The search for a platform

Sol & Strand is one of Denmark’s leading vacation rental agencies headquartered in North Jutland on the west coast. With 21 local offices spread across the country, they manage around 6,500 private summer and holiday homes in Denmark. And with 21 offices, Sol & Strand is responsible for a large number of employees, including holiday advisors, service staff, and more. This number constantly increases with the growing number of holiday homes for rent. When new employees are hired, the onboarding process plays a significant role in the quality of the work to be performed in the future. For Sol & Strand, this was no exception. Therefore, they saw a need to create a common denominator when hiring and onboarding new employees to ensure that all employees were pre-boarded and well-prepared for the job before starting.

Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand, had four focus areas back in 2019 when her search for an LMS began. One of the focus areas was digital learning, and based on previous experience with learning systems, it was important to find a system that was simple and manageable.

“Conzentrate’s LMS is logical and user-friendly, and that was an important factor for me. I want to be able to manage the content and handle the daily use myself. I can do that with your platform.”

 – Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand

A user-friendly and manageable platform was a requirement because they wanted to produce, upload, and administer the majority of the learning content on the platform themselves. Additionally, they wanted to find a provider that could offer competent and professional production of e-learning courses as needed. It was also advantageous if the platform could host content from external course producers. Conzentrate’s LMS met these requirements, and based on these important factors, Sol & Strand chose Conzentrate as their provider and partner.

“If you’ve worked with other systems before, you’re often promised the moon and the stars until you’re lured in, and then you’re left to yourself. That hasn’t been the case with you.”

 – Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand

Training 300 Employees in 3 Weeks

The idea of ​​improving the onboarding process was the starting point for a digital learning universe at Sol & Strand. The onboarding process had previously been a challenge, especially regarding service employees who clean the holiday homes. These service employees are freelancers working for different agencies around the country, and agencies have limited daily interaction with them. It would be both challenging and resource-intensive to convene this group of employees from across the country for a physically present pre-boarding course, so digital learning became the obvious choice for effectively pre-boarding service employees. To ensure that the service employees received the right instructions regarding the legislation on duty of instruction from the labor inspectorate, Sol & Strand developed a mandatory pre-boarding course for this purpose. This course provides foundational learning as part of a blended learning process before the service employees participate in physical training at the agency they are affiliated with. The course was launched in March 2021, and already after just 3 weeks, 300 service employees had completed and passed the course through the platform.

“At being able to translate something digital into a practical skill can be challenging, but digital learning is a fantastic supplement to physical training – and contributes to creating the most optimal learning process for us.”

 – Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand

Training 300 employees in just 3 weeks is a great success. A success that particularly demonstrates the effectiveness of digital learning. In addition to onboarding for service employees, Sol & Strand has developed a course focusing on leader onboarding for agency managers, covering topics such as employment conditions, conversations, and other fundamental subjects, which are made available to the managers in the agencies.

Our Platform, Your Learning Content

When Sol & Strand entered into a partnership with Conzentrate, it was with the aim of finding a platform that would allow them to produce, upload, and administer courses themselves. Through Storyline360 and Rise360, Sol & Strand produces its e-learning courses, which they offer through our LMS, Learning Arena. The ability to produce courses themselves is an obvious choice for Sol & Strand because Rikke-Louise has the experience and skills to develop digital learning content herself.

But the need for outsourcing can always arise, and in such cases, we are always ready to help our customers produce digital learning content that suits their needs and learning objectives. We did this when Sol & Strand needed to develop the EasyBook course, which demonstrates and presents employees with how their booking system works. The course functions as a simulation course, and although Sol & Strand can develop most of their learning content themselves, Rikke-Louise believes that there are some things that are better to outsource to save time and resources.

“Conzentrate could produce and deliver EasyBook much faster and better than we could ourselves. The collaboration works perfectly, and the course is professional.”

 – Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand

In addition to EasyBook, which Conzentrate has produced, Sol & Strand has purchased our standard e-learning course in IT security, teaching employees how to avoid hacker attacks, phishing, and how to protect their passwords and emails. External courses from our partner, GoLearn, have also been purchased and added to the platform.

Overall, Sol & Strand has created a learning platform that meets their three needs: the ability to produce content themselves, have professionally produced content, and purchase external courses. Together, this has laid the foundation for a completely new digital learning universe across the 21 agencies nationwide, and the requirement for a user-friendly platform and a partner who is accessible has been fulfilled.

“The best thing about this collaboration has been that we could relatively easily and quickly sit down and figure out how your system works without having an educational background in IT and control systems.”

 – Rikke-Louise Klarskov, HR Manager at Sol & Strand

Today, Sol & Strand uploads courses to the platform weekly for various employee groups in the organisation, and here at Conzentrate, we are proud to have been part of creating a solid digital learning platform that supports Sol & Strand’s future strategy for education and competency development.