Day One Technologies is a creative elearning company with a multi-skilled team, based in the North of England. They serve a diverse range of global brands, such as Mercedes-Benz, Linde, NHS, Roche and Amazon, as well as several international banks, logistics and industrial companies.
They invited me to an online meeting for a deep-dive into Day One’s elearning solutions and to write up a review, and I was interested in seeing what they are doing for some of these big-name clients having heard about the company more and more over the last few years.
Day One describe themselves as “The Can Do eLearning Company”, building bespoke training solutions that deliver learning by doing, not by rote.”
They pride themselves in providing a rare balance of being a safe pair of hands, with a very personal approach to customer relationships as digital learning experts, while also possessing an agile and innovative mindset that embraces and employs the latest technology via their in-house development team.
What was very clear from meeting them, discussing their process and going through examples of their work, was that this is not a faceless ‘sausage factory’ elearning agency, churning out generic elearning. This is an attuned team of real (and personable) people with a great deal of experience who carefully craft solutions that really meet the needs of their clients.
CREATING CONTENT TO DELIVER CHANGE
Most training requirements are usually about enabling behavioural or attitudinal change, and Day One are expert partners in taking their clients on a journey to create solutions that enable that. At the same time, they are also skilled at helping organisations with compliance training.
So, as well as creating some effective and innovative solutions to effect behavioural change, they are also aware that sometimes an organisation just needs help to create a compliance solution that’s fast and effective.
Day One work with all kinds of experts with all sorts of different expertise, and they don’t claim to be the subject matter experts themselves. Rather they consider themselves the experts at transforming training content into engaging elearning that will support change management at speed and scale, regardless of geography or even language.
For example, they showed me some content they’d created for Mercedes-Benz using isometric imagery (think birds eye view of a Lego-style structure). This is really quite slick and allows for a pretty immersive feel, as different camera angles and zoom can be used to move around the environment while users transition to the next part of the learning experience.
Day One seem to me to be the ‘enablers’ and ‘conduits’ for transformation, evidenced not just by the variety within their client base, but by the sheer variety of elearning solutions aimed at such diverse end-user audiences (from theoretical high-stakes knowledge based content, software simulation environments, to modern and fun bitesize content utilising gamification and TikTok style videos).
They have a very robust, tried and tested process for working with their clients through fact-finding and knowledge gathering, documenting high level designs and prototypes, understanding the profile of the learners, and drafting what that whole solution will look like. This starts with storyboarding of course, then through an Alpha, Beta, Gold process of development.
The most striking thing about this though, is that they are not so tied to their processes as to be detrimental to their originality and creativity (as some sadly are). Instead, Day One know that in order to achieve the solution that’s right for the client, and ultimately delivers real lasting impact, sometimes it means ‘pushing back’ on what the customer comes to them thinking they want.
They simplify, clarify, and get right to the heart of the key messages of what the learning needs to achieve. Their clients clearly love it, if their impressive list of clients, positive feedback, and high retention rates for ongoing work are anything to go by.
The bespoke elearning development project with Mercedes-Benz some sales and customer service training used branching scenarios to allow the end users to test the outcomes of different conversations that they might have in a sales room forecourt. It involved the use of avatars and gamification in a very innovative way.
I could see how it’s been designed to be very empowering for the end-users, giving them total control to pick their character, personalise the learning experience, and even pick which customer scenario they want to practise. This is great for fine tuning those customer service skills when you most need them.
They’ve also created some engaging elearning for Amazon, which they developed to improve compliance and hazmat training for thousands of warehouse staff across the UK and Europe.
A DIVERSE RANGE OF CLIENTS
Day One work with a wide range of organisations, across a diverse range of sectors, such as Healthcare, Industrial, Finance, Government, Logistics, IT, and the Third Sector.
One of their current clients is a large European investment bank, for whom they undertake ongoing work on their compliance training. This includes updating their compliance materials on a 12-18 month schedule, because in this highly regulated industry, a lot of the compliance training such as data protection and banking rules needs constant updates.
They are in effect working as a kind of external bolstering of this bank’s L&D team. The content they have created, and for which they are managing the ongoing updates and maintenance, is going out to a global audience of 80,000 employees. This investment bank loves working with Day One, judging by the client feedback and apparently they even give their other suppliers tips on how to be more like Day One in terms of their communication, attention to detail, and their proactive approach to QA procedures, translations and accessibility requirements, which can often be onerous.
AN AGILE AND INNOVATIVE MINDSET
A good example of their effective embracing of technology is their use of AI. They have utilised AI for voiceovers and translations, and for collating information as part of their initial ideation process, but they don’t use AI templates, because they believe that GenAI is not an adequate substitute for creativity.
Rather than AI creating the final product, they simply use it to increase efficiency and initial ideation, which is exactly how it should be. For example, I saw an exciting example of some elearning they’ve created for Arriva to distil several hours of their compliance training into bitesize modules no longer than 10 mins each. They’ve woven in some of the company’s history into a module on Data Protection covering key points in time from its founding in 1938 in a really fun and engaging way (even utilising music and imagery from the 1980s for that period in the company’s timeline).
They used Gen AI to generate an image based on real photos (that otherwise wouldn’t have been of high enough quality) of what the original company looked like back in 1938. I thought this was a really nice touch, and a clever way of combining the company’s heritage into a very innovative approach to compliance training.
In terms of technology and tools, Day One use authoring tools like Storyline, Rise, and Evolve, and a bonus of this is that it makes it more accessible to clients to make their own ongoing updates and to maintain it themselves if they so wish.
The client always owns all the IP and is provided with the source content, which puts the client in control, but of course Day One themselves can also provide that ongoing support and updates. They also can create bespoke elearning using JavaScript if there is a need over and above what these tools can offer.
BESPOKE ELEARNING SOLUTIONS
Day One can provide consulting on strategy, assist organisations with their training needs analysis, and are experts in building some of the best bespoke elearning solutions.
SIMULATION TRAINING
One area in which they excel is in the creation of simulation training for immersive learning. This is a mode of learning that uses technology to mimic real world scenarios, so that people can practise skills and activities in a safe environment, ensuring they are better prepared for those real-life situations.
They can create training that is incredibly immersive and can be used for all sorts of different roles and use cases, including business leadership, sales and customer service, health and safety processes, and software system training.
DIGITAL ADOPTION PLATFORMS
They can also create software system simulations, where they create a bespoke digital adoption platform (which is like a replica of the cocktail of desktop systems used by your organisation’s teams in their day-to-day roles), and the simulation approach enables your people to be fully immersed in, and interact with, the learning experience.
Learners can practise tasks and workflows in a realistic and risk-free environment that mirrors their real-life systems. It’s like a digital sandbox, where teams can safely play and learn.
I saw a great example of a digital adoption platform they developed for NBS, an organisation in the construction industry. It simulated some very complex software used to manage architecture processes and building plans. The resulting solution is hosted on Day One’s own bespoke LMS, and the user has access to the software workflows appropriate to them (depending on their role / need), where they have a ‘Show me’ / ‘Try It’ facility.
What really impressed me with this was both the care and attention the Day One learning designers had clearly employed to learn and understand all the many workflows themselves for a complex piece of software in an unfamiliar industry. Evident care and thought that had gone into future proofing the design.
With any software, individual workflows are always subject to change with ongoing updates, so to ensure sustainability of ongoing maintenance, each workflow was carefully recorded screen by screen, so that an individual screen can be quickly and easily swapped out when a workflow is updated and deviates slightly (eg screen 20 out of a 40-screen workflow can be swapped out just like that by a team who know the workflows inside out).
A FULL-SERVICE DIGITAL LEARNING COMPANY
The bespoke aspect of Day One’s offer means that not only can they provide the custom elearning content, sometimes the solution might also include a bespoke LMS, which they are also able to provide.
Some 20% of Day One’s clients tend to require an LMS, and in these situations they can provide an LMS that is tailored to their client’s requirements. Their provision of bespoke content delivered via a bespoke LMS is something they term a “full-service solution.”
What’s interesting is some of the use cases about why potential clients might need this LMS, because it’s not just the kind of smaller organisations that perhaps don’t have their own internal in-house LMS.
For example, the Metropolitan Police were supplied an LMS because they were in between LMS platforms at the time, so Day One supplied an LMS with some custom content as a bridge as they migrated from one to another.
They have also supplied an LMS to a large umbrella company in Singapore that they have been working with, who had three LMSs across their business, none of which were fit for purpose. This situation had arisen because of various acquisitions through a rapid expansion of the business, and having these three very disparate systems was a real problem, the solution to which has been getting an LMS via Day One.
They’ve deployed an LMS in the Middle East in English and Arabic, and another LMS for a healthcare charity in English and Chinese. They’ve also deployed LMSs that integrate with back-end eCommerce systems, CRMs, and shopfronts to enable clients to sell their training.
An example of their full-service solution is the work they’ve done with the charity Tommy’s. Here they developed bespoke content aimed at line managers in corporate organisations covering the emotional and legal sides of pregnancy and parenting in the workplace, with the overall aim of valuing women in the workplace more. As part of this full-service solution, they provided two LMSs for Tommy’s to be able to sell their product offering to corporates via memberships, and to smaller businesses via these LMS platforms integrated with a shopfront and paywall.
I saw the Tommy’s example, and what was really apparent was how unlike off-the-shelf LMS solutions this is. Instead, it’s a fully customisable solution built to the exact spec needed for the client, and the client has complete control over this.
Few standalone LMS solutions can be completely reskinned with customised widgets and bespoke functionality. The Tommy’s interface had been completely skinned and customised for the brand and boasted a custom-made maternity leave calculator and integrated shop front.
A NIMBLE, MULTI-SKILLED TEAM
Day One has a nimble, multi-skilled and technically disciplined team, all in-house and UK-based, with a huge breadth of skills, including project management, needs analysis, instructional design, graphic design, videography, video editing, and software and coding skills for the LMS.
All their elearning and software development expertise is also in-house, and this is a real benefit, ensuring they are able to help support their clients and also to customise their full-service solution if and when it’s needed.
Their clients seem to really like that they get to work with a consistent, stable, and accessible team. Day One provide a personal service from the same group of people that clients can get to know and trust, rather than some large faceless agency with lots of sales, externals and contractors. This is a winning combination for them, because it works well for organisations of all sizes, even corporates, because ultimately even in the bigger corporates, it is usually a specific team that is then working alongside Day One to bolster their capabilities.
However, when required, they can scale-up and manage themselves in a very agile way, demonstrated multiple times on various projects, and they are able to do this on demand, literally doubling their team if the project requires it.
A FOCUS ON FINDING SOLUTIONS
What clients like most about working with Day One it seems is their focus on finding a solution to their clients’ problems, allied to a can-do attitude. This means that they are always trying their utmost to do the best job they can to solve their client’s headaches and get them the solution they need.
The client can be confident that Day One are going to fulfil and deliver on their promises.
Learn more about Day One Technologies and get in touch via their website.