KLM drives employee development with innovative learning platform

KLM was founded on October 7, 1919 and is the oldest Dutch airline in the world still operating under its original name. With 30,000 employees, 200 aircraft, 34.1 million annual passengers and 621,000 tonnes of annual cargo, KLM and KLM Cityhopper form the heart of the KLM Group. Through its huge network of 92 European and 70 intercontinental destinations, KLM offers direct connections to major cities and economic centres around the world. KLM is a partner in the SkyTeam Alliance.

The Challenge

KLM actively contributes to creating a collaborative learning culture that encourages continuous learning and ownership. Their focus is to get people in motion. KLM believes it is important that their employees take responsibility and control of their own development. One of the tools to stimulate this is to facilitate a personal development budget (‘sustainable employability budget’) which is part of KLM’s collective labor agreement. This budget can be used for personal development, professional knowledge and career opportunities.

The main challenges to implement this were to:

• Giving access to a large and up-to-date training catalog with a balanced mix of both internal and external courses in all delivery types (including coaching), from over 100 course providers
• Facilitating employee opportunities to spend their Personal Development Budget on external training offerings. By using the advanced Totara Learn report tooling KLM keeps a grip on the total costs of the development budget of their employees
• Shape an intelligent order-management process, including the invoicing and billing process of external training providers
• Be able to enrol in re- and upskilling programs that can contain both in-company courses and external open offerings
• Always contribute to the broader goal of stimulating the learning culture within KLM.

The Solution

Totara partner Bloomville created an intuitive learning environment called KLM MyLearning which consists of two main components that work seamlessly together.

The main component is Totara Learn, the powerful engine enabling a lot of KLM’s requirements. The robustness and secureness of Totara in combination with a MySQL database was chosen to process and secure order requests, orders, order cancellations, learning content, budget data, personal data and billing data. The functionality of Totara Learn has made it possible to create:

• Single-Sign-On for easy accessibility, enabled by a full-automatic daily HR-feed
• An intuitive user interface in KLM ‘look & feel’, to maximize the user experience, attractiveness and familiarity, supporting learning culture and self-directed learning
• Easy access to support via FAQ’s, phone and integrated chat functionality, supported by Bloomville’s Learner Success Center

• A powerful search index with numerous filters, including ratings and a ‘KLM house selection’ of courses and even a ‘request outside catalog’ route for employees
• Flexible and diverse workflow processes for blended use of Personal Development Budget, Company Budget and personal contribution, including notifications
• Employee dashboards with request- and order status, training and program activities and their status

• Manager dashboard with all information of their direct reports, including approval requests, training status, program and certification status and budget use
• Organizational overviews, reports and analytics.

The open nature of Totara Learn has given Bloomville the opportunity to extend its code base with innovative and popular extensions. Bloomville added:

• A budget-feed that enables KLM to assign personal development budget to employees
• A personal budget meter which gives an employee (and their manager) a real-time view of the use of their personal development budget, in graphical and numerical formats
• An intelligent order-management process, including the invoicing and billing process of external training providers, giving KLM complete financial insight and control
• Being able to enrol in re- and upskilling programs that can contain both in-company courses and external open offerings

• A training evaluation plugin that also ensures that 5 star-ratings are shown in the portal
• A payment plugin, iDeal/PayPal, which enables employees to pay part of the course costs themselves, for instance if personal budget is not sufficient
• Extensions on existing reports as well as making new ones.

The second main component is Bloomville’s external content solution ‘Learningville®’. This addition to Totara Learn is 24/7 harvesting the training supply of over 300 major Dutch vendors of training and coaching. It currently has around 50,000 learning offerings and is expanding every month. In Learningville® customers like KLM can easily decide which training they want to emphasise for their employees. And actual prices are calculated automatically and show in the portal, taking into account the specific vendor discounts.

Results

The estimated work/cost-savings realised by automating these financial processes with the features of Totara are significant, freeing up resources. The number of users has increased 10% to over 30,000 since go-live in 2020. Besides that, KLM and Bloomville lowered the threshold for employees to invest in their personal development: already several thousand bookings are made on external courses with the personal development budget. To stimulate development of their employees and shape a learning culture in the organization, KLM has earmarked several million euros for future personal development.

The number of available external courses runs to almost 7,000 across instructor led, virtual, elearning, coaching, blended, seminars and many more. For example, already 500 IT employees have participated in a KLM-specific upskill & reskill program.

The average discount savings on the external training offer as a result of collective procurement by Bloomville varies between 10-35%. The solution provided also detailed insights in the status and cost overview of booked and billed trainings for KLM.

“The introduction of MyLearning has boosted employees’ sustainable employability and health, supported through the personal budget that KLM provides. MyLearning is also used by the IT-department to facilitate learning paths for the re- and upskilling programs.”

– Annelies Leveling, Vice President KLM Learning & Development