TomTom is a global specialist in mapping and location technology that develops and provides its data and technology including maps, traffic data, and navigation services to global carmakers, businesses, and developers.

In early 2024, the team defined a bold two-year People strategy to reshape learning experiences and become a truly skills-based organisation to enable growth within TomTom. Specifically, the team wanted to equip its entire workforce (3,300+ employees) with personalised, skills-driven development paths as a route to future-proofing innovation, supporting reinvention, and driving internal mobility.

To achieve this, the company launched a new initiative in Q4 2024: the TomTom Academy, powered by HowNow’s AI learning and upskilling platform. Today, the TomTom Academy is not only revolutionising how people learn and grow, but acting as the connective tissue between employee development, skills growth, and wider company strategy.

It makes for a great story - and it’s one that Aneta Milosierna-Santos, TomTom’s People Product Lead, recently recounted for us…

Before they could build something new, Aneta and her team had to reckon with what wasn't working. Asked about the L&D challenges that existed prior to engaging HowNow, Aneta outlines five key issues:

• Inconsistent learning experiences: “Learning wasn’t centrally driven so there was inconsistency across different business units and geographies.” It varied wildly depending on where an employee was located.
• Complexity: As a global business, TomTom’s “geographically dispersed workforce added another layer of complexity, especially with regards to compliance and CRS (Common Reporting Standard) reporting.”
• Inability to create and share knowledge: “We needed a single platform that would make it easy to access, track, create and share knowledge. Without this, we knew that content would remain fragmented and that it would be harder to turn internal expertise into sharable learning.”
• Use of multiple systems: “We were using different learning platforms that didn’t speak to each other so we needed to consolidate.”
• User-experience: “Our existing learning platforms were not particularly user-friendly, which no doubt impacted learner engagement,” dampening it before it had a chance to build.

The objectives

TomTom’s overarching objective was not to simply select and onboard a learning platform, but rather choose the partner that would best support its core goals and make meaningful, skills-based learning a part of everyday work.

TomTom’s core goals:

• Become a dynamic, skills-based organisation by enabling personalised, skills-led learning in the flow of work.
• Leverage skills to drive agility and adaptability so that TomTom can continue to reinvent itself in line with evolving market and customer needs.
• Create effective learning experiences that enable employees to connect their learning to ongoing skills growth and career progression.
• Equip people with the skills they need to support product innovation.
• Improve learner (and employee) engagement by making L&D highly accessible and relevant to the individual.
• Provide managers with better visibility into growth and development, helping them to curate the right learning for their employees at the right time.
• Consolidate employee learning and customer onboarding into a one-stop-shop, purpose-built learning platform.
• Increase internal mobility through continuous upskilling and cross-skilling.

Why HowNow?

“HowNow’s AI skills mapping functionality was a big selling point”

With a set of clearly defined goals, TomTom began its search for the right learning partner.

Aneta recalls: “It was a two-stage process. We had our list of functionality requirements…and personalised, skills-based learning sat right at the top of that list.

“HowNow’s AI skills mapping functionality was a big selling point for us, as was the strong sense of partnership we felt during those initial conversations. Like TomTom, HowNow is an agile, fast-growth company…because of that, we could see their potential to evolve with us. That really resonated.”

The deal was sealed and TomTom engaged HowNow in Q3 2024.

Driving factors in the decision to choose HowNow:

✔ AI-powered personalisation

✔ Skills-based framework

✔ AI-powered skills mapping

✔ Seamless learning ecosystem integration

✔ Great user-experience

✔ Shared product-led mindset

✔ Strong sense of partnership

‍

The TomTom Academy launched just a few months later in Q4 2024, and was rolled out to the entire workforce in June 2025.

Skills-based learning in the flow of work

Every employee now has a one-stop home for all their learning, with AI-driven content suggestions personalised to their role, skills, and unique interests. TomTom's career framework—including all skills and custom proficiency levels—has been fully integrated into HowNow, giving people a clear line of sight between what they're learning and where their career is headed. Employees are fully empowered to own their growth journey.

Democratising knowledge creation

Any employee, anywhere in the world, can now become an internal content creator. Internal expertise that used to stay siloed in individual teams or geographies is now multiplying across the organisation at speed, in a way that is quick and easy for employees to contribute.

But it’s not just employees who are benefitting. The TomTom-HowNow partnership is delivering tangible benefits across five distinct organisational pillars:

• Managers: Gain dashboard-level insights into team skills and learning progress. This improves their ability to hold meaningful development conversations, better aligns development with performance and succession planning, and allows them to leverage AI to curate the right content for individuals.
• Leadership: Receives real-time visibility into skill readiness data across teams to support strategic workforce planning and future-fit capability building.
• Customers (Onboarding & Education Unified): TomTom consolidated employee onboarding and customer education into a single platform, creating a scalable experience on both sides. Over 1,000 business customers are now efficiently onboarded through the Academy, improving long-term customer experience.
• Talent Acquisition: Accesses internal skills data for smarter sourcing, mobility, pipelining, and building internal talent pools.
• Compliance: Utilises centralised tracking for mandatory learning, regulatory reporting, and complex CRS requirements.

‍

At HowNow, we’re passionate about learning that means business. This is what drove us to build a platform that connects the dots between learning, skills, and measurable business impact.

Six months in, the numbers are already moving:

• ⭐ 90% learner activation rate – starting at an impressive 80% within months of launch, and rising to 90% following the rollout of the skills feature.
• ⭐ 100% completion for employee onboarding – every new starter completes structured onboarding through the Academy.
• ⭐ 10% increase in internal mobility for technical roles – showing direct, measurable movement on one of TomTom's core strategic goals (with a 5% increase across the broader company since launch).
• ⭐ 4.4/5 skills pilot satisfaction score – employees rating the experience highly from the very first rollout (May-June 2025).
• ⭐ 100% Career Framework skills (and custom proficiency levels) integrated seamlessly into HowNow.
• ⭐ ~10,000 unique skills mapped to content, turning the career framework from a static document into a living, learning system.
• ⭐ 600+ pieces of internal content created – and counting, as knowledge-sharing becomes a natural part of how people work.

Why partnering with HowNow was “the right decision”

Speaking about the collaborative nature of the partnership, Aneta emphasises that the relationship itself has been the true differentiator: “Choosing HowNow was the right decision. I’m confident that the level of personalisation and customisation we’ve received from them wouldn’t have been possible with a larger vendor. The team acts on our feedback and they’re invested in our success, which makes for a true partnership.”

The partnership also aligns closely with TomTom’s forward-thinking approach to talent, a point emphasised by the company’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Arne‑Christian van der Tang:

“At TomTom, our people strategy is built around what we call the now of work - creating the conditions for our teams to have impact today. TomTom Academy gives us real‑time visibility into skills across our organisation and enables our people to learn, grow and deliver value with agility. In a world where the pace of change is relentless, this partnership helps us stay responsive, flexible and focused on empowering TomTom’ers to do their best work, every day.”

To learn more about HowNow and how we can support your journey to skills-based learning, contact our team to get your demo. We’d love to hear from you.

‍