TIM Academy: quality training expressed through Open Badges

TIM Academy is TIM’s Corporate University, launched in April 2016 to help TIM people to acquire, update and spread knowledge and skills. Since its foundation, TIM Academy has always attached great importance to innovation:  innovation in the formats, the teaching methods and the tools used is essential to generate engagement and enhance training both for employees and people external to the company.

Ida Sirolli, Training Director at TIM, explains how valuable internal training is for a company leader in the industry.

An intranet platform, a mobile app, MOOCs, communities dedicated to Knowledge Management, learning maps, live digital and social activities, training on the job, gamification, open badges: the tools used are many. Why? What’s the objective?

The competency of the workforce at all levels is a company’s main wealth. I am not talking only about the core competencies of a company and individual roles, which of course are important, but also adjacent skills and keeping staff up to date are of fundamental importance if a company doesn’t want to risk losing sight of the changes taking place externally to the company.  Not forgetting to mention the topic of reskilling: in such a context characterised by rapid and sudden developments, constant learning is a necessity, as all institutions remind us – from the European Parliament to the World Economic Forum.

What’s the importance of using innovative tools to engage people?

The focus is not on innovating tools. Tools are – just – tools, but what we want to create is a seamless learning ecosystem for the people involved, a system in which all topics and learning objectives are achieved with the right tool. This is the key to keeping the level of engagement high after the initial thrust due to curiosity, which obviously helps.

With English@TIM, for example, we made available both the portal and the app and we noticed that the users’ behaviour is significantly different in terms of access times and time spent. In this particular case, enabling both modes was the right choice because we had to reach as many people as possible.

Does TIM Academy issue Open Badges to all people who receive training?

No, at least not yet. For now we’re trying to make the most of the specificity of open badges, using them in those cases where they offer us significant added value. Open badges are in fact particularly effective for two things: self-empowerment, that is, the learner becomes aware of the value of the skills learnt, and external communication. Thanks to the possibility of being shared and seen on social networks, the Badge represents not only a person’s competencies but also the company’s brand which then shows to be active on certain issues, something that may not be known outside the company. For example, this is one of the objectives of the Antitrust Badge while the Badge dedicated to digital skills  has the specific aim of enhancing the skills learnt and the commitment of the learner.

How do Open Badges fit in with the overall vision of TIM Academy?

Open Badges are for us a way to align ourselves with a standard and to be transparent in assessing the skills of our people. Of course, transparency is part of a process that starts with our care for the narrative and the formats used and aims at enhancing the uniqueness of TIM Academy – with maximum openness and accessibility – to achieve the self-empowerment and the recognition of our lifelong learners.

How did people welcome these changes, especially Open Badges?

TIM people, as you would expect from any large Telco, proved to be ready and open to innovation, welcoming with interest the majority of the initiatives we proposed.  We are very proud to have a very high claim rate: almost 80% of the people who receive our badge proceed to collect it from the Bestr platform. Further proof of how well TIM employees value training and making their training known.

Take a look at TIM Academy on Bestr