Rosetta Stone Classroom: Thomson Reuters

About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is a leading source of intelligence information for businesses and professionals, employing 50,000 employees across 93 countries.

They deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets.

Thomson Reuters: At a Glance

• A leading source of intelligence information for businesses and professionals.
• 50,000 employees across 93 countries.
• International organisation with supplier, customer and partner relationships around the globe.

Established Objectives

Following Thomson’s acquisition of Reuters in April 2008 to form Thomson Reuters, the need for scalable training solutions to support company-wide staff development became a priority.

With offices in locations as diverse as Argentina to Zimbabwe, Thomson Reuters identified a strong need to incorporate a global language-learning offering to support their employees across all locations and functions. Although language-learning solutions had previously been offered, various methods were being used in numerous geographic locations and business functions. The company therefore took the decision to integrate a more comprehensive tool across the global organisation to cater to the business need for language skills.

Learning Technology Innovation Manager for Thomson Reuters, Monica Swanson, said: “We previously relied on face-to-face language tutorial sessions, which proved restrictive for employees due to geographical or time contraints. Rosetta Stone helped us to overcome these logistical barriers and add much needed flexibility to the training we provide. This is a huge win for us.”

Additional problems with the existing solutions were expense – the lack of a global supplier meant missing out on global economies of scale, and the primarily classroom-based methodology – which made the solutions difficult to scale up, and logistically cumbersome.

“We are delighted with the take-up on the program and we have received fantastic qualitative feedback from employees.”
Thomson Reuters records an average of 2,036 accesses per month with more than 12,000 registrations to learn languages with Rosetta Stone. —Monica Swanson, Learning Technology Innovation Manager for Thomson Reuters.

Solution

After thorough research on available options, Thomson Reuters chose to adopt Rosetta Stone, an interactive language-learning solution, on a global level, following their experiences working with the company on a smaller scale, in select segments of the organisation.

Once the solution was implemented, Thomson Reuters was able to offer 29 languages to over 50,000 learners around the world, with no restriction on which language employees can study.

The Rosetta Stone Manager tool allows administrators to track learner progress, edit the available course content to focus more closely on specific business need and perform comparative analysis on individual and department progress. This gives businesses the unique ability to ensure consistent quality on a global level.

Results

Following initial success of the global solution, Rosetta Stone is now offered to all staff who request language-learning support. In some cases is used to assess staff commitment to developing language skills, with user progress being taken into account when considering access to more expensive further face-to-face language tuition.

All available languages have now been accessed by Thomson Reuters’ employees, and the availability of granular metrics has proved highly useful for administrators and managers.

“The deciding factors in the decision to implement Rosetta Stone on a global level were the program’s unique scalability, accessibility and measurability. The ability to integrate the program into our global network, coupled with the ‘no translation’ learning methodology, mean not only can our staff access it from any of our global offices, but also make language-learning accessible to learners of all ability levels.” —Andrew MacGovern, VP - Strategic Talent for Thomson Reuters