numbers by 500% and now has 119 garden centres from 48 members and over 11,000 UK-based garden centre employees benefitting from Hubken’s Totara Learn online training platform.

Through their system, the GCA is able to use the extensive knowledge of subject matter experts from within their membership to create bespoke content and produce courses that are specific to the various issues their industry and clients are facing. Using its member’s expert knowledge, even the most complex of subjects can be brought to life with stimulating and engaging content that learners not only respond to, but most importantly, remember.

As their Totara site ensures that all the training is centralised, standardised and consistent, it allows easy and full access to an entire suite of courses that are easy for learners to digest. Moreover, the fact that the system is always available and accessible by any device, means the GCA’s member’s employees are able to learn at their own pace and at a time that is convenient for them. This has helped ensure that high numbers of garden centre staff are being trained in compulsory modules. This compulsory training is also being completed much more quickly as the online learning process means staff no longer have to wait for trainer-led courses to begin.

GROW is provided as a subscription to GCA members, meaning training costs are much more stable and represent outstanding value for money. Members have seen dramatic savings as they’ve moved away from traditional face-to-face training. Some have seen a 90% drop in the cost of training since the introduction of GROW, along with experiencing a significantly reduced operational impact on the business as staff no longer spend so much time away from their usual duties.

Totara’s powerful reporting functions allow individual garden centres to easily monitor training records and automate refresher training before it’s due. GCA members report that it is not uncommon to have 100% employee participation in online training.

Moving forward, there is plenty of scope for future growth. As well as generating plenty of interest from their UK-based members, the GCA have also been in discussions with their Canadian counterparts to provide access to the LMS for their members – despite there being several Canada-based LMS providers!