Share a Chair is a German start-up company in the early stage. The initial idea was that companies use the Share a Chair platform as an innovative marketplace to book, organize and share their free vacant Training vacancies (chairs) with other selected companies.
The goal was to ensure that their unused training capacity was efficiently and fully utilized, with less intensive organization work involved, while accessing affordable corporate training to help small and medium-sized companies fulfill their employees' development and skills. In other words, " Share a Chair was the "Airbnb of the Corporate Training. "
Currently
The project evolved from the original idea to a more comprehensive one by becoming an all-in-one platform solution that provides access to Vacant training chairs and a training management system where managers can have all the needed tools for their training management. Also, provide a marketplace for all training providers to share their training on the platform. This opportunity was revealed to us due to our extensive user research.
(Share a Chair is a platform for corporate training (marketplace), that enables regular companies to organize their training in an easy way and to share their free corporate training vacancies (chairs) to other selected companies – a Peer2Peer platform for efficient training management and reducing people development effort up to 50%.) -
Empower the workforce not replace them
Corporate further Training is labor and cost-intensive because of the lack of time, organization, and budget from the companies to develop their employees.
74% of workers are willing to learn new skills or re-train in order to remain employable.
87% of millennials believe learning and development in the workplace are important.
29% of employees are "very satisfied" with their current career advancement opportunities available within their organization.
Source: HBR
How do we simplify the whole training process and provide the needed tools for the organizations to drive the development of their employees
- Save time
- Optimizing the training budget
- Organizing and tracking
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We want to understand the current behavior and the process of the corporate training. That means, how they book the training, and we need to understand the factor that influences their decisions. As a result, we plan our research to identify the new standards and experiences that the user needs to look out for when planning, booking, or managing training.
1- Need tool to better manage bookings
Management & planning tool is Excel (appointments, hotel, budget) Usually is handled by one person who all hold together
2-Annual training budget
Annual training budget 75k for 260 employees -> approx. € 400 / employee / year.
3- Developing your own training courses is time-consuming for companies
So they tend to outsource the training from training providers in the market and its take a so much time to find proper trainings and they search between dozens of websites.
4- The learning history of the individual employee is important.
What did he prove? What else does he have to do? Learning offers are made without knowing the actual need Currently the employee reports a need, then a training is sought
User quote
The Training management is often handled within Excel and Outlook at the moment , is solved when we have a tool providing enough functions to 'out run' the former way of doing it. " Nino (responsible at the DKB for executive development) "
Workflow, Features of Training Management and Organization. Deep insights about the internal and external booking process of training. Identification of Explicit and implicit needs of the user during the booking and planning process in order to put it into the marketplace design.
Provide a marketplace for all training providers to share their training on the platform. implementation of all needed Marketplace and TMS process to fulfill the users need of a browsing, booking, managing, sharing, privacy process
Enables regular companies to organize their training in an easy way and to share their free corporate training vacancies (chairs) to other selected companies
Training Marketplace - 2 Months
Without content there is no management, the marketplace will provide the companies one location to find all kind of the trainings.
Training Management system - 4 months
TMS is important part from the product strategy to give the companies the needed tools to track and manage the training for their employees.
Training share a chair - 2 months
It is the feature that will complete the ecosystem and give the companies the ability to share their trainings with other companies
1️⃣ Flexibility
Make systems flexible
We need to ensure that system is done in a timely and effective manner.
Users should have clear expectations of how the product will work and how each part connect to the other
2️⃣ Credibility
Be trustworthy and credible
Eliminate uncertainty. and provide a transparent way to achieve each task.
The users should be informed each step about their actions and given feedback about them and it's our responsibility to be clear and transparent about how each training has been added and provide all the necessary information
3️⃣ Empowering
Full control
Users need to be confident in how to find proper training that fits their needs.
We should assure that have full control over their choices and the ability to Request , cancel, create and conduct payments for the training in a simple trustful way.
The experience of Share a Chair begins with the need to find proper training from the HR development department in the company.
Throughout the journey, we provide the tools required for this process and empower them to track, organize, and manage in one dedicated dashboard.
Our key strategy is to give the user full control through the whole journey and make the right decisions
The marketplace must have a clear searchable way to find training with the ability to filter and also categories the training based on sectors and provide suggestions and clear description with all information about specific training
The content provider must have the ability to create training and publish the training in the marketplace with the ability to edit modify and draft the training and also to receive requests for specific training and manage these requests in an intuitive manner.
Due to the complication regarding the payment process and the tight deadline we agreed that we should now stick with a simple request and manage by us internally with emails and invoices.
The HR persons after finding the training must have the ability to invite the employees to this training from the dashboard and manage the attendees
Create training process is a little bit long and the date and time steps are not considering multiple entries.
Payment in Germany for corporate training not process by credit cards.
It is not clear for the user how to create a training from the home page. Thought that could create it by clicking on the Become a Host option.
Users likes that one can review the training information added before it is sent to be approved.
User points out that the name of the trainer is missing and that is very important to add this information because there are trainers that are already well known and are prominent and this is a key factor when people decided to participate in a training.
The user was not sure about the meaning some of the terms we used.
After gathering the key insights, discovering the patterns of the real problem, how the users think and do, how the business statement aligns the business problem (from our insight the business didn't with the current user experience), and discovering new product opportunities.
The final solution contain the following elements
Market place, sharing training, training management system. Gather all the training in one place and manage it in one place, with market share and people can share them.
We build our products with team of 4 to 6 people. One or two developers, a front-end developer, a designer and a team leader. The team works with a backlog that contains of User Stories. Major design decisions are all made during the sprints by the team.
We experienced clear benefits:
We worked closely with engineers to validate the design and copy implementation. Along with daily stand ups, we also had weekly demos and occasionally sit toghther and cross check implemetation with final design.
Training in the marketplace
After finishing the phase #1 and developing the marketplace a training provider from Germany "Zamegato" showed interest in the product and offer 120 training from their catalog to be in Share a Chair marketplace.
Pilot company
A company from Germany "FRÄNKISCHE" Also showed interest in the training management system and we are currently working closely together to understand their needs for TMS in the Phase #2.
Clear product process
We manage to establish work standards and we moved from only paper scratch for the initial idea to clear structure and we have now simple design system and component library and documentation process.
