New look, refined focus

When we started Opus Training, we had one goal: to make training easier, effective, and accessible to everyone. Our mission is to create a world where every worker has a good job. That mission has never wavered. If we can help 110M Americans up-skill in their current job, then we can create opportunity for the next generation of workers.

We embarked on that mission with the 2nd largest employer in the US - the hospitality industry. Restaurants, commissaries, hotels, cruise ships, university dining, amusement parks, casinos — they all make up an industry that keeps our America humming. But the tools restaurants have had to skill their workers have failed them. First-generation learning management systems (LMS) were built for desk-workers. Then, those same systems were retrofitted for businesses with desk-less workers but with no adjustment in mind to accommodate a workforce that stands on their feet all day and has second jobs and kids and commutes. That’s why 70% of American restaurants are still using paper to train their teams - legacy systems don’t work for them.

In honor of our new look, I want to take a moment to talk about how we got here and how we’re achieving this mission.

To begin with, we started building from scratch…

Our product meets the needs of 3 groups of workers: frontline employees, field managers, and admin support teams.

We fixed the friction points these users faced. The improvements compounded and resulted in a better training experience for everyone.

It starts and ends with the employee

Our customers here, here, and here know we are frontline first. We started by making the employee experience as accessible and engaging as possible. Dead simple, yet meaty. We spent a year perfecting our signup experience - It takes 12 seconds to sign up for Opus. And trainings are 3-5 minutes long, removing the burden of having to step off the floor to learn. Every moment is delivered in 100 global languages. These short learning moments connect together into learning paths so people build skills at the right time throughout their employee journey.

If you want to know everything we’ve done on this front, read on here

Training that moves at the speed of ops

We fixed delivery with mobile, but we couldn’t ensure employee engagement without having great training content. Enter: “the content problem”. Every leader from c-suite to admin knows this issue. Creating impactful trainings is hard. Like most things in life, creating something great requires planning, testing, and analysis - rinse and repeat. We saw the limits of content divorced from delivery and built a native content builder. Then, we supercharged it with AI capabilities so L&D teams can keep up with their operations.

For many of our customers, like Alex at Just Salad, Angelina at Ford’s Garage, and Christina at Shipley Do-nuts, 500x faster (3 months vs. 1 hour). ??

What does that mean for Learning & Development teams? It means having space to modernize, speed up, and expand training programs. Better, faster trainings leads to better, more productive, and satisfied employees. Read this for more details.

Let’s not forget the glue that makes magic happen

Field leaders, such as store managers, regional directors, and in-field trainers are the link between HQ initiatives and store employees.

I’m proud that we are the only training platform with a dedicated manager app experience. So much of what we’ve done for employees help managers too (if nothing else, managers love getting fewer questions!). There’s more we can do to arm these managers with more tools to strengthen their day.

Bridging online with on-the-job to make training (truly) for everyone

We work in the people business, so on-the-job training is not only unavoidable, it’s at times optimal. Shoulder-to-shoulder training is the good stuff. We never want to eliminate it. Which is why you’ll never hear me say that we want to ‘take your training digital’. What’s more important is that we “make your training visible”…for the first time.

Field leaders are critical to making on-the-job training work. That is why we’re building the best field leader experience to maximize and track in-person training moments.

We’re investing more in this manager experience to reflect the unique ways managers and employees engage with each other.

• Track in-person training activities to verify understanding
• Create guided verifications to ensure consistency across trainers
• Get full visibility of online and in-person training activities
• Help managers stay focused and have the tools to correct

By making learning and development tools accessible to those who are first to act, more can get done, faster.

Combining it all to reach 100% of your frontline

A famous study by Deloitte shows that a 15% improvement in engagement can result in 2% increase in margins. But, training is rarely seen as a lever for continual engagement, which limits the visibility and impact training can have on people productivity and retention.

That’s changing. Our customers consistently see results that are multiples higher than their previous solution. This includes:

• 98% training completion
• 4.7 / 5.0 employee satisfaction
• 90% adoption within 4 weeks of frontline launch
• 40% labor savings

Even more, some customers can connect specific trainings to bottomline results. We’re encouraged to see how training matters and committed to helping our customers get full visibility into their L&D intelligence.

Hospitality trainers co-creating

What I love about training leaders is the community around development. We learn a lot from our customers, the hospitality industry, and are proud partners of CHART. So we're creating new ways for them to learn from each other, share best practices, and build relationships.

Check out our next webinar on Sept 28, sign up for the Opus newsletter, or connect with me ??

Want some free SWAG?

I’m proud of our fresh, new look. It represents our teams effort to constantly be looking ahead, un-phased by distractions that don’t lead to better outcomes for employees, managers, and the companies who employ them. Enter your info and we’ll send you a free swag pack.

It’s our way to say thanks for being a fan and to spread some fun. Inventory is limited, so please submit asap.

Thank you for pushing us to be better and to work with us to create a better world. Here’s to what’s next.

Rachael