Sony Music ILT Conversion

What we made

A multi-media, highly interactive digital learning experience, including navigable language menus to ensure learners were able to access the training in their spoken language.

The issue

When your employees are as far-flung and internationally stationed as Sony Music’s, you’re bound to have a few training hurdles. With a bevy of record labels–RCA, Columbia, and Epic, to name a few–and employees from South Africa to Argentina, Sony Music struggled with the idea of consistent, harmonious training throughout the organization.

Project highlights

  • Rolled out to 1000+ employees
  • Change in company culture

The issue

The Issue: International Sony Music Stations

When your employees are as far-flung and internationally stationed as Sony Music’s, you’re bound to have a few training hurdles. With a bevy of record labels–RCA, Columbia, and Epic, to name a few–and employees from South Africa to Argentina, Sony Music struggled with the idea of consistent, harmonious training throughout the organization.

For years, live training workshops were the order of the day. The company hosted workshops, incurring huge travel costs to fly employees to its San Diego headquarters. It was time-consuming and expensive, and what’s worse, executives weren’t sure if employees were even retaining the information they’d learned.

Face-to-face interaction and live training was the gold standard, but the drawbacks were starting to outweigh the benefits for an international organization with a lot on the line.

The journey

The Journey: Making Sweet Music

Live training was definitely a priority, so ELM used the conversational, casual tone of a live training session to answer course objectives and retention outcomes for Sony Music. After spending time with Sony Music instructors and combing through existing course materials, ELM converted the content into an interactive and visually stimulating self-paced course. By blending the live elements with gamification and knowledge assessments, ELM was able to deliver a custom, targeted solution that harmonized the engagement of live training with the convenience and retention of online courses.

The outcome

The Outcome: Saving Money and Gaining Retention

The course went to the top of the charts with employees, who loved the gaming aspect and the ability to pace themselves and lead their own learning. And, as experts in music distribution, Sony Music was able to blanket the organization with the new training faster than a top-ten hit. By skipping the live training (and saving $100K in the process), Sony Music gained in productivity and retention without sacrificing results.