Ruffalo Noel Levitz – an employee training case study

Background

Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) is a leading higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions provider. For nearly 50 years, colleges and nonprofit organizations have turned to RNL to enroll students, help more students graduate and thrive, and build lasting connections with donors.

RNL by the numbers

• Operating for nearly 50 years
• Works with 1,900 campuses and nonprofits each year
• $3 billion in institutional financial aid for campus partners
• Over 1,300 employees
• Partnered with 3,000 institutions to date

“Without the customizable LMS, compliance training, and price agreement, we would be stuck with a less effective solution at a higher price.”
—Cindy Brown, Vice President of Talent Acquisition

Meet Cindy Brown

Cindy has an electrical engineering degree but liked working with people more than circuit boards. She spent 25 years doing training, development, and recruiting for the Air Force before joining RNL. Cindy, vice president of talent acquisition at RNL, has managed compliance training, employee development, and user onboarding for the past seven years.

Challenges

When Cindy joined the company, RNL had TrainingToday’s California-compliant sexual harassment library delivered through its proprietary learning management system (LMS). She would frequently hear complaints from users that the platform was hard to use, and she had difficulty tracking whether users completed the assigned training. This required ongoing manual intervention and follow-up from Cindy and her team to ensure the required training was completed on schedule.

As RNL’s operations expanded, Cindy knew she had to replace the clunky, hard-to-navigate LMS. She hoped to find a more modern, automated, and customizable one. She began her search in 2020 for an LMS that would allow her to assign and track compliance training and create customized learning paths with an intuitive user interface. She and her team vetted multiple vendors over a period of three months, hoping to find one that checked all the boxes and fell within their budget.

Key challenges

• Provide and manage training for 1,300+ internal and external users.
• Course-authoring capabilities to create custom learning paths.
• Streamline the training administration process.
• Cost-effective solution.

Solution

Cindy and her team needed an all-in-one training solution that provided internal and external user onboarding, compliance training, and employee development courses. TrainingToday® was the only vendor that worked with her team to meet their needs.

“TrainingToday’s client success team was able to thoroughly train my team on all the features within their LMS and were consistently available to help us whenever we had questions. The professionalism of their team made all the difference and allowed my team to get the full use out of the LMS.”

During implementation, Cindy and her team collaborated with BLR’s onboarding team to customize and rebrand the LMS to reflect RNL’s branding. As a result, the platform underwent a transformation to appear as a dedicated RNL learning portal for users. Cindy’s team spent the next three years creating engaging learning paths for general onboarding, new manager training, and role-specific training for their sales representatives and customer service team.

RNL also had to resolve a unique problem of client training. It needed a robust LMS solution that gave the company the option to create several client-facing learning paths. One of these learning paths was designed to train users on navigating RNL’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and help them strategize how to use their product. Learning paths such as these were used as part of their new client implementation to help their clients hit the ground running.

Moving forward

Looking to the future, Cindy plans to rewrite some of the assignment rules in the LMS to make it easier to automate course assignments that match their organizational needs. With a quick upload and a few new rules, her team will be able to assign courses based on employee titles. This automation will free up time to focus on creating more learning paths.

With TrainingToday’s pricing model, compliance courses, customization options, and course-authoring capabilities, RNL can meet organizational needs as it continues to scale.
 
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