It was perhaps the worst of times to launch a new employee training programme. Brimming with optimism, Hong Kong-based regional conglomerate Jardine Matheson had just launched the Jardines Digital, IT and Innovation Academy (JDIIA) with global learning provider Hyper Island. This marked the first time in the group’s 188-year history where it had undertaken a group-wide initiative to provide learning and development (L&D) experiences en masse to its diverse business units.
The scope of the project was ambitious, considering that Jardines operates as a decentralised organisation, with over 464,000 employees across the world covering industries ranging from real estate to groceries to vehicle distribution. Inevitably, people from each of the different business units across different markets bring with them different beliefs and approaches to doing things.
As such, executive chairman Benjamin Keswick has set a common goal for the employees via the JDIIA. They are to be equipped with the right skills and technological competencies to remain relevant and competitive in a disrupted digital economy. For the first run in 2019, 240 employees across 15 business units from nine countries were enrolled.
“There is no doubt that economic and demographic shifts are putting additional pressure on the workforces of today,” says Peter Attfield, chief talent and learning officer of Jardine Matheson, which dates its history back to the earliest days of European trade in Hong Kong. “We are focusing on upskilling and re-skilling at scale which is necessary for our people in Jardine Matheson to thrive in a rapidly changing world.”
Attfield explains that Hyper Island was selected as Jardines’ delivery partner because of its strong industry reputation, as attested by other chief learning officers at other companies. “In the whole area of digital and innovation-related training, [Hyper Island’s] name was mentioned a number of times,” he tells The Edge Singapore. The fact that it is a global organisation with a strong focus in Asia — a similar profile to that of Jardine’s — was also a key selling point.
The process of designing the curriculum itself reflected Hyper Island’s creative ethos. At Attfield’s behest, Hyper Island organised a “playdate” for the chief digital officers of Jardines’ various business units. Participants explored Hyper Island’s course catalogue to develop a bespoke curriculum, followed by an intensive roleplay where each had to defend their selection as the managing director of their business unit. Besides ensuring course selections were suitably “pressure-tested”, it also helped gain the buy-in of Jardines’ disparate business units.
Out of Hyper Island’s full catalogue of 40 courses, six were ultimately chosen for the programme pilot out of an initial shortlist of eight to 10. These included data-driven decision-making, developing technology prototypes, digital acceleration masterclass, digital business agility, digital marketing & growth hacking and human-centred design.
The tough gets going
Covid-19, however, threatened to render these lofty aspirations dead in the water. The plan was initially to conduct the programme through a mixture of blended in-person and online learning. However, as the coronavirus saw the rapid imposition of lockdown measures worldwide, the Hyper Island team found itself with just two weeks to convert the entire programme into a pure online experience, which seemingly jeopardised its human-centric approach to learning.
Various prior studies have hinted at the less than ideal effectiveness of online learning. For instance, according to Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, feedback surveys from 118 higher education providers found that between a third and half of the students were unhappy with online learning. Students complained that online lessons resulted in a “lack of engagement” and isolation from their peers, among other gripes. In particular, students missed informal interaction with instructors before or after classes when studying face-to-face.
Hyper Island, which positions itself as a creative business school, is not content to deliver a stopgap solution for this landmark initiative. Founded in 1996 to reinvent the “linear and fixed way of teaching” used in traditional schools, its co-founder Jonathan Briggs designed new formats such as gamified learning journeys to help students “learn by doing”. It was this DNA of innovation that subsequently shaped Hyper Island’s response to the Covid-19 challenge.
“We came together and hustled to innovate the format of experiences, where all face-to-face learning journeys were not ‘translated from offline to online’ but completely reimagined for online delivery, demonstrating true agility in the process,” writes Melanie Cook, APAC managing director of Hyper Island. Rather than using simple video lectures, her team wanted online classes to provide an interactive learning experience built on original learning outcomes.
For instance, the Hyper Island team revisited the learning objectives of its data-driven decision- making course, which sought to get participants to glean usable insights from unstructured data. “If you think about it, the web is one big unstructured data pot,” Cook explains. Capitalising on this ready pool of data, the team redesigned the course into a “data treasure hunt” and “murder mystery” experience that required participants to analyse unstructured data to reach their objective.
Consequently, Cook says that participants were able to remain engaged with the new content while achieving their original learning objectives. Even better, participants actually developed greater confidence in the digital space as a result of learning within that space. Learner satisfaction improved slightly from 92% to 94% following the shift from a blended learning to pure online learning; massive open online courses (MOOCs) tend to see just 15% satisfaction.
The lessons from these sessions appear to have stuck as well. Hyper Island found that 77% of its participants managed to apply what they had learned back at work.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the number of participants has increased steadily from 240 in 2019 to 442 in 2020. And the 2021 edition is expected to welcome 500–550 participants.
“The virtual workshop works better than I expected,” says one participant in Hyper Island’s human-centred design class. Another noted that the interactive activities and website for course materials made their learning experience more fun and in-depth. A third participant expressed delight at meeting colleagues from other business units and felt that the course helped them think of ideas through alternative perspectives.
Attfield has been happy with the online learning experience so far. He says that the 40–50 tools and methodologies taught to participants have been refreshing and enlightening. “One of the things I think Hyper Island are very good at is that they are a bit hip, modern and funky,” he tells The Edge Singapore. He says that this trait is very engaging for participants compared to usual training programme offerings, with virtual events being equally as engaging as the physical offering.
The engagement does not, however, end with the JDIIA programme. By popular demand, for the 2019 cohort, Hyper Island launched a nine-week “light-touch” programme for JDIIA alumni called TMRRW, pointing participants to new tools, resources and challenges to build on their JDIIA experience. The creative business school also continues to get in touch with alumni once a fortnight to keep them current so that they can build on their learning.
Enter the ‘Never Normal’
The partnership that Hyper Island has cultivated with Jardine Matheson is not its only one with a big corporation. Besides Jardines, Hyper Island has also developed a similar programme for insurance firm AIA Singapore called Digital Ei8ht. Other existing clients have also asked Hyper Island to develop solutions for them since the Covid-19 pandemic began as their online learning needs grew.
And that need is likely to grow even more as Covid-19 rapidly increases the pace of economic digitalisation. The World Economic Forum notes that more than 1 billion jobs — nearly a third of all jobs globally — will likely be transformed by technology within the next decade. By 2022, 133 million new jobs in major economies will be created to meet the demands of Industry 4.0. Forty-two percent of the core skills needed to perform existing jobs are also expected to change.
Despite the present obsession with hard skills and STEM, it is actually soft skills that will likely have greater staying power. The highest priority skills, the 2020 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report finds, will be soft skills like leadership and management (57%), creative problem solving and design thinking (42%) and communication (40%).
“There is a growing need for people to develop specialised skills for how they interact with each other. The shelf life of technical skills can be relatively short, but soft skills are always necessary, regardless of an employee’s functional role or how the technology landscape evolves,” observes Cook.
To be sure, Jardines is not alone in seeking to prepare their workers for this brave new world — other firms are catching on too. “Since the start of the year, we have seen numerous business models evolve and customer demands intensifying,” says AIA Singapore’s chief HR officer Aileen Tan. AIA Singapore’s Learning and Development faculty, she says, is focusing on developing a culture of innovation and teams with the right resilient skill sets throughout the organisation, allowing it to better leverage opportunities in the post-Covid-19 economy.
Encouraged by its JDIIA experience, Hyper Island is looking to develop more of such long-term trusted relationships with other large groups in future.
“We have learnt what it is needed to create such deep bonds with corporates, especially multi-business corporates,” says Cook. She hopes to draw lessons about what learners want and how to run a digital academy to better impact Asia’s emerging middle class. “In this new melee to take learning online, we have a chance to make the learning better this time.
