Luma Brighter Learning - Most Innovative Company of the Year

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2021, Click to Enter The 2022 STevie Awards for Women in Business

Company: Luma Brighter Learning
Company Description: Luma Brighter Learning is a small (10>) women-owned instructional design and learning company that was founded in 2008 on the premise that when people learn, their lives improve and so does society. https://learnwithluma.com/. Luma has been making big strides in a male-dominated industry despite being women-owned.
Nomination Category: Company/Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company of the Year – 10 or Less Employees

Nomination Title: Luma

Luma Brighter Learning is a small (<10) women-owned instructional design and learning company that was founded on the premise that when people learn, their lives improve and so does society. We started the company serving higher education, but pivoted in 2014 because we saw an opportunity to help the trucking industry.

Training in the trucking industry has historically been video, paper-based, and in a physical classroom. Learning research shows that these methods do not align with how people learn (Jonassen, 1999). Luma’s eNugget® Learning Management platform collects real-time analytics and provides a variety of content formats and learning tools to help with information processing.

Luma listens to the industry and our clients’ needs in order to innovate solutions that show measurable results. As Gary Faldin from DART said with using Luma, “We saw our crash rates frequency improve.” Our CSA had improved (Love, 2021)."

Luma has a track record for showing measurable results in the trucking industry:

-May 2021, Gold Titan Winner for Production Innovation
-November 2020, Silver Best in Bix Winner for Small or Medium Business Product of the Year.
-December 2020, Gold Stevie®Award for Company of the Year in Consumer Products for a small <10 women-owned company.
-November 2019, Gold Stevie®Award for the Company of the Year in the for a small <10 women-owned company.

Specifically, Luma has helped carriers, since July 2019: improve retention and engagement of drivers (Huff, 2020b; 2020c), save a significate amount of money (Huff, 2020a; 2020c) and in the end, improve safety scores (Huff, 2020a; WorkHound, 2021).

Retention of Drivers: Sutton was operating at around 80% driver turnover for many years and ended 2019 with only 20% voluntary turnover (Driver Reach, 2020).

Cost savings: Luma saved Forward Air Corp $1000 per driver with over 1,000 drivers going through its orientation utilizing Luma. (Huff, 2020a). Kottke saves the company $300 to $500 per driver (Huff, 2020c). Still, others report reducing training costs by 75% (Fleet Owner, 2021).

‘Safety Improvements: Luma has attributed to lowering carriers’ Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scores ((WorkHound, 2021). Forward Air specifically said it was lowered by 19% when they transitioned to 100% Luma’s learning solution (Huff, 2020a).

First, Luma was the first to market with these unique offerings in the trucking industry:

April 2021: a built-in interactive content game-based authoring tool, which one client wrote in an email “is game-changing for the industry”

September 2020: an on-line proctoring tool (LumaLens), that one client wrote in an email, This tool is will save carriers millions of dollars with nuclear verdicts…millions” https://www.fleetowner.com/fleet-management/press-release/21142469/lumalens-documents-driver-training-events-with-photo-evidence

March 2020: a synchronous conference tool (https://learnwithluma.com/lumalive/ LumaLive), that keeps track of attendance for trucking safety meetings. Jessie Burnette, chief people officer of Hirschbach said, “The help and support we received from Luma has been critical to keep us moving during the COVID-19 crisis,” (Huff, 2020b)

Second, Dr. Gina Anderson co-founder and CEO of Luma’s research is transforming the teaching approaches that are being considered in this industry. According to industry experts, turnover is at an all-time high and continues to be an issue (WorkHound, 2020). There is a push to get more women into the male-dominated industry. It is one thing to recruit women and another to retain them.

In March 2021, Dr. Anderson published a teaching book for the industry and has been working with America’s Service Line to study more social approaches to learning with drivers by using discussion boards embedded in their “eNugget®” microlearning lessons. Dr. Anderson is finding that women tend to prefer these approaches to connect them to each other. She is sharing her knowledge with the industry in hopes to revolutionizes how the trucking industry teaches women drivers.

All real-time articles and research referenced and more can be found at https://learnwithluma.com/news/

September 2021: ATA Safety, Security & Human Resources: Dr. Gina Anderson, CEO of Luma Brighter Learning, will share research on how a community of learner approach can be used as a springboard for engagement and retention for women drivers, https://sshr.trucking.org/#aboutsshrnce

There also was an article published in January 2021, very early on about her research intention by a popular trucking journal, https://www.ccjdigital.com/workforce/article/14972985/building-communities-of-learning-in-the-trucking-industry.

March 2021: Dr. Anderson’s New Book: Teaching Without A Teaching Degree: Luma Learning Lessons https://learnwithluma.com/teaching-without-a-teaching-degree/
All lessons are freely available on https://learnwithluma.com/category/learning-lesson/

DriverReach. (2020, March 12th). Sutton trucking doubles down on applicant experience and sees immediate impact. https://tinyurl.com/ywytmnym

Huff, A., (2020a, June 15).Forward saves on driver training costs and improves compliance with virtual orientation.Commercial Carrier Journal Fleet Management Magazine. https://www.ccjdigital.com/forward-driver-training-costs-improve-compliance-virtual-orientation/

Huff, A. (2020b, May 26).Hirschbach fully digitizes driver hiring, training.CCJ Commercial Carrier Journal Fleet Management Magazine. https://www.ccjdigital.com/hirschbach-digital-driver-hiring-training-luma-enugget-lms-platform/

Huff, A., (2020c, April 27).Fleets go digital to hire, train drivers remotely during coronavirus.CJ Commercial Carrier Journal Fleet Management Magazine. https://www.ccjdigital.com/fleets-digital-hire-remote-driver-training-coronavirus/

Love, K. (2021, March 2021).Replay: Train and Retain: How Dart Keeps Drivers for the Long HaulThis article captured Gary Faldin speaking to his improvements. https://tinyurl.com/54k8fm6j

WorkHound. (2020).What drivers said in the first half of 2020. https://workhound.com/resources/2020-driver-feedback-trends-6-months/