How an electronics corporation globalized, modernized, and simplified eLearning production

TDK’s scale and global reach present obvious challenges from an L&D perspective. The company’s learning programs must cover a wide range of industries, with over 100,000 employees in varied roles producing and bringing a wide range of products to market.

On top of this is a multilingual dimension—the business has 10 core languages in which global training material may appear. Each of the core languages is used in one or more regional divisions and is created by different local authoring teams.

While seeking a new solution for its eLearning authoring process, TDK also sought a more ambitious approach to its eLearning courses. Until recently, the team had relied on non-interactive formats, such as recording voiceovers for slideshow presentations. TDK also wanted to update its authoring capability to take full advantage of its new learning management system (LMS).

TDK set up an international team to search for an eLearning authoring tool that answered all of these challenges while offering a modern and user-friendly interface, the ability to create quality content quickly, and robust customer support. The team selected Gomo and began to work with the tool in October 2019.

Key Gomo features helped TDK simplify many of the complexities its global businesses face. The ability to create one digital learning course in multiple languages has made the delivery of globally (and regionally) relevant content considerably simpler. Similarly, Gomo’s multi-device authoring ensures that training works perfectly on mobile devices. This is essential at TDK, as device habits vary greatly from region to region or job to job.

Gomo’s support for display conditions and branching paths through the learning are also particularly important to the team, as even within specific languages there are small regional differences in information to account for. By setting variables in response to user choices, Gomo is able to pack these differences alongside the device and language variations in a single file, thereby simplifying quality assurance, the delivery of the course, and the management of the course catalog on the LMS.

Since rolling out their new content process in November 2019, TDK has consistently experienced better performance from courses authored by local teams using Gomo. Alongside a popular ‘History of TDK’ course used in the onboarding process, a series of ‘Getting to Know’ courses is helping to promote understanding of the different business and diverse cultural norms in the wider organization.

Use of the tool is gaining momentum as a result of these early successes, with the core HR team at TDK being contacted by a growing number of corporate departments and subsidiaries who want to become more actively involved in the creation of new eLearning content.

As the TDK team has scaled up their efforts to the different local teams, they have had to find ways of easily onboarding new authors with Gomo. Fortunately, Gomo was already in the process of creating the Gomo Academy, a microlearning portal that provides self-service information on how to use the tool.

Scaling eLearning from 2,000 to over 15,000 learners in a year

Within a month of rolling out the new corporate LMS, 2,000 employees were consuming Gomo-authored content on the platform. By the close of 2020, the team had started or completed the production of 140 eLearning courses. By the end of 2021, more than 15,000 employees will have access to content as the localization process continues.