Growing Globally with GoSkills: How Balsam Brands Fosters a Learning Culture Across Continents

When people know their jobs better, they’re happier in them. Thus, they’re more satisfied. We’ve boosted our employees’ abilities to implement their own initiatives and use their skills at work because they now have them.

—Paul Dawson, Former People Initiative Senior Strategist at Balsam Brands

Founded in 2006, Balsam Brands is a homegrown company specializing in lifelike artificial Christmas trees that has grown to over 300 employees spanning four international locations—Boise, Redwood City, Ireland, and the Philippines.

Balsam Brands' journey with GoSkills started with their Manila team and rapidly expanded to their North American offices.

Nearly 200 employees have been trained using the platform, with an impressive 50% average course completion rate. More significant than this percentage, though, is the fact that they’re keeping their employees happy. Employees from Balsam reported increased job satisfaction, enhanced productivity, and improved morale, which has led to higher retention rates.

So, how has GoSkills played a key role in helping Balsam Brands not only broaden its training initiatives across a diverse workforce but also in fueling its employees’ growth?

The challenge

Before finding GoSkills, the Manila team struggled to find high-quality, engaging training for their team that wasn’t “American-based.” Following the successful adoption from the Manila branch, GoSkills spread to other Balsam teams that were previously using other platforms.

It was our team in Manila who predominantly used GoSkills at first. We couldn’t find any other good training platform in that location, so GoSkills became our go-to option.

Now, multiple members of the Americas team also use it. Almost 200 Balsam Brands employees have been trained with GoSkills.

As Balsam Brands fosters a culture of continuous learning—encouraging employees to spend at least 10% of their time learning—the organization encountered a significant challenge: training a diverse workforce. This included people from varied cultural backgrounds and with diverse skill sets.

So, what set GoSkills apart as the ideal platform for not only delivering training to such a diverse workforce but also successfully engaging employees with Balsam Brands’ learning initiatives?

The solution

Paul underscored the following features that made the “GoSkills difference” for Balsam Brands’ training programs:

• Ability to import courses
• Ability to create personalized learning paths
• Customizable course templates
• Bite-sized lessons
• Quizzes and hands-on exercises
• Gamification
• Detailed reporting

If you want to dive deeper into each of these features and learn how Balsam Brands leveraged them to deliver such outstanding training programs, download the full case study.