About Wilbert Plastic Services
Wilbert Plastic Services is a premier thermoforming and injection molding company, and one of the top 25 plastic producers in North America. They have six manufacturing locations throughout the United States, as well as a corporate office and an engineering office.
The training challenge
Wilbert Plastic Services specialize in a particular, fixed specialty, where finding employees with an extensive background is not easy.
That being said, and since trained employees in the industry are as rare as a cat in the sea, Wilbert decided to train their existing workforce from the ground up.
Amelia Keown, who oversees employee training at Wilbert Plastic Services, addressed the issue: “To be honest, there are very few offering the type of training we need for our employees. And since we had a hard time finding those who have the training in their background, we had determined that we needed to train our own employees.”
They began to explore their options.
At first, they started uploading video material while engaging in some internal, offline instructor-led training as well. As it turned out, it didn’t work out due to two principal challenges:
- First, Wilbert needed an easy way to monitor training at a glance, so they could track and measure their employees’ development.
- Second, it’s not the 80s anymore, and the company was looking for a way to digitize and upload their training so employees could access it anytime, anyplace. But this was not their own idea,
“In reality, that was the most common request from our employees. Previously, they were required to be at one of our facilities, in an office, or in a training room to access their training. By moving to TalentLMS, we were able to record all of our training in one location, as well as have that training available to all our employees on their own home computer, phone, tablet, or wherever they wanted to be.”
Amelia recalls
That was the moment when Wilbert Plastic Services started looking for a cloud LMS solution.
Why Wilbert Plastic Services chose TalentLMS
Wilbert researched extensively before they decided that TalentLMS was the real deal for them. When asked why they chose it among other alternatives, it all came down to five key points:
- TalentLMS is a cloud service, which means there’s no maintenance and employees can access their training from anywhere in the world.
- Before they invested in online training, Wilbert used to work a lot with offline, classroom training. TalentLMS gave them the opportunity to move their whole class online and work with instructor-led training in a completely digital environment via webinars and ILT units.
- The company works with diverse forms of training, and their file types vary. The fact that TalentLMS supports documents of almost any nature has helped them focus on course development as opposed to wasting time converting files. At the end of the day, it’s all about learning, right?
- To assess employees, Wilbert uses tests and quizzes. What they loved about TalentLMS is the variety of assessment types the platform offers, so instructors can evaluate their learners’ knowledge.
- Apart from the competitive pricing, the flexible price structure amazed Wilbert. What do we mean by “pricing structure”?
“We have about 1,300 employees, but that doesn’t mean all 1,300 were going to be using it at one time. So, we wanted a structure where we could pay by usage each month and that could fluctuate depending on what we had going on in our company. And TalentLMS was able to give us that pricing structure for the employees that we needed.”
Amelia explains
The results
After almost a year of using TalentLMS, Amelia has created WilbertU — Wilbert’s online employee training program. And Amelia says that 95% of their workforce has started participating in training.
Being experienced users of the platform, they’ve leveraged every tool. One of them is the ability to categorize learners in groups. This allows them to deliver different training for each job position, or even for each company facility. And they have plenty.
Additionally, the HR department will be accessing test reports, to pull up a report for each employee and see what percentage of their training they’ve completed and what they’ve learned.
Amelia adds that this will give the company some clear insights they can use for their next performance reviews: “A portion of our employees’ performance review will be based on their training after we see how much individuals are participating and how much they’re learning.”
But online training with TalentLMS hasn’t only been beneficial for the organization; it’s helped employees, too. Workers at Wilbert Plastic Services who receive extra training are more likely to be offered an internal promotion — a best-case scenario that’s been happening for quite some time now in the company.
As for the future?
The company’s expecting more stuff to come in, and they plan to use TalentLMS for onboarding purposes:
“We’ve already used TalentLMS for our new hires’ orientation and they’re using TalentLMS as soon as they start working with us.”
An excellent, heart-warming way to welcome them into the Wilbert Plastic Services family!
