Inkling Announces Illuminate 2019 Industry Awards for New Breed of Learning Mobilizers

SAN FRANCISCO — November 21, 2019 Inkling, a modern learning platform, today announced the 2019 Illuminate Award winners. The awards recognized six organizations for their innovation and commitment to staying on the forefront of learning and development (L&D). Winners were honored at Inkling’s inaugural user conference, Illuminate, which took place on September 16-18, 2019, in Chicago.

“We are proud to honor companies that are blazing trails with new learning and operations strategies designed to engage learners with always available, always updated content,” said Jeff Carr, Former CEO of Inkling. “Our Illuminate award winners, whom we view as learning mobilizers, are pioneers in leveraging Inkling to provide just-in-time operational knowledge and learning that is relevant to their daily work and more impactful than traditional training tools. These companies are top performers and the types of organizations to emulate for their innovative and effective approaches to developing the modern workforce.”

Inkling presented awards in six categories: 

  • The Ignite Award – A champion of Inkling who sparked a major internal change in their organization by purchasing Inkling or expanding its usage.
  • The Innovation Award – A creative go-getter who found new and innovative ways to use or apply the Inkling solution to address internal challenges.
  • The Impact Award – A benefit achiever who created enormous cultural or monetary value within their company by implementing and promoting Inkling.
  • The Insight Award – An eye-opener who leveraged Inkling analytics to gain team and organizational insights and used that information to drive business improvements.
  • The Inspire Award – A leader whose use of Inkling improves their company, industry, or community in amazing and positive ways.
  • The Inkvangelist Award – A motivator who goes above and beyond to share their Inkling story, experiences, and best practices with others, including prospects and other Inkling customers.

Among the 2019 winners were: 

  • H&R Block — The Ignite Award: In the second year of a multiyear transformation strategy, H&R Block’s strategic pillars for transformation includes building operational excellence. One way they’ve done this is with their training. To make training simpler and more engaging for aspiring tax pros before tax season, H&R Block converted to digital training, which eliminated waste and simplified how work gets done. With that success, the company expanded Inkling access to all 97,000 H&R Block tax professional trainees and corporate associates.
  • Hikvision — The Insight Award: It’s not enough to simply have data on learning activities; it’s critical to do something with that information. Hikvision is a leading supplier of video surveillance products and is dedicated to using Inkling’s advanced analytics to understand employee training usage patterns. Hikvision uses this data to drive healthy competition for learning completions, better understand low knowledge retention rates from a traditional three-day training program, and even pinpoint what time of day employees most prefer to take a learning course (right before lunch if you were curious). Hikvision’s innovative use of analytics has produced insights to help them restructure their learning processes to increase product knowledge and improve sales outcomes. This change allowed the company to drive improvements throughout the organization.
  • Project Lead The Way— The Inspire Award: When PLTW wanted to provide high-quality STEM curriculum with real-world applied learning experiences to Pre-K-12 students, the non-profit selected Inkling as the platform students and teachers would use to access all course materials. This enabled PLTW to align their forward-thinking mission with an exceptional user experience that adapts to learners’ specific needs while collecting valuable insights on student engagement. Inkling’s platform has also allowed PLTW to integrate advanced activities like coding directly into their coursework for a streamlined learning experience. Last year, PLTW’s Inkling content reached an average of 300,000 students and teachers per month around the country, and more than one million unique users to date.
  • McDonald’s — The Inkvangelist Award: Every successful organization has its brand evangelists, and for Inkling, McDonald’s is a treasured “Inkvangelist.” McDonald’s participated in one of Inkling’s first customer coffee hours, led a speaking session at ATD, participated in press interviews, and has collaborated with other Inkling customers, sharing its story, experiences, and best practices.

The customer award ceremony was held during Inkling’s inaugural two-day user conference, which brought together human capital management experts and thought leaders to share the latest trends and cutting-edge strategies. Enterprise learning expert Josh Bersin discussed “The Future of Work,” and McDonald’s Chief Learning Officer, Rob Lauber, shared his perspective on creating and managing an overall learning and talent development strategy for employees in more than 35,000 restaurants worldwide.

About Inkling

Inkling is a mobile learning enablement platform designed for distributed workforces. Inkling brings together learning and doing to improve the employee experience from day one and every day after that by delivering mobile, effortless access to the training and resources they need to be successful in their role. Leading brands trust Inkling to help them efficiently onboard employees, ensure continued performance enablement and successfully execute corporate initiatives while providing new levels of visibility into critical operating metrics. Founded in 2009 Inkling is based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information, visit www.inklingelemdev.wpengine.com.

Contact: Erin Bocherer for Inkling, 678-294-2258, erin@cogentacom.com