Adobe Success Story

Thomson Reuters
Leading global information solution provider reduces eLearning development time 50% with help from Adobe Captivate software

Accelerating speed to confidence
Thomson Reuters offers intelligent, information-based solutions, software tools, and applications for professionals in many industries. For example, financial professionals rely on the company’s trading and post-trade connectivity solutions, accountants tap the company’s decision-support tools and software applications for tax and legal professionals use research and reference solutions from Thomson Reuters to find out more about trademarks or international laws. Thomson Reuters solutions are broad, varied, and supported by 50,000 employees in 93 countries, making the company the world’s largest source of intelligent information and solutions for businesses and professionals.

Thomson Reuters solutions change at lightning speed. “Five seconds is considered a long time in the trading and financial markets,” says global head of learning Charles Jennings. “Our financial products are continually changing and updating. At peak times our real-time data is updated 200,000 times per second. We are constantly innovating and building eLearning content to reflect those changes and help our internal staff and customers come up to speed quickly.”

Benefits

• Accelerated eLearning development by more than 50%
• Reduced development costs
• Improved eLearning quality
• Enhanced support for product launches with timely training

Project Details

Rich interactivity, quickly delivered
For Thomson Reuters, eLearning is the only logical solution. Jennings explains that speed of education is vital, especially in the financial markets where customers in more than 90 countries around the world need to immediately build the confidence and skills required to accomplish their jobs effectively. While the convenience and speed of online training is paramount, Thomson Reuters also strives to deliver eLearning that is equally as rich and interactive or more so than an in-person classroom experience.

This is where Adobe Captivate software comes in. The company has standardized on Adobe Captivate for eLearning development for all of its financial products. “With Adobe Captivate, we can quickly capture product demos or overviews and then overlay rich interactivity such as quizzes, simulations, and a whole range of things that other tools do not allow us to add,” says global eLearning program manager Tina Durrant. “Adobe Captivate is far superior to any other options we’ve tried.”

Refreshing content on a dime
eLearning specialists within Thomson Reuters use Adobe Captivate to capture product demos and overviews, using audio to provide context and add examples of the product’s use in real-world situations. The ease of use of Adobe Captivate makes it ideal for quickly updating content about ever-changing product features. “Our eLearning specialists can update and maintain parts of each training program very easily, and that’s vital because some components of our products can change in as little as six months,” explains Durrant.

Adobe Captivate is used in conjunction with Adobe Flash Professional software for eLearning development. Specialists often use Adobe Flash Professional to author rich, animated portions of an eLearning module that are less prone to constant change. “We use Adobe Flash Professional for content such as how a particular department in a bank functions—something that is not likely to go out of date any time soon,” says Durrant. “Then we use Adobe Captivate to quickly refresh the content with in-depth interactive product demos showcasing new changes or enhancements to our solution. Adobe Captivate enables us to easily keep our eLearning up to date while maintaining the rich interactivity our customers expect and appreciate.”

Cutting development time in half
Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Captivate not only help the company enrich eLearning content, but also speed development time, reduce costs, and help boost quality. Thomson Reuters previously relied heavily on outsourced resources to develop its eLearning materials. By tapping into the intuitiveness and accessible features of Adobe tools, eLearning specialists within the company can readily produce training content in-house in a fraction of the time and cost. And, because internal specialists are required to learn the company’s solutions as part of their job functions, they have more in-depth knowledge to impart to customers.

“By using internal resources and solutions such as Adobe Captivate, we have reduced our training development time by more than 50%, and that’s translating to significant cost savings,” says Jennings. “Plus, because our internal specialists are closer to our solutions, our training has become more tailored, more focused—and improved overall.”

Because training can be delivered in less than half the time it previously took using external resources, Thomson Reuters can better support product launches, complete with accompanying eLearning modules. “Even if a product goes live within a few days, with advanced planning we can very quickly get an eLearning course out there to bring our customers up to speed,” says Durrant. “Adobe Captivate is a key cornerstone of our go-to-market strategy.”

In 2007 alone, Thomson Reuters employees working around the world completed nearly 70,000 eLearning modules, a testament to the convenience and popularity of the company’s online training solutions. As a next step, Thomson Reuters is investigating the use of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro to enrich and extend eLearning delivery to its customers around the world. “Adobe solutions are pivotal to our eLearning capabilities,” concludes Jennings. “We’re always looking for ways to harness their power to improve our business success.”

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