The Evolution Journey Case Study

About Trend Consult

Trend Consult, a training and consulting company with more than 20 years of experience, aims to develop a new Learning Platform that focuses on a personalized learning program for each user. 

A key initiative was to enable e-learning and adopt a more guided approach to help users create customized learning paths. 

Ultimately, Trend Consult was able to deliver both a fully integrated marketplace for learning programs and a personalized learning platform in just 2 months with the help of Plant an App. 

• 20 Days to build
• 4000 Courses Delivered
• Helped grow students 20x

Digital Systems for Customised Learning Paths

Trend Consult, a training and consulting company with more than 20 years of experience, aims to develop a new Learning Platform that focuses on a personalized learning program for each user. 

A key initiative was to enable e-learning and adopt a more guided approach to help users create customized learning paths. 

Ultimately, Trend Consult was able to deliver both a fully integrated marketplace for learning programs and a personalized learning platform in just 2 months with the help of Plant an App. 

 

And then came the pandemic...

The pandemic created a landscape that will continue to encourage remote work, remote learning and digitization of services. In light of these recent changes in the working conditions, Catalin Vasile, Head of Sales & Customer Experience Practice at Trend Consult, mentions that the pandemic has splatted their clients into two categories. 

There were those who believed they would put their projects on hold and it would take only a while before they would return to the initial agreements. Then there are the clients who realized that the teams are no longer working in the same office, that managers no longer manage in the same way and, thus, they need to find tools to navigate these turbulent and uncertain times.

New topics have emerged, such as remote work or remote team management, emotional resilience and stress or anxiety management.

The pandemic was also a challenge for Trend Consult. On the one hand, it was a commercial effort. "We had to convince the existing clients that we can continue learning and more than that, that people need learning programs at the beginning of the pandemic, now more than ever. We all had to adapt to the new situation," he recalls. 

Then, it was an internal struggle for them to change the delivery method, since the traditional B2B programs were very hard to impossible to reproduce outside of that physical space. “It was also an effort to develop topics that were not on our map until that moment ", as Catalin Vasile recalls. For the e-learning programs, Trend Consult had to speed up its delivery. 

However, what the pandemic did was only to highlight some shortcomings. "We were all faced with a situation we had never encountered before and we felt the need to learn things, to communicate at a distance, to organize our time better, to deal with anxieties and fears that occurred”, remarks Vasile. Still, even before the pandemic they discovered that there is a greater openness to learning which translated into an opportunity for expansion. 

This is when Trend Consult started working on an e-learning platform, in collaboration with Ascendia, a company that develops both learning management system platforms and tailor-made educational modules. Thus, the two companies decided to bring their skills together and develop customized content. 

The project was developed with the small businesses in mind, specifically the corporate clients who usually don’t have budgets to cover the learning needs of the entire organization. Catalin explains that there are entry-level positions or specialists who need to attend the classic course formats, in a physical space, but companies don’t have the financial means for it. 

Therefore, Trend Consult accelerated the speed of developing new courses, while converting all the existing programs and bringing them in a remote learning format, through video-conference applications, such as Zoom, Webex or MS Teams. In this way, they could address a much wider audience. 

Ascendia has the experience to create e-learning content, which is engaging and modular and takes the users through various styles of delivering concepts. When we say e-learning, a lot of people think of video, but there is a trap: video is very disengaging. It runs in the background while your mind is focused on your other priorities in life. However, in a video format course combined with text, practical exercises, quizzes and animation, you must always pay attention and you can’t pass if you don’t have a significant class participation

Catalin Vasile explains.

Rise of the Citizen Developer

Leading on from this, the intuitive nature of a low-code platform enables citizen developers to create their own applications and software solutions. By removing many of the barriers associated with traditional coding frameworks, non-developers are empowered to pursue their own digital vision. In this way, low-code democratises app development and supports the self-efficiency of companies and organisations. 

However, this is not to say that low-code neuters the potential of experienced developers; it instead offers a more intuitive and productive development process, while still offering the freedom and agility that professional coders desire.

Introducing Plant an App

The new generation of low-code technology. Plant an App is a development platform that provides developers and IT teams with the speed and accessibility of low-code, but without compromising flexibility, or the potential for collaboration. 

Built from the ground up by developers, Plant an App boasts an abundance of different features on its platform. This includes four levels of software development and hundreds of pre-built tools. Combined with an accessible low-code platform, this allows you to easily sculpt your desired digital vision; in less than a week you could build a working prototype. The flexibility of Plant an App’s platform also allows for real-time collaboration during the development process. Citizen developers and business users can work on the same platform simultaneously, while API management assists in organising your different projects in one place. If your or your team have an idea, you can bring it to digital fruition.