Learn Fast: Share Knowledge, Scale Adoption

Construction teams learn quickly on live programmes, but those learnings often remain trapped inside the project where they happened. Skanska needed a company-wide application to surface insights, encourage reuse, and build a community around practical learning, without adding extra admin work for busy site and delivery teams.

The barriers were both behavioural and technical. Creating consistent, high-quality content takes time, and rich media is hard to publish quickly if authors must manually write summaries, generate captions, and format posts. At the same time, standard Power Apps controls are not designed for large video uploads at enterprise scale, and the solution had to support robust governance, data foundations, and analytics to show what is being learned, what is being adopted, and where it is making a difference.

LearnFast was delivered as an enterprise Canvas Power App designed to make capturing and sharing learnings feel effortless. The experience brings together content creation, discovery, conversation, and measurement in a single flow, while using pro-code extensions where necessary to meet scale and media demands.

The core product is a social learning hub where employees can create posts containing project write-ups, short videos, photos, links, and attachments, then engage through comments, likes, bookmarks, and lightweight in-app chat. Discovery is driven through tags and boards designed to work like Pinterest, making it easy for teams to follow topics that matter to them and explore relevant learnings when they need them. To move beyond passive consumption, posts support an "Adopt this learning" checklist and "Adapt for my project" notes, helping teams record how a learning was reused and what context changed when applying it elsewhere.

Enterprise foundations were built in from the start. Authentication and roles leverage Microsoft 365 identities, while an Azure SQL backend supports scalable relational data, reporting needs, and upload throughput. The solution is managed with environment separation across development, testing, and production, alongside auditability and retention rules to match enterprise governance expectations.

To increase contribution rates, the design focused on reducing authoring time. When a user uploads a video, the app automatically generates a transcript and captions for accessibility, creates a thumbnail, suggests a title, drafts key takeaways, and produces a blog-style summary and description that the author can quickly review and publish. Tag suggestions are also generated to improve findability and reduce the effort required to classify content.

Because rich media is central to practical, repeatable learning on construction programmes, LearnFast extends native Power Apps capabilities with custom controls and server-side APIs. This approach supports chunked and streamed uploads to secure storage, visible upload progress, resumable transfers, and enforcement points for validation and security hooks. The result is a Power Apps experience that remains simple for end users while meeting enterprise expectations for reliability and performance when handling large files.

LearnFast connects to Viva Engage so posts can automatically create or link to relevant community threads. This allows conversation, Q&A, and endorsements to happen in the collaboration space people already use, while still keeping the original learning post as the source of truth. A Power BI suite provides ongoing visibility into platform health and organisational learning patterns, covering engagement, adopt/adapt activity, creator health, and trending learnings across communities.

LearnFast is live as a single enterprise application supporting approximately 9,000 employees, giving Skanska a consistent place to share learnings, discover relevant practices, and record how insights are adopted or adapted across programmes.

By automating the heavy lifting of publishing, transcription, captions, thumbnails, summaries, descriptions, and tag suggestions, the platform makes it faster for teams to turn raw video into reusable knowledge, helping contributions happen while the learning is still timely. Custom upload controls ensure the experience remains dependable for large media files, while Viva Engage integration keeps conversation connected to content without fragmenting the user journey.

Power BI provides a measurable view of engagement and reuse, enabling leadership to understand how learning travels through the organisation and where it is being applied.