Udemy improves lives through learning by providing flexible, effective skill development to empower organizations and individuals.
As of September 2022, the platform had more than 57 million learners, 213,000 courses, and 74,000 instructors teaching courses in over 75 languages. There have been over 773 million course enrollments on the platform.
Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco with hubs in Ankara, Türkiye; Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Mountain View, California; Denver, Colorado; Dublin, Ireland; Melbourne, Australia; New Delhi, India; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The impact of Dado on our global onboarding program can't be overstated. We've been able to bring consistency and transparency for every location while saving 10's of hours each week compared to our previous process. Our new hires and managers tell us how helpful Dado has been for them, and we have even had other departments request to use Dado for their internal processes like role-based onboardings or new manager trainings.
Udemy onboards new employees globally on a regular basis. Additionally, in 2022, to support their business expansion, they needed to increase the overall employee base which meant an increase in hiring beyond normal attrition.
True to their nature, Udemy had a robust learning curriculum for new Udemates. However, the administrative burden outside of the actual learning content created several key challenges. Each location, worker type, and level had different tasks that needed to be completed by different teams: people managers, IT, office managers, people operations, and more. Managing the completion of all these tasks in a large ecosystem of stakeholders made the work even more complex as onboarding classes grew. The manual process of updating their project management system for each new hire and then often following up over email or Slack meant that too much time was taken from higher impact activities.
Lauren Hauser, Learning & Development (L&D) Program Manager, recalls what those days were like:
"Before Dado, everything was manual with many hours spent per new hire. New Udemates and their managers had to navigate a complex process and the behind-the-scenes manual work was also error-prone adding to the confusion."
These time-consuming, manual processes were also costly, stressful and risky for the business.. It meant that Udemy's current employees were spending time on low-value activities, dealing with inefficiencies and potentially creating risk if key compliance steps were missed.
It was also impossible for Hauser to know how the program was performing and for whom, as there was a lack of data that allowed her to identify how and where to improve in the preboarding phases. This was especially true for non-US team members.
Udemy needed to create a global onboarding program that was efficient, cost-effective, and delivered a positive and consistent experience for the top talent the company recruits.
The Udemy team selected Dado to streamline and enhance the onboarding process for the HR team, internal team members and new employees. The ability to automate complex admin at scale, while creating an easy and seamless experience for employees, made Dado the perfect solution.
Hauser has shared positive feedback with the Dado team, citing the increased efficiency on a daily operational basis, and highlighting the reporting functionality which provides data to senior leadership showcasing the substantial time that has been saved since implementing Dado. The feedback internally has shown increased positivity from new employees and hiring managers on the onboarding process, particularly highlighting the ease of use and progress-tracking automation. Hiring managers have praised the “in the flow of work” features of the Dado platform, which empowers them in providing a top experience to their new team mates.
The implementation of Dado saves the Udemy People team and their collaborators a significant amount of time on an ongoing basis. Additionally, they've been able to expand and enhance the program without adding any admin overhead.
This has resulted in saving 1,350 hours of manual administrative time, which accounts to roughly 168 working days and approximately $150K+ worth of admin cost savings in 8 months for the company.
