Soft Skills “Accelerator” for Frontline Workers

The Challenge

MasterClass was looking to unlock a new revenue stream, and had identified an opportunity in soft-skills training for frontline workers. The Chief Business Officer and Head of Sales approached me with a challenge: could we deliver that solution, and fast?

The constraints were clear. Learning had to be delivered in the flow of work, on mobile, in bite-size formats that could quickly upskill employees in the soft skills that move the business - communication, teamwork, sales, productivity, and customer service.

The Approach

Within a week, I came to the team with a full working prototype of a weekly micro-learning experience. I had reformatted long-form MasterClass videos into short-form clips tagged by soft skill, and mapped curricula aligned to target industries - hospitality, retail, and manufacturing.

The prototype was a mobile-first UI. Alongside the videos it included “Daily Actions” - simple behaviors drawn from the video to apply on the job - and a manager experience: leadership development videos plus prompts for team huddles to help their people put those Daily Actions into practice.

The Build

I presented the prototype to the Chief People Officer and senior executives at Dick’s Sporting Goods, who jumped at the opportunity to pilot it across 25 locations. I then led a product and design team through development, plus a team of editors on the content. We stood up the pilot within three months, and I planned and ran the user research alongside it.

Over the following year, I built a library of two-minute clips harvested from the MasterClass catalog and tagged with the soft skills that matter to frontline workers and managers. That library let me assemble tailored curricula for companies across industries based on their business goals, then deliver it in custom-branded experiences.

The Impact

Within a year we had paying customers in retail, manufacturing, and hospitality.

I presented the product and the learning theory behind it at multiple professional conferences - including the Association for Talent Development’s annual conference, where I partnered with the Dick’s Sporting Goods team to share the pilot’s results. 84% of managers reported seeing the learning show up in their store associates’ interactions with customers and their teams.