Pilot Catastrophe Services

Pilot Catastrophe Services, the largest insurance adjusting company in the United States, provides contingent workforce support to leading insurance providers when they face increased demand for claims due to catastrophic events. On an average day, Pilot Catastrophe employs up to 4,000 insurance adjusters; but when a major event like a hurricane hits, their staff can grow to as many as 10,000 adjusters within a week.

Whenever disaster strikes, thousands of insurance adjusters at Pilot Catastrophe have to get up to speed as quickly as possible, often within a matter of hours. They also need continuous access to reference materials so they can learn as they do their jobs. Training might be focused on how to handle customer claims, customer service, or how to properly represent a particular client.

No matter the topic, Pilot Catastrophe understands that not everyone learns the same way. The learning and development (L&D) team knew it had to go beyond simply creating great content—they also needed to deliver the content to the right employees and provide a more modern and engaging learning experience overall.

Pilot Catastrophe selected Schoox as its preferred LMS because it allows the L&D team to easily upload, organize, and share learning content at the corporate level, while empowering the managers of various business units to track and lead training initiatives for their own teams. It also provides an engaging user interface and mobile accessibility options so employees can access learning content anytime and anywhere.

The Power of Engaging, Bite-Sized Content

The company’s employees explore their career paths independently and often complete training on their own time. An insurance adjuster who specializes in property insurance, for example, might decide to expand their skills in automobile insurance so they can take on a broader range of assignments. To accommodate this approach to career progression, Pilot Catastrophe recognized it needed to create engaging content that employees want to access to pursue career advancement. “If it’s engaging, people will watch it,” says Greg Stokes, Head of Recruiting, Media, Communications, and Training at Pilot Catastrophe.

Pilot Catastrophe knew it needed a better way to deliver all its learning content. Without a large staff, however, Greg also knew platform administration had to be as simple as possible. The company selected Schoox so it can properly distribute content to the right audiences while providing an engaging and intuitive user experience for admins, managers, and learners alike.

“We deliver content related to a variety of different companies to a lot of employees, none of whom work directly for the companies they’re representing. Schoox helps us navigate all those nuances, properly segment content, and ensure the right people have access to the right information whenever they need it,” says Greg

Flexible Access to Personalized Content

Since employees only represent a single insurance provider at a time, but may represent many different providers throughout their tenure, Pilot Catastrophe needed an LMS that ensures people have access to the right content whenever they need it. Moreover, Greg and his team have to ensure that employees don’t have continued access to proprietary or confidential information unrelated to their active assignments. And since many of their employees work temporarily, Pilot Catastrophe requires a platform that makes it easy to quickly add, remove, and adjust users and their permissions within the system.

For Greg and his team, seamless integrations with Pilot Catastrophe’s HRIS seamless integrations with Pilot Catastrophe’s HRIS and the unique flexibility of the Schoox platform eliminated the manual process of adding and continuously adjusting user permissions within the system: learners are automatically added and assigned to the right coursework based on the roles and information designated in the HRIS.

With their previous LMS, Greg found that employees were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information thrown at them. In contrast, the flexible hierarchy within Schoox allows Pilot Catastrophe to personalize content for each learner, ensuring suggestions are timely and relevant. Schoox helps Greg and his team manage user permissions and access to content at a granular level, enabling them to change permissions or reassign users to different courses and curricula as needed.

A Shift to Hybrid Learning

Originally focused on in-person training, leadership at Pilot Catastrophe saw that it wasn’t always the most cost effective way to train a contingent workforce. Recognizing the need to shift strategies, Pilot Catastrophe reconsidered how to deliver training before the COVID-19 pandemic, so the company was ahead of the game when the rest of the world was forced to shift to remote-first strategies. Greg and his team focused on developing accessible, high-quality content in multiple formats so all learners can find a method that works for them. To accomplish this, they created an in-house media and broadcast team to design eLearning materials that supplement in-person learning.

“In the past, we crammed people with information before they started their tasks, but learners forget. The chances of them recalling the information when they needed it was slim. We recognize that every learner is different. Listening to them was important—we realized they’re apt to choose the shortest learning option, so we created content to fit those preferences. Now we have over 500 courses with 2000 substeps, most of which include short 5-7 minute videos on individual topics,” says Greg.

“We provide training in all formats: in person training, to videos, to online training exercises they can revisit 24/7.”

Greg Stokes, Head of Recruiting, Media, Communications, and Training at Pilot Catastrophe.