Elearning - June/July 2008 - (Page 19) Perfect Marriage? MORE THAN EVER, H.R. IS LIKELY TO ENCOMPASS TRAINING AT LARGE CORPORATIONS. IS THAT GOOD OR BAD? B Y J E R RY ROCHE Over the last 30 years, the corporate human relations (H.R.) function has evolved from managing personnel and employee information to managing essential procedures (such as payroll) and key strategic elements (such as top management development). In the meantime, e-learning has become more than simply “courses on the Web.” It’s become a platform to support and integrate learning into the overall human capital development and management cycle. It would seem almost intuitive, then, that the training department would be an integral part of the HR department. But, in many companies, that has not been the case. Michelle Lotti is director of training for the Americas Consumer Finance Division of GE Money. She re-invented the company’s whole training function — and now she is part of the H.R. department, outsourcing tactical training elements and keeping strategy and business-driven elements in-house. Lotti allowed Elearning! magazine a few minutes out of her busy schedule to answer some questions about how her company has integrated the HR and training functions. HOW HAS THE TRAINING AND H.R. RELATIONSHIP CHANGED WITHIN YOUR BUSINESS UNIT? The training function has always reported into H.R. When we existed as one of its units, we were a separate but fairly large division, with 170 people servicing 10,000 to 15,000 employees. As we evolved back, we went through a series of outsourcing strategies where we looked at the feasibility of variable versus fixed-cost models and then adjusted our internal staff for that purpose. We became an organization with strategic learning leaders in place, but with many tactical responsibilities outsourced, like design, development and delivery. That enabled us to reduce our staff significantly and achieve efficiencies. However, what we decided was that it really made sense to further integrate H.R. and learning. In past years, the alignment of HR and training wasn’t as strong. Training was a separate island, and training and H.R. were two entities battling for business attention. When we looked at opportunities to merge talent management with talent development, we found some efficiencies in blending those resources. So training as its own entity dispersed, and we became more aligned with the H.R. executives within the business. HOW DID THE H.R. EXECUTIVES TAKE THAT? They took that very well, because it rounded out their teams. There was a gap in terms of H.R.’s generalist functions and its strategic functions. Giving learning a direct line to HR enabled a better partnership. Today, I have a huge non-exempt staff in operations and collections — the bulk of our business unit — that I support from a call center perspective. It’s enabled me to partner with my H.R. leaders for those operations and collections functions, and we get a lot further together. It’s not so much who can posture in front of business leaders anyElearning! June/July 2008 19
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