Corporate learning is moving beyond course completion and classroom attendance. Two organizations using Schoox are putting that shift into practice: Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants and Westgate Resorts have each won Gold in Learning & Development categories at the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards, with both programs tying employee development more directly to operational and business goals.
For frontline-heavy businesses, training is often difficult to standardize. Employees work across restaurants, resorts, departments and locations, while managers need learning programs that fit around operational demands rather than pull workers away from them.
That makes the latest recognition for Schoox customers notable less because of the award itself and more because of what the two winning programs reveal about the direction of HR technology.
Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants received Gold for Best Learning Program Supporting a Change Transformation Business Strategy. Westgate Resorts won Gold for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program. The 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards recognize organizations across learning and development, talent management and other human-capital disciplines, with judging focused on program design, objectives, benefits and measurable results.
The two programs tackle different workforce problems.
Cooper’s Hawk replaced a paper-based training process with a centralized learning environment supporting more than 10,000 employees. Its implementation uses Schoox alongside Paylocity’s HRIS, creating a digital system for role-specific training, compliance, development and reporting.
The change is important for a distributed frontline workforce. A restaurant organization operating across multiple locations can struggle to ensure that employees receive the same training at the right time. Paper processes also make it harder for HR and learning teams to see completion rates or identify gaps quickly.
Moving those processes into a learning platform creates a common layer between workforce administration and employee development. It also gives managers greater visibility into whether training is reaching the people who need it.
Cooper’s Hawk says the transformation has produced completion rates above industry benchmarks while reducing administrative work. The company is also using the model as it expands into new markets and restaurant concepts.
Westgate Resorts took a different route.
Its LIFE — Leadership Immersion for Excellence program redesigned leadership development around competency building and operational experience. Instead of maintaining a lengthy leadership program available to a limited set of departments, Westgate moved toward an enterprise-wide model delivered through Schoox.
The significance is scalability.
Leadership development has traditionally been difficult to expand because programs can require classroom instruction, senior facilitators, travel and significant time away from day-to-day operations. Westgate’s model attempts to reduce those constraints while opening leadership development to a wider portion of its workforce.
The company says the initial pilot produced a strong internal promotion rate and reduced the time and cost required to develop leaders. That makes the program less about training as a standalone HR activity and more about building an internal talent pipeline.
This is increasingly becoming the central question for corporate learning technology: Can an organization demonstrate that learning changes workforce capability or business performance?
Brandon Hall Group’s award framework reflects that shift. Its 2026 HCM program includes categories for learning measurement, learning technology implementation, results of learning programs, competency development, learning in the flow of work and use of AI for learning.
That breadth mirrors the evolution of the learning management system (LMS) market. Modern platforms increasingly compete on employee experience, skills visibility, analytics, content personalization and integration with broader HR systems rather than simply hosting online courses.
Schoox is positioned in this market around frontline enterprises, putting it into competition with broader enterprise learning ecosystems from vendors such as Workday, SAP, Microsoft and Cornerstone, as well as specialist learning platforms and talent-development providers.
The distinction is important for HR buyers. A large enterprise may already have an HR system of record, payroll platform and talent-management suite. The learning platform therefore needs to integrate with those systems while addressing the realities of frontline work: mobile access, short training sessions, role-specific content and manager visibility.
Artificial intelligence is adding another layer to that competition. Learning platforms are increasingly incorporating AI to recommend content, personalize development paths, identify skills gaps and automate aspects of content creation. But the two Schoox customer examples highlight a point that can be overlooked amid the AI conversation: better learning technology still needs a clearly defined business objective.
Cooper’s Hawk started with the need to scale and standardize learning across a large workforce. Westgate focused on developing leaders more efficiently and broadly. Technology was the mechanism rather than the end goal.
That distinction matters for enterprise HR and learning teams evaluating new platforms. A sophisticated LMS or learning experience platform cannot compensate for unclear competencies, weak manager participation or training disconnected from operational priorities.
The strongest implementations are likely to be those that connect learning data with other workforce signals — including performance, internal mobility, retention and skills development. In that model, learning technology becomes part of a broader workforce intelligence stack.
The 2026 Brandon Hall awards therefore offer a useful snapshot of where enterprise learning is heading. Training is becoming more centralized and measurable, but also more closely connected to frontline operations and internal talent pipelines.
For companies with large distributed workforces, that could be the more consequential trend: making learning easier to deliver is useful, but making it easier to connect employee development with business performance is where HR technology starts to become strategic.
Market Landscape
The enterprise learning market is increasingly converging with skills management, talent intelligence and employee experience technology.
Traditional LMS platforms primarily managed courses, enrollments and completion records. Modern learning ecosystems are expected to support competency frameworks, personalized development, mobile learning, analytics and integration with HRIS and talent systems.
Brandon Hall Group’s 2026 awards categories reflect that broader market, spanning competency development, learning measurement, technology implementation, learning in the flow of work and AI-enabled learning.
For frontline organizations, the challenge is especially acute. Learning has to operate within the constraints of shift work, geographically distributed teams and high employee turnover. That makes integrations with systems such as Paylocity, mobile-first delivery and automated reporting increasingly relevant.
Schoox’s two winning customer programs also illustrate two distinct enterprise use cases: standardizing learning at scale and building internal leadership capacity. Competitors such as Workday, SAP, Cornerstone and Microsoft increasingly approach similar problems through broader HR, talent and productivity ecosystems.
The competitive advantage will increasingly come from how well these platforms translate learning data into workforce decisions rather than from the size of their course libraries alone.
Top Insights
- Cooper’s Hawk digitized training for more than 10,000 employees, showing how frontline enterprises can use learning platforms to standardize development and reduce administrative work.
- Westgate’s LIFE program turns leadership development into a scalable competency model, potentially strengthening internal promotion pipelines while reducing traditional classroom-training constraints.
- Brandon Hall’s 2026 categories emphasize measurable learning outcomes, reflecting the growing expectation that L&D teams demonstrate business impact rather than completion rates alone.
- Schoox’s customer wins highlight demand for HR technology that connects learning, HRIS data, employee development and operational priorities across distributed frontline workforces.
- AI may reshape corporate learning, but these programs suggest successful implementations still begin with defined workforce outcomes rather than technology adoption for its own sake.
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