Insurance. It’s a daunting industry full of ins, outs, and gray areas. And it’s something that most people hope they never have to think too much about.
But around here, we’re no strangers to having difficult conversations. In fact, we lean into them. And we think the best way to understand learning and development in an industry that, frankly, could use a little bit more of it, is to ask an expert.
So, we sat down to talk shop with Brittany Graman, Learning & Development Specialist at Gibson, an agency of advisors and consultants in the employee benefits and insurance space. We were introduced to Gibson back in 2020 when they were looking for a training solution and landed on our doorstep!
The challenge
Gibson has been around the block for a while—they’ve been in business for nearly 100 years. So, it’s no big surprise that they’ve gone through their fair share of onboarding and training processes over the years. Over the course of decades, managers and team leaders began to cherry-pick onboarding processes, training materials, and ongoing training opportunities to use or push to the wayside. This resulted in an employee training experience that was pretty inconsistent.
“A lot of our managers had been here for years and years, so they each had their own way of doing things,” Brittany said. As a new hire, the onboarding experience varied greatly from one manager to the next depending on their approach to training. Some departments would deliver a very hands-on experience, while others relied on the learner to speak up when they identified their own knowledge gaps.
Brittany set out to change that. “It started out as really wanting to put a focus on new hire training and onboarding and doing that consistently whenever we had a new hire come in,” she said.
They also wanted a training system that would help tame the mess of information that had accumulated over the years and was housed in various corners of their shared drive, on their intranet, or in the minds of more seasoned employees.
Essentially, Gibson wanted training software that could also become a library of sorts, “so that it wasn’t a scavenger hunt looking for something that’s going to take 20 minutes to find because it could be in 3,000 different places.”
They also wanted to be able to deliver targeted training to their 150+ employees, some of whom joined Gibson with little to no industry knowledge or experience. Ongoing training was ad-hoc, generally covering overarching professional development topics in webinar or group training settings. The experience didn’t account for personalized training needs very well.
In the end, Gibson’s decision to look into something like Lessonly by Seismic was threefold—how could they deliver training and development more consistently and meaningfully than what they’ve done in the past? How could they do it in a way that drills down and targets specific people with what they need? And, how could they help their employees find information and training resources easier?
The partnership
Brittany always says, “It takes a village to raise a new hire.” Well, we feel honored that we’ve been a part of Gibson’s village since October 2020. In less than a year, Gibson has created a consistent, easily-accessible onboarding process in Lessonly by Seismic.
But, why exactly did Gibson choose Lessonly by Seismic, you ask?
After a long due-diligence process, Brittany said that Lessonly was the happy medium for them, balancing user-friendliness with the ability to customize just enough. “It was like the Goldilocks,” she said. “It’s not too much, not too little, it’s just right.”
“There were a lot of systems that I looked at, and I felt like I needed a degree in instructional design or eLearning to know where to start,” Brittany said. That wasn’t the case with Lessonly, where she often takes pre-built templates from Lessonly University and “Gibsonizes them.”
In fact, she’s done that with about 15-20 onboarding lessons that every single Gibson new hire walks through—covering things like team structures, payroll FAQs, technology setup, and a general foundation of what Gibson is all about. From there, managers and team leaders execute personalized training plans specific to their practice areas, simply because the industry know-how needed to be successful in the employee benefits division varies so greatly from the property and casualty side of things.
The results
“We have metrics and scorecards for each of our teams,” Brittany said. “But more than anything, we’re looking at employee satisfaction in the training experience.”
She said that, with Lessonly, “Employees feel like they’ve been trained and have the tools and resources they need now.” And that, my friends, is what it’s really all about.
Onboard 62% faster
Lessonly by Seismic helps employees get up-to-speed and keep them there. Interested in trying out Lessonly for yourself? Kick-off your new onboarding experience with a demo today!
