How Edrington distills learning with the help of LearnUpon and Degreed

With a who’s who of brands in its portfolio, including The Macallan, Highland Park, The Famous Grouse, and The Glenrothes, Edrington is a world-renowned Scotch whisky and spirits company. 

Ever-evolving as a business, the company has a strong vision for its future: Give more by crafting exceptional, ultra-premium spirit brands. To help people develop the skills and capabilities needed to make this vision a reality, learning leaders prioritized an ambitious learning strategy.

It aimed to make accessing learning intuitive and to accommodate multiple activities — upskilling, development, and mandatory training. And to do this, the L&D team needed a learning “one-stop-shop” to house it all. 

In partnership with LearnUpon and Degreed, Edrington unlocked wide-ranging learning opportunities for its people. It did this by harnessing the strength of a learning management system (LMS) and learning experience platform (LXP) working together to power, enhance, and grow the company’s Edrington Academy.

The challenge: Escaping fragmented, inefficient learning

Edrington had dipped its toes in the learning waters before. Having implemented learning solutions in the past, the business found these solutions fragmented and inefficient. “We had a number of providers scattered about, and depending on your department, region, or business area, you’d get something different,” Palmer said. 

As Edrington made learning the foundation of its vision for the future, learning leaders realized that they needed an innovative and streamlined learning solution.

For the L&D team, the dream was to move the organization away from tiresome training spreadsheets and emails and find a solution where all learning — self-directed, mandatory, upskilling, development, and beyond — would be managed, delivered, tracked, and accessed in one central hub.

The solution: Two platforms, one front door

LearnUpon provides an LMS while Degreed provides an LXP. The two companies have a longstanding partnership, and the solutions are designed to work together. This proved to be a winning combination for a “one-stop-shop” at Edrington. 

Launching LearnUpon and Degreed in unison, the Edrington L&D team provided 2,500 employees with extensive learning opportunities packaged into a unified, friction-free experience, accessible through a single front door. 

Engaging through blended content

A year after the launch of LearnUpon and Degreed, the L&D team knew the Edrington workforce had embraced learning. ”We managed to engage 85% of the business,” Palmer said, noting that the company had more than 28,000 course enrollments largely attributable to the diversity of content available.

Using Degreed, Edrington’s people carve their own learning journeys, choosing content that’s aligned to their own skill development needs. In addition, leaders get insights into the skill sets of their people, and into the supply and demand for skills across the organization. Using this information, they recommend relevant, high-value content. With the click of a button, a manager or L&D team member can share a course, video, article, book, and more from numerous content providers with any colleague. 

Using LearnUpon, the L&D team has the power to create bespoke, in-house training courses for compliance, skill development, instructor-led training, and more.

The value is two-fold: By removing the need for agency costs for content, Edrington can focus its budget on more meaningful development options for its people. This gives managers and subject matter experts control of the content being built. Working in collaboration across the business functions ensures that engaging and relevant content is created to drive learning throughout the organisation.

“Life-changing” automation

Using LearnUpon and Degreed has transformed the L&D team’s way of working by taking a manual process off its plate. Through the integration, a shared User Sync File runs in the background. And a once-weekly task requiring an Admin to manually update user data across learning systems is now obsolete.

Adding to the Edrington team’s peace of mind is LearnUpon’s Dynamic Rules. Used to manage compliance training enrollments, it enables L&D to automatically assign people to the right content based on specific criteria in their user profiles.

Aligned partnership

It’s not just the product integration that’s helped Edrington. Joint support from experts on the LearnUpon and Degreed teams has helped too, Palmer said. “The relationship has enabled us to think strategically about learning and our business. The knowledge and experience we’re offered is brilliant, and it reassures us we’re doing the right things.”

The future: Making the vision a reality

Developing the right skills and capabilities in people to help deliver Edrington’s vision is high on the agenda. Edrington’s L&D team members are enthusiastically planning their next steps. To drill down further into skill-building, they’re focusing on designing skill streams for different functions across the business.