Why Astellas Pharma Uses Private Podcasting for Corporate Learning and More

Josh Williamson is a Senior Technology Analyst at Astellas Pharma, a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company with US headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois. The company is focused on improving the health and well-being of people around the world through product innovation and reliability. In a recent webinar, we talked about why they are using private podcasting for corporate learning and employee engagement. Josh shares his insights on the types of learning that podcasting can deliver and how the company has scaled its program to support multiple initiatives and remote business teams.

In particular, Astellas wanted to develop a learning program that delivered small, digestible pieces of content. These micro-learning modules needed to be available to employees in a convenient way accessible when they had free time to stream the content. What’s nice about streaming audio content is that it supports multitasking, increasingly a priority among learning programs.

Here are a few highlights from the Webinar. And don’t forget to click on the the full transcript and recording if you’d like to get all of the great information that Astellas shared:

(2:55) Josh speaks about just-in-time learning: "So if you have a learner who is…in the office, maybe they are out and about, but they have a specific need. Can you reach them in the moment of that need? That’s just-in-time learning. A lot of times a podcast can fit that description really easily. A lot of times podcasts are easy to pull up. They are available on mobile devices readily, and a lot of times you can tag that content so it's easy to find.”

(6:19) Josh goes on to talk about word-of-mouth sharing: "If I were involved in an episode, and say I was a rep out in the field, and I was either a guest speaker, or maybe I recorded some music and I sang on the intro, I would be able then to share that with my colleagues and say, "Listen, did you hear episode five of show number six?" That was me on the recording. That was me in the intro." And that sort of recommendation, you're not going to be able to beat with marketing. Word of mouth recommendation is the best possible recommendation you can have."

(8:11) On requirements, Josh offered: "One of our requirements was that we needed to segment content. We needed to be able to say that content A is only available to group A, and then content B is only available to group B. They can't see both sections' of content… uStudio is actually a tool that does that for us. And it works with our existing employee data, and is able to segment content based on who the users are.

(14:00) Josh on gathering feedback shared: "Is that content impactful? Is it meaningful? Is learning transfer happening? Is it actually helping them in their day to day roles? Or is it something that isn't quite applicable to them? That feedback then drives the next episode, drives the next show, and you can begin to step back and alter some of that content if needed. This becomes an endless loop, and that way your content is meaningful, and it's more likely to be consumed and absorbed."

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As always the entire webinar and transcript are available to watch, listen or read.