Caylent is a cloud native services company that helps organizations bring the best out of their people and technology using AWS. They work with customers to build, scale and optimize sophisticated cloud solutions using deep subject matter expertise to deliver world class outcomes through an agile co-delivery model.
Challenge
As a rapidly growing tech consultancy, Caylent’s engineers (who account for 65% of their total workforce) needed frequent training and upskilling, especially in AWS certifications. But Caylent had trouble meeting the demands of a global, fully remote team with diverse learning goals and the need for ultimate flexibility.
Their small Learning and Development (L&D) team was overwhelmed with requests, and struggled to deliver training with their limited resources. Solving this issue was critical to Caylent’s future, as they hoped to grow their talent pipeline by creating pathways for promoting junior engineers to senior leadership roles. It was also essential to their mission of providing world class innovation services to their client partners:
“Our commitment to learning and career development includes providing time for engineers and architects to study, train, and get certified on technologies that our customers value. This dedication to continuous learning enables us to have opinions grounded in experience and best practices, which are a strong value-add to our customers who look to our team to solve the most complex technical challenges.” [Quote from the Caylent website]
Key challenges:
- Small L&D team with global, remote workforce
- Engineering talent requires specialized skills
- Goal to build internal leadership pipeline
- Need to stay on top of the latest industry trends
Solution
Caylent knew that a standard LMS (Learning Management System) or LXP (Learning Experience Platform) could not satisfy their diverse learning needs. So they came to OneRange in search of a solution that would enable them to combine internal training with on-demand external resources, and that would be easy for their small L&D team to manage and scale.
OneRange worked with Caylent to provide engineers access to the best AWS certification programs on the market, and made it easy for peers and managers to recommend bundles of resources to their teams, including courses, books, and subscriptions. Caylent allocated $500 individual budgets to each of their employees and gave immediate access to the platform to all current team members and new hires.
Results
After just a few months of using OneRange, Caylent saw immediate impact from the program. More than 90% of employees logged onto the platform at least once, compared with the industry standard of under 10% participation in learning and development activities.
But employees weren’t just logging on, they were actively requesting hundreds of courses, books, conferences, and subscriptions. After 9 months on the platform, Caylent’s 500 employees were on track to request 2,320 resources by year’s end for a total cost of $120,000 — or about 5 resources and $250 in spend per employee.
As expected, learning focused heavily on AWS certifications, with about 80% of Caylent’s investment coming from technical courses. However, employees also requested books to build leadership and management skills, as well as subscriptions to programs such as Grammarly and DuoLingo to expand their communication skills, improve their ability to interact with global teams, and hone their ability to lead customer engagements “The Caylent Way” (as one learner put it).
Most importantly, both employees and L&D leaders saw real, tangible impact on their daily work. When surveyed, 90% of Caylent employees said that they were actively applying new skills to their jobs, compared with the industry average of just 12% who report relevance of L&D programs to their careers. And we estimate that Caylent engineers, L&D leaders, and managers saved 2,320 hours of administrative time — or about one hour of searching for and approving quality programs, paying for and receiving expense reimbursements — for every resource requested on the OneRange platform.
Caylent results by the numbers
92%
employee
activation rate
60%
saved on total
L&D program costs
90%
of employees report applying new skills to jobs
2,320
hours of total administration time saved (estimated)
