Construction firm Laing O’Rourke has restructured its internal training resources, setting up a single central platform that is used by 700 people.
Justine Macrae and Helen Fraser, Laing O’Rourke
General manager of the people function in Australia Helen Fraser likened the firm’s previous training resource environment to a house “with different types of furniture, all scattered everywhere”.
“There was designer furniture – and only our top talent was allowed to sit there,” she explained.
“We had common commodity furniture; all the same and available to everyone. And this was LinkedIn Learning, the mandatory training.
“We had a whole lot of furniture, and we didn’t know where it was. We didn’t know if there was any use for it; it might be damaged; [or] people couldn’t find it.”
The company built its central port with SAP’s low-code tool, Build Work Zone.
The central portal, named LOR Learn, is for “employees to access personalised, role-based learning modules that are critical to their career growth:”
“The construction sector faces immense pressure. We have immense pressure around delivery; immense pressure around safety,” Fraser told an audience during SAP HR Connect in Sydney.
“Time is always so scarce. It feels like an impossibility to take people’s time out of what they’re delivering to be able to learn.
“What [LOR Learn] did for us was create a single, big front door for all of our learning, which brings everyone to the ‘house’; they all have a code, and they have a really clear floor plan [of what is available].”
Although Laing O’Rourke is a big proponent of “self-directed learning”, the company’s training budget was previously spent on just 80 staff members.
Now, 10 percent of this budget is reaching 700 people who use the LOR Learn platform.
According to the company, LOR Learn has 55 bespoke learning pathways and 350 custom assets featuring “content akin to Instagram and TikTok”, peer-to-peer resources and social learning networks.
The platform also comes with tracking and reporting metrics for Laing O’Rourke’s human resources teams to “report to the board” and “make improvements along the way”.