Learning and Development Strategy Drives 400% Efficiency Gain
A major telecommunications provider in Brazil needed to replace a fragmented, ad hoc approach to employee training with a single enterprise-wide learning and development strategy. Working with GP Strategies, the company created a new corporate university, learning framework, and employee lifecycle training journey that transformed its L&D function and organizational culture. The result: 82,600 employees trained, a 400% gain in operational efficiency, and a Gold Brandon Hall Group Award for Best Learning Strategy.
Challenge: A Fragmented Learning & Development Function
The telecom company’s learning and development function was decentralized and fragmented. Training content was duplicated and lacked methodological standardization, learning objects were scattered across multiple platforms with inconsistent oversight and outdated material, and training sessions were often run ad hoc, without strategic alignment to the business.
An enterprise-wide listening tour—consisting of 12 focus groups, 16 executive interviews, and an anonymous employee survey that gathered 3,260 responses—confirmed how deep the problem ran. Only 37% of employees proactively sought out training, and 47% learned about their training options only when a manager told them.
Simply producing more content wouldn’t fix that. The organization needed a single, governed system that made training easy to find, consistent in quality, and directly tied to business and regulatory needs, across an extended workforce of tens of thousands of employees spanning customer service, sales, security, and technical operations.
Key Constraints
Fragmentation: 10,000+ non-standardized learning objects existed across multiple platforms, and 80% of them were incomplete.
Low visibility: Only 37% of employees proactively sought out training, and 47% discovered available options only when informed by a manager.
Regulatory pressure: Employees needed mandatory training to stay compliant with ANATEL, Brazil’s national telecommunications regulator, alongside role-specific and behavioral development.
Scale: Any new training model had to reach an extended enterprise across Customer Service, Sales, Security, and Technical Operations (both B2B and B2C) without sacrificing consistency or quality.
Solution: An Enterprise Learning Strategy & Corporate University
The telecommunications giant partnered with GP Strategies to design their own framework: a structured learning model built to standardize how training was designed, tagged, and delivered. The framework became the backbone of the company’s new corporate university and of an enterprise-wide, personalized learning journey designed to guide every employee through their career at the company. Two principles anchored the approach: “Digitize to Connect,” using technology to widen access to learning, and “From Everyone, For Everyone,” extending the inclusive philosophy behind the provider’s own products to its training experience.
Phase One | Listen and Diagnose
The company’s L&D team ran a company-wide listening tour and formed a cross-functional team to analyze and standardize the pedagogical models behind its training. That work produced the framework and its five sequential learning stages mapped to the employee lifecycle. Those learning stages were then paired with four competency pillars to align business needs with employee growth.
Phase Two | Build and Launch
GP Strategies helped the telecom provider clean up and rebuild its training library with new materials as well as updated legacy content. In all, more than 10,000 redundant, non-standardized learning objects were consolidated into 3,500 relevant, framework-tagged assets, making content easier to find and encouraging more employees to enroll in optional learning. The corporate university was then launched for employees, with training delivered across five formats (online, in-person, synchronous, asynchronous, and blended) using methodologies including problem-based learning, gamification, design thinking, edutainment, and the 6Ds model. This multi-modality approach ensured flexibility, scalability, autonomy, and an engaging experience for all.
Phase Three | Scale, Sustain, and Optimize
As the company drove adoption of the new corporate university through a five-stage change management strategy, a cross-functional advisory team gathered feedback and adjusted processes based on completion data, assessment scores, and learner feedback. Accessibility became a continuous discipline, not a one-time fix; they added subtitles, adjusted fonts and contrast, implemented inclusive language, and trained instructors to run more inclusive sessions. Behind the scenes, the team adopted Power BI and People Analytics to automate reporting and give HR leaders a live view of training performance.
Impact: A Transformed Workforce & Scalable Learning Strategy
The rollout of the framework and the corporate university reshaped how the telecom provider trains its people, at both the scale of the numbers and the speed of the operations behind them.
employees trained across Customer Service, Sales, Security, and Technical Operations (B2B and B2C), completing 4.5 million training hours and 2.9 million training modules.
gain in operational efficiency, cutting the course content update-and-publish cycle from two hours to 30 minutes.
Net Promoter Score, reflecting high employee satisfaction with the redesigned employee learning experience.
reduction in executive report production time (40 hours to 30 minutes), plus a projected 100% reduction in server and data-management tool costs, powered by 22 automated dashboards updated daily.
At a macro level, this initiative catalyzed the company’s long-term planning of employee development and ordered the learning process into clear and sequential steps aligned with business needs. As a result, the telecom giant has a repeatable learning governance framework and a standardized content taxonomy that keep paying off as the program grows, including plans to use AI to make learning-path recommendations more personalized over time.
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