Why Garver left Docebo after 14 years for a future with Acorn 

The gap: Learning friction hampering professional development 

As a civil engineering firm with over 1,400 employees, Garver’s success in projects from water infrastructure to aviation and transportation depends on having technically excellent employees who meet stringent requirements year-round. 

For Learning & Development Consultant Audra Smith and her five-person team, managing professional development is not just about compliance. They’re charged with ensuring every employee can perform at their best by offering:

• In-house training on technical and human skills
• Content from LinkedIn Learning  
• External training such as webinars and conferences.  

These are all put towards a goal of 40 professional development hours a year per employee. 

But their previous LMS Docebo was frustratingly inefficient. It lacked basic features like generating transcripts of professional development hours or consolidating live and recorded training into a single module. On top of that, Docebo’s support charged for basic items such as reports (specifically, $800 for a report of all the courses in their catalog), making it hard for Audra to show their leadership simple information about the LMS, and lacked features like user-friendly dashboards or calendar invites for external instructors. 

The result was a system that made it harder for engineers to track their development and a lack of visibility for Audra and the team meant to track impact.

“My biggest report from day one wasn’t even accessible to me,” Audra said. “It felt like such a simple request.”   

The solution: From frustrations to a future-proof platform 

Audra and team faced an arduous search to replace Docebo after 14 years, evaluating 50 vendors and interviewing 18.  

“I had a spreadsheet and after the first couple meetings, it was like OK, this isn’t working. So, then it was: before we waste your time, can your software do this?” 

In a sea of LMS vendors, there were a few things that made Acorn’s learning and performance focus stand out:

• One platform to manage and report on all learning content for licensure requirements—that’s in-house webinars, LinkedIn Learning modules, and even external development activities like conferences and industry events.
• Consolidated course shells for live and recorded training.
• Flexibility to change how functionality was named to match Garver’s language
• A real-time tracker that shows employees exactly how many professional development hours they’ve completed toward their 40-hour goal, visible right when they log into the platform.
• Customizable supervisor dashboards that give managers visibility into their team’s PD progress.  

While Audra notes that a goal was for “the LMS to be a one-stop shop as much as possible”, Acorn didn’t stop at tracking learning. Garver has begun to lay the foundation for Capabilities, Acorn’s performance engine. While a late addition to their stack, Capabilities will take their existing competency infrastructure and map training to job roles based on competency level.

Garver’s learners will know exactly how they’re performing and what training they need to do to progress beyond mandatory PD—incredibly important for their engineering learner base, who have complex and unique performance requirements by trade. 

The impact: A partnership focused on Garver’s success

Since transitioning to Acorn, Garver has made their professional development process fit for purpose and actually user-friendly. Learners (including Audra) can see exactly how they’re tracking toward their professional development goals, while supervisors can proactively support employee growth and intervene faster when progression stagnates.

“Our users love how much easier it is to access information,” Audra said. “We’ve accomplished a lot of what we were trying to achieve in terms of user satisfaction.”  

Reporting can be tailored to Garver’s specific training metrics, so rather than simply tracking course completions, Audra and team can oversee professional development hours—meaningful to show impact for both learners and the organization. Oh, and they don’t have to pay extra for that learning and performance data.

Above all else, Acorn’s approach to partnering with customers really sold it for Audra, and she’s simply found it fun to work with the Acorn team. Our Technical Account Manager (TAM) program provides an added layer of insight that allows Audra to make Garver’s professional development program more impactful, thanks to quarterly system reviews and heatmaps for tracking user navigation.

For Garver, professional development isn’t just about tracking training hours—it’s about equipping the right employees with the right capabilities, at the right time, to deliver high-impact engineering work. Acorn understands this more than most.

“There have been other vendors that have… come back and said, ‘Do you mind sharing with us why you chose Acorn over us?’  

“Of all 18 vendors I met with, Acorn was the only company that wanted to partner with us,” Audra explained. “We weren’t just going to be another account. That partnership was the biggest factor in our decision.”