Learning at Madix: Why a 20,000-Course Library Was the Problem, Not the Solution

“Everybody who gets a GoSkills license, they’re thrilled. It’s like they were given a present.”

— Craig Kilgore, Director of Culture and Leadership at Madix

Madix, Inc. is a store fixtures manufacturer with roughly 70 years of history and around 2,200 employees across Texas and Alabama. The shelving and display systems they build end up in Walmart, Kroger, and Publix stores nationwide. About three-quarters of their workforce is on the manufacturing floor.

For Craig Kilgore, Director of Culture and Leadership, that last detail was the whole problem. Madix lists lifelong learning among its core values, and Craig presents it at every new-hire orientation. But the learning platform they had couldn’t reach the people who needed it most.

Since switching to GoSkills, Madix has gone from roughly a 12% participation peak to 115 employees completing courses in a single year — with no assigned courses, no quotas, and no reminders. Along the way, employees have moved from the production floor into supervisory and office roles.

The challenge: a library too big to use

Madix previously ran about 150 licenses on a platform with a large general-purpose learning library. Here’s the before and after:

On the old platform participation peaked at 12%, with 10 to 20 people making real use of roughly 150 seats. By contrast GoSkills active license usage peaked at 93 of 100 licenses, and led Madix to increase the number of seats based on employee participation. The number of GoSkills licenses now stands at 175.

The issue wasn’t motivation. It was that the platform had been designed for a different kind of learner.

Madix employees are highly skilled at what they do, but many of them had never taken a class on a computer before. Drop that person into a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and ask them to pick the right one, and the result is predictable.

“It was just overwhelming. If I'm coming in and I have very little or no computer skills and I want to start learning stuff about Excel or Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, I can go to YouTube and get probably a free tutorial, but it's going to be some random person; who knows?”

— Craig Kilgore, Director of Culture and Leadership at Madix

As the sole administrator, Craig also ran into practical limits. Employees would ask him for access and he had nothing to give them. When he tried to find an arrangement that fit a manufacturing workforce, he was passed from his rep up through several tiers of management — none of whom asked what he was actually trying to achieve, but instead tried to sell him on another block of 100 licenses or a different product.

What Madix needed

Craig’s search came down to six requirements:

• A catalog an inexperienced learner could navigate without giving up
• Consistent, high-quality instruction rather than a patchwork of uploads
• Lessons short enough to finish around a production shift
• A way to prove participation before committing to a full year
• Content relevant to both the floor and the office
• The flexibility to increase the number of seats incrementally

The solution: curation, short lessons, and flexibility

Craig found GoSkills after a superintendent spotted it and passed it along. He ran the evaluation himself, started month-to-month, and converted to an annual agreement once the usage data backed him up. Internal approval was quick, because he’d already answered the objections before he asked.

1. A curated catalog with a clear starting point

Instead of a thousand Excel courses with no way to tell them apart, the GoSkills course library offers a vetted set organized basic through advanced, or by subtopic. Craig’s test was simple: could an employee find the right course without abandoning the search?

"If you’ve ever gone to a restaurant with a ton of options, you just get scared and overwhelmed reading the menu you can’t even make a choice, right? I think that’s the same thing with the workforce and online learning."

Learners need clear options with course content that doesn’t overlap or frustrate. That structure matters most for the learner with the least confidence.

2. One instructor, start to finish

For someone new to formal learning, conflicting explanations are worse than no explanation at all. GoSkills courses are taught by a single instructor from beginning to end, and Madix’s learners noticed.

“I like the instructors for sure. That makes it so much better than just reading something and then taking a test over it. I'm a very visual person.”

— Elaine Valentine, Customer Service Representative at Madix

3. Bite-sized lessons that fit a production schedule

In 2025, the average completed course at Madix took about 1.6 hours across roughly ten lessons. That’s the difference between training someone can finish and training that never ends.

Shannon Weathers, who supervises the shelf line, fits learning in before her crew starts, at lunch, or in the evening once the floor quiets down.

“Short enough that I can manage it, but still informative enough that I can learn something from it.”

— Shannon Weathers, Production Supervisor at Madix

Video lessons, transcripts, printable notes, and downloadable exercise files all sit in one place — which, for learners who’ve studied online elsewhere, is the difference they name first.

4. Access treated as a vote of confidence

This is where Madix does something most organizations don’t. Craig doesn’t open enrolment to everyone. Licenses go to employees that supervisors identify as having real potential, which makes a license feel less like software and more like recognition.

“If I just open it up and say, hey, come get a license, I’ll probably get 50 people that want a license. But how many are actually going to use it? I want to keep it kind of special.”

— Craig Kilgore, Director of Culture and Leadership at Madix

About half of adoption now comes from supervisors recommending the platform directly, and the other half from employees telling each other about it.

5. Licenses you can buy a few at a time

The practical unlock was being able to grow the program in increments that matched demand. When Craig runs out of licenses, he adds a small block and prorates it, rather than committing to fifty or a hundred seats he has no immediate use for.

“With LinkedIn Learning, you’ve got to buy blocks of 100 so to give one license, I’ve got to buy a hundred licenses. Come on. But now [with GoSkills] I can buy smaller blocks, put them in play, and I can prorate it.”

This is a common complaint within the world of employee training software. Most of the players that dominate the market force organizations into a commitment they neither need nor want.

Craig admits:

“I didn’t know I wanted it until I got it, because I didn’t think it was available.”

GoSkills turned "Sorry, we can’t," into a scalable program that could keep pace with demand within the organization.

The results

Not surprisingly, a clean, distraction-free interface with easily digestible lessons and a support team that understands employee training was a hit, both with learners and the administrator. 

Madix currently has 175 GoSkills licenses — because that’s the number they want, not the number a sales rep forced them to take. 

Courses with the highest enrolment rates were: Microsoft Excel 365 – Basic & Advanced, Emotional Intelligence, Microsoft Excel 2019 – Basic, Time Management & Productivity, and Leadership Training.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. What’s more interesting is what Madix employees did with the access, given that nobody told them what to do.

Employees were intentional about the courses they took

Left to choose, Madix’s learners choose close to home. Elaine Valentine has been a customer service representative at Madix for 41 years and had never taken an online course before GoSkills. She worked through courses on customer service, de-escalation, conflict resolution, and communication — and the change showed up in how she works.

“The older you get, the more you tend to slow down and listen to what others have to say instead of always being the one that needs to talk.”

— Elaine Valentine, Customer Service Representative at Madix

Elaine saw courses that were relevant to her role and signed up. She then moved on to leadership, mentoring, and delegation courses, because new people keep joining her 15-person department and she mentors them.

Shannon Weathers took a similar path with higher stakes. She joined Madix as a machine operator, then moved to welder, quality assurance, lead, and senior lead before taking over the shelf line. Lean Six Sigma courses were an obvious fit for her role as production supervisor, but she also saw the need to develop her leadership, mentoring, and Excel skills.

"Everything I've taken has helped shape me into leading my team the way I do now."

— Shannon Weathers, Production Supervisor at Madix

That is the ultimate return on investment for any L&D team: practical training that translates to on-the-job execution and meaningful behavioral shifts.

Completion without chasing

Cari Smith, a customer service rep of nearly three years, has completed every one of the 38 courses she's started, passing the assessment on almost all of them. Her approach is less about discipline than about knowing herself.

"I want to start the course, finish the course, not have to pause it."

— Cari Smith, Customer Service Representative at Madix

Her longest course sat unfinished for three months while she completed nineteen shorter ones. Then she went back and finished it, highlighting a crucial lesson: as with most tasks, momentum is key when tackling online learning.

Here is what the Madix team accomplished with their L&D program:

What your team can learn from Madix’s success

Madix’s situation is not unique — a manufacturing workforce, one administrator, shift patterns that make evening study a real ask. What did they do differently? Here are five takeaways you can apply to your organization’s learning strategy:

1. A bigger library isn’t necessarily a better one

Tens of thousands of courses sounds like value on a proposal but reads as decision fatigue to a learner. When someone with limited computer experience has to choose between forty Excel courses by unfamiliar instructors, the rational move is to close the tab. A curated catalog with clear levels asks less of the end user and encourages them to navigate it.

2. Prove it before you commit to it

Craig went month-to-month, watched what actually happened, and converted to an annual plan once participation justified it. That’s why his CFO signed off almost immediately — he arrived with evidence rather than projections.

3. Treat access as a perk, and partner with a platform that scales

Opening enrolment to everyone produces a long list of licenses, difficulty justifying the investment, and often very little learning. Madix rolls out access bit by bit, reducing upfront commitment and indirectly encouraging participation through scarcity.

4. Start people on short courses

This actionable finding showed up in Madix’s data and in their learners’ own advice. Long courses stalled until someone has a few short completions behind them. Momentum has to be built somewhere cheaper first.

“Start easy. Do something you enjoy first, and then start the harder learning stuff. If they start off with one of the hard ones, they’re going to be like, I ain’t doing that no more.”

— Cari Smith, Customer Service Representative at Madix

5. Show a clear link between course content and job role

Excel and leadership training matter at Madix because people see a direct connection between what they’re learning and what they do (or want to do) everyday. Where a skill connects to a job that actually exists, learners finish. Where it doesn’t, no amount of encouragement helps.

GoSkills features worth knowing about

With GoSkills courses, Madix gains access to:

• A curated catalog of over 600 courses organized basic through advanced
• One instructor per course, start to finish
• Bite-sized lessons built for learning between tasks
• Learning paths that group courses into a sequence with certification at the end
• Graded assessments and certificates of completion
• Gamification with customizable rewards
• Admin notifications when a learner completes a course
• Usage and completion reporting that can be shown leadership
• An AI Tutor built into the lesson screen for when a learner gets stuck
• A free monthly Excel challenge series at a range of difficulties
• Practical AI skills content
• Month-to-month or annual payment options
• Licensing that allows them to scale your training program at their pace

Madix’s story shows that reaching a frontline workforce isn’t about throwing more courses at your team. It’s about offering well-chosen content on a platform that understands employee learning.

“If you’re looking for a solution for a manufacturing firm, I can’t think of a better one than GoSkills.”

— Craig Kilgore, Director of Culture and Leadership at Madix

Looking for a learning platform your frontline team will actually use? Create a free GoSkills account to explore the platform with your team — no commitment required. Or, if you’d prefer a guided tour, book a demo with our Customer Success team to see how GoSkills can support your goals.