The latest e-learning technology is having a major positive impact in the financial services industry (just like it is in many others), saving training departments money, reducing time to competency, and improving learning outcomes. Here we look at how Day One Technologies in Yorkshire is transforming mortgage training at a major high street bank.
We all know that e-learning is a multi-billion pound industry these days, with revenues set to rise as more corporations and companies around the globe tune in to the fact that their millennial workforce has brains that are hard-wired to accept information delivered in this format. What’s also obvious is that e-learning designers need to work harder to create stories, scenarios, games and simulations that will challenge and absorb this generation, which has famously shorter attention spans and a preference for authenticity.
Day One Technologies, an e-learning consultancy from Yorkshire, has been creating ‘technology-enhanced learning environments’ for the last 10 years, and has an impressive line-up of clients who include Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Standard Life.
At Learning Light we reviewed some of Day One’s solutions in 2012 and had this to say about them then: ‘This is as about as realistic and as immersive as you can get’, it is an ‘exemplar of a modern, effective systems training solution, which really impresses’.
Training Solutions for Major Clients
Fast-forward to 2016 and we’ve taken another look at what Day One are up to – going strong with new clients such as ghd, Virtual College, The Internet Society, TSB and The Co-operative Bank.
Day One’s design team are still devising new ways to delight their customers and provide interesting, effective e-learning environments.
Elaine Teal, Day One’s Learning director, told us about a recent solution for a major high-street bank that was having difficulties with providing ‘hands-on’ training for their mortgage advisors. Without a safe, realistic environment in which to practise the end-to-end process, they were finding the learner experience was poor ,‘time-to-competence’ was too long (and therefore too costly), and there were concerns over compliance.
Mortgage Training Innovation
In 3 months, Day One developed a Mortgage Simulator, which has now been rolled-out to 600 branches throughout the UK. But this is a simulator with a difference. Working with the Bank’s learning designers, Day One came to understand that what would really make a difference to managers, trainers, trainees (and, ultimately, customers) would be a facility whereby trainees could practise the whole mortgage interview – not just the bit (important though it is) on the MSP Mortgage software.
Day One looked at the whole interview and developed roleplay features for a second trainee (or an assessor) to play the part of a Bank customer at the branch. Now trainees can practise the entire process, starting with shaking the hand of the customer as they enter the interview room, talking to the customer to understand their needs, entering all the details in a simulation of the MSP system, printing out a facsimile of the completed mortgage documentation, ensuring the customer understands and is happy about the reasons for the mortgage recommendation, and shaking their hand again as they leave with their mortgage offer – or not, if that’s the way the simulation goes.
Great Results
Day One’s clients at the Bank have been amazed at the creativity behind the mortgage training solutions and the way in which they have been driven to provide real value.
Teal told us that the Bank’s Learning Manager quipped that working with Day One had been a ‘stakeholder’s utopia’, and ‘as different to the previous solution as night and day’!
And finally – a word from Day One’s technical director Andy Cottier when talking about the workplace ethos at Day One, ‘This is what interests us and makes us want to come to work – the creative and technical challenges, and the satisfaction of nailing the brief’.
For more information look at Day One’s Mortgage Simulator case study.
