Liliana Meneses, Educational Strategy and Development Manager at Banco Santander gave us a few minutes for this interview, to explain some of the key factors that have led to the successful collaboration between Netex and Santander Mexico.
Liliana, How has the training school of Santander México evolved?
We come from the Serfín tradition in which a great working group made many efforts in the training field. Thanks to that, Santander was granted the school licence.
With the Serfín-Santander merger, we set up a workspace in a new line: e-learning.
Our tradition was to carry out on-site training on a national level –a quite expensive display. E-learning offered us the possibility to create massive training programmes which would reach each one of Santander employees wherever they were.
After twelve years evolving in the field of self-paced learning, we also went for collaboration. Blended learning started to be a more recurrent need each day. Remote training, but including trainers and tutors in real-time.
Lastly, we want to provide training wherever and whenever you wish. Using the new technologies of smartphones and tablets to reach further than computers in the workplace can do.
Which are the main training challenges for Santander Mexico?
Dynamism is very important for us. We have to be constantly updating the training we develop. People must have in their hands updated data as soon as possible.
Why did you decide to collaborate with Netex?
One day we saw the learningCoffee format and we found it quite interesting. We liked the metaphor “Time for a coffee, time for learning”.
With just one content you can achieve very specific training objectives. That was the trend we wanted to follow and that’s why we liked it so much.
…because before most courses were multimedia…
Yes, we experienced an evolution in the courses format.
At the beginning, content was mainly focused on text-image and page-flipping. Later on, we went for a multimedia-based format, where Flash, audio and video resources were part of the story.
But over time we realised that students weren’t interested at all. On-screen characters and games finally went out of fashion. We considered that it had also been superseded.
And now that you are using learningCoffee, which benefits has it brought you?
learningCoffee has turned out to be very suitable for our training needs. It provides us agility, reduces the time needed for training and makes content updating more dynamic.
Our most complex internal customer is the business customer, who stands up in front of the final customer. We did a pilot with this format and it was very well received. The possibility of viewing all the information about a banking product within one content was very engaging. Besides, training was performed in about 30 or 40 minutes, and that has been a huge difference because our previous courses used to last around 2 to 4 hours.
Another of our employees’ needs is training in motion. As learningCoffee is designed according to “responsive-design” criteria, we’ve been able to take training even to their smartphones.
How many people are being trained with learningCoffee?
After the first pilots, we decided to apply this format to our regulations courses, which are mandatory and annual. Thanks to this format we are reaching a population of 16,000 students.
Which are the bank’s next training challenges?
We’re looking for easy-to-use tools which allow us to develop training internally in a quick way.
We were used to working with applications for creating content which had to be necessarily installed in our computers. We want to work in the Cloud, regardless of where we are, “access, create and deliver”. We like learningMaker because it has those characteristics.
Besides, we’ve finished the learningApp pilot and we’d like to follow up the project in 2014 within the Mobile Learning project.
Santander’s Human Resources and Training Department is ready for these initiatives to be maintained, developed and boosted.
Considering that you work with many providers, which are the differences you find with Netex?
What we like the best is that you are innovative, up to date on current trends of remote training, and there lies the difference.
There are many other companies which haven’t adapted yet to HTML5, which have no information about mobile learning, or which aren’t up to date about eXperience Api.
There is where we see the differences. We share with Netex the constant search for leading technologies. After so many years working in this training business, we hadn’t seen in a long time a provider able to surprise us, to teach us things we didn’t know.
That’s why we’re interested in working hand in hand with Netex. We share the same view.
If you enjoyed this interview, you may be interested to see our Case study with Banco Santander México
