Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants earns Gold for Best Learning Program Supporting a Change Transformation Business Strategy; Westgate Resorts takes Gold for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program.
AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Schoox, the Intelligent Learning & Growth Platform for frontline enterprises, announced today that two of its customers, Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants and Westgate Resorts, each won Gold in the Learning & Development category at the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards.
“The HCM Excellence Awards have become the most recognized benchmark for excellence in human capital management because organizations know they are earned, not given. Every winning program has demonstrated measurable impact, innovation, and execution through one of the industry’s most rigorous evaluation processes. We are proud to recognize the organizations setting the standard for the future of work,” says Mike Cooke, CEO, Brandon Hall Group™.
Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants: Gold, Best Learning Program Supporting a Change Transformation Business Strategy
Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants won Gold for its enterprise learning transformation, replacing a manual, paper-based training model with a centralized, automated learning system supporting more than 10,000 Team Members across the organization. Powered by Schoox and integrated with Paylocity HRIS, the blended learning approach expanded access to consistent, role-specific learning and created a single source of truth for training, development, compliance, and reporting. The transformation has driven training completion rates well above industry benchmarks, significantly reduced administrative workload, and created a scalable learning model that supports Cooper’s Hawk as it expands into new markets and restaurant concepts.
“As Cooper’s Hawk continues to grow, learning is more important than ever—and our approach to learning must grow with us,” said Angela Brantley, VP of Learning & Development at Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants. “We believe that when we invest in our people, we invest in the future of our business. Our partnership with Schoox has helped us create a more consistent and accessible learning experience for Team Members and Managers across our organization, while giving our leaders the tools to develop their people. We’re proud of this recognition because it reflects our belief that learning should go beyond training—it should build capability, strengthen performance, and create meaningful business impact. When our people grow, our teams perform better, our hospitality gets stronger, and our business grows.”
Westgate Resorts: Gold, Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program
Westgate Resorts won Gold for its Impact-Driven Learning Model, a fundamental redesign of how the organization ensures learning improves business performance. The centerpiece of the transformation is LIFE (Leadership Immersion for Excellence), which replaced a lengthy, costly leadership program limited to a handful of departments with a flexible, competency-based model now deployed enterprise-wide on the Schoox platform. The redesign dramatically lowered the cost and time required to develop a leader while producing a strong internal promotion rate in its initial pilot cohort, turning leadership development from a narrow, high-cost program into a scalable engine for organizational growth.
“Innovation isn’t just about technology. It’s about finding better ways to solve business challenges,” said Stephanie Ketron, Vice President of Learning & Development at Westgate Resorts. “Through our new LIFE program, we reimagined leadership development from the ground up, replacing classroom instruction with hands-on operational immersion. The result is a faster, more cost-effective way to develop leaders while expanding opportunities across the organization. By unlocking talent in places we had never reached before, we’re building a stronger leadership pipeline and a stronger future for Westgate.”
A Shared Commitment to Measurable Impact
Schoox pointed to both wins as proof points for its broader mission of connecting learning directly to business outcomes.
“These two wins tell a powerful story about what’s possible when learning is built around a business outcome,” said Sandra Moran, Chief Marketing Officer at Schoox. “Cooper’s Hawk brought the same standard of training to a large, distributed frontline workforce, including many people who had never had access to structured learning at all. Westgate rebuilt its leadership program from the ground up so that readiness could be developed at a scale the business had never had access to before. Both teams started with a business result they were accountable for, not a training format they were attached to, and used Schoox to work backward from there. That’s the discipline we built this platform for, and it’s exactly what Brandon Hall recognized in both of these programs.”
The result is learning that is not just delivered but is engineered for measurable outcomes.
Learn more about Schoox Learning Impact Suite, their frontline-focused platform and their global customers’ successes, or request a demo.
About Schoox
Schoox is the Intelligent Learning & Growth Platform for frontline enterprises — purpose-built to go beyond traditional learning management by engineering learning to reliably drive business performance.
Where conventional LMS platforms stop at learning delivery, Schoox goes further. We identify role-based skills, generate purpose-built learning programs, and measure outcomes against operational KPIs. And uniquely, we forecast the expected return of a training investment before a program ever launches. The result: L&D that operates not as a cost center, but as a measurable driver of enterprise performance.
In addition to Copper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants and Westgate Resorts, Schoox is trusted by global brands including KIOTI Tractor, Five Guys, The Fresh Market, Sport Clips Haircuts, Sonesta Hotels, and Wingstop. Schoox is defining a new category of intelligent learning, engineered with AI to ensure every training dollar delivers business results.
Learn more at www.schoox.com.
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SOURCE Schoox LLC
