How the Australian government used a 40+ multi-tenancy functionality to drive learner engagement across 40,000 learners

The gap: Creating a future-ready workforce 

The Australian Federal Government identified that they needed to create a centralised shared service for APS employees to access leading learning and development initiatives in a scalable and consistent way.  

They needed to improve employee retention, build the skills needed to future proof the APS workforce, and ensure best-in-class education was shared amongst agencies. The decision was made to create a central resource called Learnhub.  

Learnhub had four key problems to solve for.   

1. The ability to centralise a large volume of users in one location.

2. The ability for each participating government agency to continue to deliver on its own core priorities alongside the common capability-driven APS performance strategy.

3. The ability to share resources.

4. Any platform used must have the highest levels of information security.  

The impact: One platform for multiple tenancies 

Acorn was selected to be the provider of choice for Learnhub.  

Acorn hosts a central catalogue of shared content to 44 federal agencies. Individual agencies can create and share content throughout the entire shared service, or restrict access to their tenancy and users. Agencies also have access to content from exclusive third-party providers like LinkedIn Learning and Go1.  

Learnhub provides an incredibly secure gateway with Single Sign On, using multiple systems to authenticate user access alongside a manual login option. User authentication is done through an external ADFS validation or against internal systems from each department, guaranteeing a high level of security for each tenancy and sub-tenancy. Acorn is also IRAP certified which is the highest level of security available. 

The solution: Personalised development for every learner 

Within Acorn, content can be mapped to capability frameworks and development plans. Frameworks can be manually created or chosen from the platform’s proprietary Capability Library, supporting the specific performance strategy of the Australian Government at large and individual agencies at the same time.  

Each agency has its own tenancy, with some like the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment utilising several sub-tenancies to provide secure and compliant training to their internal teams as well as external users. Acorn also dynamically scales to support up to 44,000 users per annum, so agencies are not limited by user licenses and are assured of 99% system uptime.  

Via the Acorn platform, Learnhub has since become the largest shared learning service across Australian federal government. Acorn has maintained 100% user retention by providing flexibility larger departments crave whilst maintaining the ease of use and centralised platform that allows smaller organisations to thrive, all while allowing agencies to securely share best practices within tenancies.