Training and Development at Acuity: A booming year and a half of learning!

At Acuity, Inc., growth and development is the name of the game, engrained in our nearly 20-year history and company culture.  And not only is our industry footprint growing, but our people are too.  Investing in our commitment to employee success, we added a Training and Development arm early last year to expand upon the company’s training portfolio, learning resources, and upskilling initiatives.  Since then, the achievements of our employees’ learning and development are quite notable.   

In the past 18 months, we adopted Udemy Business, successfully rolled out manager training, launched in-house teambuilding opportunities, and premiered a leadership development series.  Additionally, we joined forces with our Technology Solutions Group (TSG) to offer a successful new hire technical boot camp, summer internship program, and other technical learning experiences, such as the AWS DeepRacer event. The introduction of these programs has invigorated a culture of learning.   

The launch of Udemy Business marked a shift in access to high-demand, online training material.  With licenses granted to every employee, we saw a 90% adoption rate with an average of 18 hours of learning per user thus far.  Hot topics ranged from Azure to ITIL to emotional intelligence and project management training.  We’ve also seen individual training requests from over one-third of our employee base, leveraging our competitive individual annual training budget.  These numbers only continue to rise. 

Our additional training offerings such as the Supervisor Alignment Training; Lunch, Learn, Lead Series; and MyEverything DiSCTM workshops, emphasize that it’s all about investing in employee success to drive company success.  We want to see our employees upskilling in their soft skills and leadership competencies as much as their technical capabilities.  These sessions are customized to meet the evolving needs of our industry and world of work and will continue to expand in the coming years. 

While our ambitious employees are due credit for the explosion in learning engagement, the executive sponsorship and full-force adoption by Acuity’s senior leaders are huge drivers of the success of these initiatives.  In fact, they were often the ones volunteering as a trial audience for new training initiatives.  With this approach to leadership, it’s easy to see why we are continuously growing and thriving here at Acuity.