Engagement has evolved into a substantial aspect of learning, now more than ever, as can be seen by the increasing interest of people towards game-based learning. Millennials are entering the workplace at a swift rate and are expected to comprise a significant part of the workforce by 2020. To cater to the needs of the millennial audience, organizations are deploying training programs that are engaging, on-demand and digital. This has led to a huge growth in innovative corporate training. Meanwhile, organizations are trying to tackle the growing challenges of skills-capability gaps. Capacity building is a common theme across corporate management, governments, regulators and the social sector and there is an increasing expectation that new companies will step up and generate scalable digital tools to address these challenges.
Powered with a mission to create a knowledgeable and empowered workforce, Aktrea was founded in 2009 at the heart of the global financial crisis to help customers improve their practices and processes around the world. The company’s aim is to change the way professionals learn and share knowledge around the world. Aktrea’s expertise spans various areas, including finance & markets, sustainability, compliance, design thinking, and diversity, creating programmes using gamification, simulations, and social learning. The company is headlining the usage of digital tools to create learning communities whose members can share knowledge and solve problems.
An Inception Tale & Professional Team
Since the inception of the company, the team at Aktrea has placed customers at the center of all its work and Aktrea’s Gamechangers have worked together to create magic – in cross-functional teams with various areas of expertise. The key to this is that everyone is aware of the bigger picture of the project and contributes across the board, rather than only focusing on their roles as individuals. Being one of the pioneers to adapt online games for corporate learning, these experts communicate, collaborate and work together to deliver value for customers.
Aktrea’s four divisions – Operations, Customer, Engineering and Innovation lab – work through its product cycle which revolves around the customer. Each department – design and delivery – hands over seamlessly to the next.
Diving more into the working of the company, the Operations team comprises of design, creation and delivery teams. The Customer team comprises of marketing and sales professionals. The Engineering team has design, development, and quality assurance teams. Finally, the Innovation lab comprises of data and analytics experts and engineers who are building artificial intelligence into learning and simulating real-life experiences across industries.
The magical Gamechangers of Aktrea
Dinesh Kumar, Head of Customer Relationships, Lokesh Dhanasekaram, Head of Operations and Vetri Selvan, Manager & Team Lead in Engineering, are the trailblazers of the company. Together, they focus on sustainable learning & problem-solving tools. These tools help corporates and inter-governmental organizations and other entities involved in sustainability, strategy, products and day to day work. Further, the company’s social learning platform can help connect people and teams that are geographically spread to share stories, engage in activities together and collaborate using design thinking.
Addressing Challenges through Innovative Strategies
CEOs around the world face challenges in engaging their employees during their journey with the company, and keeping employee skill levels current. Aktrea worked with senior leaders to get their people to be engaged, attend, actively participate and follow through their learning journey.
When an organization is global or geographically spread, it increases the difficulty of providing consistent training because of geographic limitations, increased costs and language barriers across borders. Aktrea addressed these challenges by delivering consistent training across the globe.
Measuring training effectiveness and evaluating how an employee is paying back the learning to the organization were other challenges that Aktrea helped solve. The company faced difficulties in figuring out which metrics to use, how to get data, when to intervene, and how to ensure future training was consistent with company values and employee needs. Traditional training methods need not work with the current audience and constantly evolving workplace and business dynamics. Leaders believe that the present and coming generations are technologically proficient, but have lower attention spans and need training tools that engage them. How an organization can provide training that spans multiple generations is another important challenge faced by the industry.
To overcome these challenges, Aktrea worked on the latest technologies and innovative techniques. Today, rather than being just a training organization, it works as a partner through each customer’s journey and not just as a vendor or service provider. It also works closely with leaders such as the CEO and the heads of HR, Sales, Operations and Businesses and designs learning programs with high ROI. In addition, Aktrea helps organizations address the need for rapid development and roll-out of content and training to a large audience.
Unfolding the Future Techniques
“Our vision is to change the way people engage and learn in this digital world.” asserts Dinesh.
Aktrea is striving to be professionally the best in the world, and also creating leaders for the future. Some innovative releases by the end of 2018 include an intelligent authoring tool which can help anyone create a gamified online learning module in minutes using existing content, and a unique design thinking simulator that helps teams to work together virtually across locations and solve customer, process and work-related challenges.