How Axalta is training smarter with Vimeo Enterprise

Axalta is a global coatings company with a passion for providing customers with innovative and sustainable solutions. That commitment — to finding inventive and iterable ways to work — is honored in their products, practices, and training. For the past five years, Axalta has relied on live virtual trainings to help reach their partner workforce of nearly 13,000 technicians. 

“Prior to 2016, our company had been training people the same way for 10 years or so, in the traditional classroom setting,” says Steve Hamaday, Virtual Training Manager at Axalta. But as the company continued to grow, the training status quo wasn’t meeting Axalta’s business needs. “Technicians don’t always want to travel to our training centers, it’s not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ for our diverse group of learners,” adds Steve. “What we started to do was take the same great classroom content and make it available online.”

But when it came to finding the right platform, Steve and his team quickly discovered that all platforms are not created equal. “If our instructor was demonstrating the use of a spray gun — which requires a certain finesse of a wrist roll — on a standard webinar platform, we’d experience frame skipping,” explains Steve. 

“We found that missing those fractions of a frame was a huge deal for our painters, as they could be missing important learning points.” So, Axalta turned to Vimeo Enterprise for a solution that was high on quality and low on effort. “We are able to get a much higher quality video product using a platform like Vimeo compared to traditional webinar software,” says Steve. 

Building better (training) systems

“We have been using Vimeo’s live streaming tools for the last five years, to conduct classroom instruction and theory directly to the auto shops we serve,” says Steve. To design the curriculum itself, Steve and his team thought deeply about how their employees might already be using video. 

“What we wanted to do is find something that worked for them,” says Steve. “We wanted to make our virtual trainings fun to watch, so we took a TV approach to our trainings — something that you’d equate to the news or SportsCenter — with high production value.”

To further build an engaging experience for learners, Axalta implemented a user-generated content component to their trainings. Painters record their own techniques in the shops and submit them to the Axalta team. During the virtual trainings, the Axalta team will play the video during the live stream and offer feedback in real time.

Making the most of Vimeo Enterprise

Before making the jump to Vimeo Enterprise’s full solution, Steve and his team had been using Vimeo to house their VOD content, and operating Vimeo’s live tools separately. “We wanted a one-stop shop for all of our training content, where we could go live and have the stream available on-demand immediately,” says Steve. “It just naturally made sense for us to progress to using Vimeo Enterprise.”

Laddering up to Enterprise also allowed Axalta to combine their multiple brand accounts into one highly secure account, using Vimeo team settings to set permissions and manage access. “My immediate team is three people, and we all have admin-level access,” says Steve. “We also have an extended team in our Learning & Development group that does a lot of e-learning. We have them set as contributors, so they can upload and access the content they need, but without cluttering their experience with other content that isn’t relevant to their work.”

“Organizing our training videos by teams or topics — all quickly searchable and on a stunning branded homepage — helps us shorten ramp up time and connect with teams at scale.”

Steve Hamaday, Virtual Training Manager

Plus, with Video Library, Steve and his team can make their content even easier to navigate for every member of the team. “Organizing our training videos by teams or topics — all quickly searchable and on a stunning branded homepage — helps us shorten ramp up time and connect with teams at scale,” says Steve. “The subfolder and folder organization is extremely useful when organizing our content, whether it’s external-facing, or just for our team on the back end. This has made it so much easier for our team to collaborate, organize, and minimize the time searching for assets.”

Video solutions for everyday work

Axalta still relies on live training sessions to keep their workforce up to date, but they’ve also begun unlocking the power of a whole library of internal content, organized and easy-to-use for folks from all parts of the business.

“Vimeo allows us to have our video content live in a bunch of different places, like in LMS, within an e-learning module, on a website, or even in a specific video catalog. And, if we have to make a change to the video, we only really have to make the change in one place because it’ll spread from there. We found that to be an amazing thing for our workflow.” 

By hosting all of their content in one hub, Axalta is also able to reuse and recycle content, rather than having to create new comms for each new hire or development. “We are firm believers in recycling,” says Steve. “What may have started as a live virtual training can be cut down and used in an on-demand eLearning module that someone could take on their own time. We like to provide all different tools to our employees.”

Looking for more tips and tricks on virtual training? Our handy guide can help.

Read The Go-To Guide for Virtual Training