Retail performance depends on speed.
Speed to knowledge.Speed to confidence.Speed to serving the customer.
For Dillard’s, traditional classroom training wasn’t keeping pace with the speed of the business, the day-to-day requests of savvy customers, and the continuous innovations across hundreds of products.
The Challenge - Coordinating Training at Scale
Dillard’s relied on in-person classroom sessions of roughly 30 associates at a time. While structured, this model created operational friction across a large, distributed workforce:
- Conflicting schedules made attendance difficult
- Travel time increased costs and took associates off the floor and away from customers
- Product and trend updates were delayed while waiting for sessions
- Readiness varied based on the effectiveness, availability, and experience of store managers who often operated as de facto trainers
In a fast-moving retail environment, waiting for a calendar slot meant associates weren’t always equipped with the most current information when customers needed it. After all, retail doesn’t operate on a training schedule.
The Shift - Learning in the Flow of Work
Dillard’s moved core training onto Learner Mobile, digitizing content and delivering it through self-paced, on-demand, mobile microlearning.
The shift changed the model:
- Orientation was reduced to 1–2 focused days
- Ongoing learning became available anytime,...
