Level up with Training: The BEMO App Learning Center

Welcome to Part 3 of our BEMO App “Built in Public Blog”, where we give you firsthand information about the BEMO App product vision, ongoing updates from the build itself, transparent discussions of the problems we are setting out to solve, and direct insight into how we incorporate our core BEMO values into everything we do.   

Last week, we introduced you to the Support Center in the BEMO App.  This week, we are unveiling the Learning Center that will empower SMB customers to unlock new levels of knowledge and embrace new ways of working.  

1. Learning Center Intro
2. Design Decisions 

Learning Center Intro 

We hear it every day, from all our SMB clients, in a variety of forms:  

Where can I learn more about a certain topic?  
How can my team get more training?  
How do I know what to do next?  
How do I know what I don’t know?  

There is a lack of cybersecurity expertise across all industries, and nowhere is it more impactful than at the SMB level. We understand that SMBs often don’t have the luxury of time to sift through countless learning resources and keep up to date with modern technologies and best practices. 

For this reason, the second step for us in creating the BEMO App was to build a robust and deeply integrated Learning Center to allow all users access to the training they need, in the context where they need it, when they need it most.  

In surveying the competitive landscape, we found that too many products and services treat training as an afterthought. Many vendors have a “set it and forget it” approach to learning. This results in outdated content that fails to keep pace with the evolution of Microsoft products and services, despite the vital role of learning in addressing the cybersecurity knowledge gap.  

And how will BEMO keep content quality high and ensure the content is kept up to date? Because the BEMO App will deliver the same cybersecurity content that BEMO uses to train our own employees. If it’s not good enough for us, it’s not good enough for you.  

Design Decisions 

One of the best parts of product development is that we get to solve problems. And setting out to turn the industry on its head in the SMB space left us no shortage of problems to solve. I want to spend some time in this post to talk through the core problems that we set out to solve with our Leaning Center.  

How can we keep our course content fresh and relevant? 
It’s a difficult situation when there’s no training content. However, it’s even more problematic when the training content, though appearing fresh and relevant, is in fact outdated and not applicable.

This kind of content is more harmful as it gives a false impression of knowledge. Identifying which content is fresh and relevant is a challenge in itself!  

In building the BEMO App, our product team recognized that BEMO has this same challenge as our customers. We are continuously training our own staff on the latest Microsoft products and updates.

We depend on the most relevant content and information to train our team members to help our customers. And we can use the BEMO App to share that very same content with our customers to ensure it always stays relevant.  

What type of learning content should we offer?  
After surveying what is out there – and there is a lot of it -- the product team decided to stock the content library with content from three distinct sources as part of our initial launch.  

1. Microsoft Learn: Microsoft creates some of the most helpful and most thorough training content available anywhere. Microsoft content offers a “self-directed approach to arrive at your goals faster, with more confidence, and at your own pace (through) interactive modules.” BEMO leverages this very same content for our own training purposes, and we will offer a curated view of this content to bring you the highest-quality and most relevant content. 
2. Storyals: BEMO has been leveraging the high-quality content from Storyals for several years, utilizing it to train not only our own staff but also our Managed IT customers. Storyals’ content stands out for its consistency, compelling nature, and superior quality, making it one of the best learning resources available globally.
   
   We at BEMO take immense pride in incorporating their extensive content library into the BEMO App. This integration will help accelerate the adoption of Microsoft 365 productivity tools by end users.
3. Custom BEMO Content: Finally, only BEMO can create the course content necessary to help our clients get the most out of the BEMO App itself. We plan to deliver a number of courses to help our clients, their team members, and BEMO employees alike learn how to use the BEMO App to their advantage.  

Initially, the Learning Center content will be focused on Microsoft product and cybersecurity topics, but if there is interest, other training libraries could be added as well – Human Resource training, onboarding training, and even client specific training libraries.  

How can we help our clients track and measure their learning efforts?  
The challenge our product team wanted to solve with the Learning Center was not just providing availability to quality course content – but to be able measure the effectiveness of the content to give our clients tools to track the learning history of their users over time.  

For this reason, the BEMO App will provide the capabilities of a full learning management system (LMS) that will allow clients to direct learning efforts for all their users from within the BEMO App.

Clients can assign courses to their users, train completion history, set up reminders, schedule repeat/annual training, collect user rating of course content, and work with BEMO to create custom training plans for you company.  

How will users find relevant content?  
Customers need to find the content they need when they need it most. The first step is to create a good search function that will easily pull results from the course library based on course topic, course content, level, user rating, and length. This will allow users to find the basics of what they need.  

With the BEMO App, we’d like to take things at least one step further. Many products often utilize the concept of “tooltips” – pop-ups next to various elements throughout a product that allow you to get additional information quickly and as necessary. The BEMO App will use a tooltip-like concept to point users directly to the most relevant training content for a particular BEMO App element.  

And taking it one step further, users can save these training tips directly to a Training Playlist that users can accumulate to watch later.  

How can we help keep our users engaged in their learning efforts?  
We’ve all been here. You have training that must be completed by the end of the month. Things accumulate and there is never a suitable time. So, you leave it to the last minute. And you find yourself spending 8 hours on Saturday watching training videos at 4x speed to get everything done on time while your kid is playing in a soccer tournament.  

Maybe it’s not always that dramatic for you, but there are things we can do to make learning a little more fun, using gamification. Seen as a bad word ten years ago (because it was thought to trivialize the importance of learning), gamification is now commonplace and is used to take a lighter approach to learning.  

Incorporating elements of game-playing into the BEMO App Learning center, such as awards, achievement badges, scorekeeping, and leaderboards, makes training sessions more engaging. A friendly competition with other departments for bragging rights and virtual trophies can add an element of excitement.

The use of account leveling and language that frames training in gamified terms makes the process feel like a series of small, attainable victories. This not only makes training more enjoyable but also symbolizes your progression towards a higher rank within your company and team. 

How can we ensure we continue to evolve the BEMO App to meet the needs of our clients? 
We are an SMB just like you. To us, that means running lean, learning fast, and being more agile than our competition so that we can turn our learnings into client value as quickly as possible.

Our approach to product development for the BEMO App will leverage lean mechanisms that will enable us to learn as quickly as possible by monitoring usage metrics over time along with direct feedback from users to inform our design and development decisions as we continue to make our product better with each release.

So, whether you are part of our Early Adopters group or simply become a BEMO App user by having your tenant migrated, your opinions, actions, and usage metrics will help us constantly evolve to meet your needs.  

Thanks for reading today’s blog post.

Tune in next time when we cover our next major product component, “My Journey.” If you’re not already on the mailing list, please sign-up today so you don’t miss a single post.