Kooyman accelerates onboarding with a virtual store and multilingual e-learning

Making onboarding and product knowledge accessible for a multilingual retail organisation

Kooyman is a well-known retailer in building materials, hardware and home improvement in the Caribbean. The organisation has multiple branches spread across different islands and serves employees with various roles, from shop floor to product specialists.

This presents a clear learning challenge. New employees need to quickly find their way in the shop, the organisation and the way of working. At the same time, training is also needed for customer friendliness, safety, product knowledge and planogramming. All these topics must also be understandable and consistently available in multiple languages.

The request to Maxcademy was therefore broader than just digitising onboarding. Kooyman was looking for a learning solution that allows employees to familiarise themselves with the store environment even before they start, and which supports various learning needs within the organisation in a scalable way.

A Matterport 3D tour as a flying start for onboarding

A distinctive part of the learning path for Kooyman is the Matterport 3D tour. In this virtual store, new employees have the opportunity to explore the environment before they are actually on the shop floor.

This makes onboarding immediately more concrete. New colleagues can orient themselves in the store, explore important areas, and become familiar with the context in which they will be working. This lowers the threshold for the first working day and makes learning more tangible than in a traditional introduction in text or slides.

For Maxcademy, this shows how digital learning experiences can go beyond standard e-learning modules. By combining a virtual environment with targeted learning content, an onboarding experience is created that is both informative and experiential.

From onboarding and safety to product training and planogramming

The collaboration with Kooyman includes multiple types of learning solutions. In addition to the virtual onboarding, Maxcademy also develops general onboarding training, including modules on customer friendliness and safety.

Within the Rise modules, Maxcademy also builds custom interactive mini-games with custom code. This allows employees not only to read information but also to actively practice with real-life situations. For example, we developed exercises for hazard recognition and for choosing the right personal protective equipment (PPE). The mini-games are directly integrated into Articulate Rise, so that the learning experience for the participant remains cohesive.

In addition, we developed product training programmes that allow employees to deepen their knowledge of the product range. For retail environments, this is essential: good product knowledge supports service, advice, and the trust with which employees assist customers.

Planogramming is also part of the training offering. For this, Maxcademy developed a separate training programme that helps employees better understand and apply store layout and shelf logic. The provided project files show that this programme consists of multiple modules, including around understanding and reading planograms and different types of conversions.

By offering these subjects in one consistent learning environment and in multiple languages, a scalable learning landscape is created that adapts to the practice of Kooyman.

A multilingual learning programme that helps employees get up to speed more quickly

With this approach, Kooyman has a versatile digital learning programme that connects onboarding, professional knowledge, and store practice.

The learning solution:

• provides new employees with a virtual introduction to the store even before their first working day;
• supports consistent onboarding across multiple subjects and target groups;
• combines general training with in-depth product training;
• makes planogramming understandable and applicable in practice;
• allows employees to actively practice through customised mini-games and custom interactions in Articulate Rise;
• is applicable in English, Papiamento and often also in Dutch;
• shows how learning design, retail context and multilingualism come together in customised e-learning.

For Maxcademy, this is a strong case in which onboarding, interactive retail training and multilingual content development come together.

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