How Decathlon scaled learning across 41 countries with 1,000 in-house authors.
41 countries. 100,000 employees. Content that couldn't keep up. Decathlon put agile authoring in the hands of the people who know the work to drive frontline performance.
frontline workers
global authors
courses built in a year
Decathlon is the world’s largest sporting goods retailer. 41 countries. Hundreds of sports. Thousands of roles. And a belief that every employee should own their development.
The problem was content. Central L&D couldn’t build it fast enough, localize it accurately enough, or keep it current across every market. The people who could were already on the frontline.
One authoring tool. 4,000 courses. Here’s how they did it.
Keeping 100,000 frontline workers operationally ready, every day, across 41 countries – that’s not something central L&D can do alone. Decathlon believes the expertise to make that happen sits inside the business. That learning should be open, available, and owned by the people doing the work.
So they opened it up – giving more than 1,000 employees the tools to create and share learning themselves. Using Create [formerly Elucidat], within a year more than 4,000 courses had been built from the ground up. And the initiative started to attract new talent.
“Our end goal is not to create experts but for our authors to be autonomous in creating elearning content through Create [formerly Elucidat] to enable upskilling.”
Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
Local experts. Agile authoring. Frontline-ready learning.
Working with Create [formerly Elucidat], Decathlon built a learning ecosystem around employee authorship. Authors weren’t starting from scratch – course duplication, easy translation and local branding meant they could quickly adapt and localize their content.
A small inner circle of creators soon became a global network. Simple onboarding kept the barrier low. And soon there were 1,000 global authors producing critical learning that kept pace with the business.
“The main benefit of our learning tools choice is the autonomy given to the content authors. Each country can localise what it wants according to its specificities without recreating everything.”
Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
The results
Fast content, built by the people who do the work.
Within a year, 1,000 employees across 41 countries created nearly 5,000 courses.
These expert courses serve more than 90,000 frontline learners. And the library continues to grow.
The business moves fast. Now the learning does too – and it’s become part of what attracts people to Decathlon in the first place. Learning drives that all important talent pipeline.
We see our approach to using, sharing and spreading L&D as a key step in our company performance. It always needs to be one step ahead.
Sophie Vanhems, Skill Leader, Decathlon
More customer stories
