The German industry giant created an aligned training system for a global partner network with Valamis

About the Vaillant Group

The Vaillant Group is an international company headquartered in Remscheid, Germany, which operates in the fields of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology.

As one of the global market and technology leaders, the Vaillant Group develops and produces customized products and systems and provides services for home comfort.

The product portfolio ranges from efficient heating appliances based on conventional energy sources to system solutions for the use of renewable energies.

In the 2023 financial year, the company, which has been family-owned since it was founded in 1874, generated sales of around 3.8 billion euros with 17,500 employees.

Its business activities focus primarily on Europe as well as on the countries of China and Turkey. The Vaillant Group has branches in around 20 countries and exports products to over 60 countries.

In addition to the product business, a comprehensive service portfolio is a focal point of business activities. This also includes training and technical support for specialist partners in the HVAC trade.

The objectives

The Vaillant Group had a clear direction: training should be more digital, more transparent and, above all, more efficient

Three central objectives were at the forefront of the optimization process:

1. Improved training and upskilling for specialist partners

New technologies and growing demands require massive upskilling, which cannot be realized with the usual face-to-face (F2F) training courses for specialist partners alone. In addition, the separate booking platform and the learning content scattered across different systems also represented an obstacle.

2. Transparency

It took a lot of effort to assemble data from different systems, content in different languages, and face-to-face trainings from different countries to measure a realistic overall picture of the results of learning initiatives.

3. Push digital

The transformation and digitalization of learning content, which was further driven by Covid, required a central platform to manage and map all the different training components.

The results of partnership with Valamis

With the Valamis Complete Learning Solution, the Vaillant Group was able to tackle all three goals at the same time

Flexibility was an important factor in the search for a suitable solution, as was the connection to the existing CRM system.

The requirements of the target group also had to be taken into account: Specialist partners, especially installers, needed a learning environment that was user-friendly and self-explanatory.

It also had to be possible to use the content on the move, as the majority of the target group works less on computers and is often under time pressure, so learning had to be as quick and easy as possible.

Thanks to Valamis’ partnership approach, the Vaillant Group had two experienced consultants by their side from day one to support the process.

The Vaillant Group’s experts are now so familiar with the platform that they can implement innovations and enhancements themselves.

Many face-to-face training courses have been fully or partially digitized in webinar form so that learners can learn the content at their own pace.

By integrating them into learning paths, the Vaillant Group now ensures that all participants in face-to-face training courses have the same level of knowledge, which makes training more effective. Some of the training courses have even been completely replaced by digital learning paths.

All learning content is in one place and is provided through localized instances in the right languages for each market.

In terms of transparency, the Vaillant Group now also has a single source from which all relevant learning data from all instances and countries can be accessed at a glance.

These key figures can also be combined with others from the company to gain completely new insights.

Now the success of learning campaigns and specially promoted lessons can be measured and it is possible to identify best practices, such as the ideal length of video content.

The sky is the limit

Following the initial launch in three pilot countries, the Vaillant Group now covers 16 countries with 19 academies in various languages.

In total, more than 1,700 training lessons are available digitally around the clock and more than 80,000 specialist partners can already access this learning content.

Since the introduction of Valamis, the company has managed to achieve a 240% increase in eLearning clicks.

Despite the great success of the implementation of Valamis, the Vaillant Group also has ambitious goals for the coming years. Ultimately, the entire partner network should be able to use the platform’s functions and take advantage of customized training offers.

Learning paths will be further expanded in order to make even better use of the advantages of blended learning for the specialist partners and to drive the energy transition forward more effectively.