Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 - (Page 30)

productivity in practice: UST Global: Opening Employees’ Eyes to New Learning One of the most important requirements for learning is accessibility. Any efforts to make development programs informative, up to date and engaging will be all for naught if users can’t even find them in the first place. UST Global, an IT services and outsourcing company with employees around the world, has been challenged with keeping learning accessible to the entire workforce since it was founded about a decade ago. Although the organization’s primary market is North America, it has two large development centers in India and another in the Philippines, as well as sales offices around the world. “Since it started, the company has had a heavy focus on training,” said Manu Gopinath, head of HR for UST Global’s North American operations. “In our largest centers in India, we bring in a lot of fresh talent from the schools, train them, put them through our boot camp and give them the ability to provide services to our customers. In that model, we’ve given a lot of classroom and boot-camp training, especially in technology and soft skills. “However, we’ve realized that in the growing-business model and also with our dispersed and diverse workforce, it’s very hard to confine all of our training to classrooms. It’s not possible, and it’s not a scalable model. That’s why we looked at multimodal training programs and e-learning.” In early 2006, the company implemented a learning portal that included virtual courses in technology and business provided by SkillSoft. Logins to this new system were supplied to all employees, but they weren’t entirely on board with it from the beginning, Gopinath said. “When we first opened this up to the company, people were confused,” he explained. “We thought it would be phenomenal, where everybody took several hours of training. But, we found that no one was doing anything. We did surveys internally and realized that people were confused as to what they should learn and didn’t know where to start.” Because of this perplexity, the company sought some best practices around how this system was implemented in other companies. “We came back with a more focused approach,” Gopinath said. “In the past 12 months, we’ve clocked around 14,500 hours of training with SkillSoft alone. The other thing we did was ensure that employees picked up the right courses. We have an annual goal-setting process at the start of the year, and we use a scorecard approach for that. We have four quadrants, and one of those is learning and growth. They have to set courses they want to take for the year, and those have to help build key competencies and improve their potential.” Additionally, a search function has helped employees find the courses they’re looking for on this platform, he said. “The home page has a search box. That search feature is very effective. When you’re searching for something, it brings up pretty much all the courses you could be looking for. The way the courses are arranged is fantastic: It’s logical and easy for people to find what they’re looking for. It’s by the relevance to the keyword the user puts in.” Because of this new learning infrastructure, UST Global is in a better position to expand its operations overseas from a talent perspective. “One of the key challenges we face is that in technology, things keep changing,” Gopinath said. “We’re supposed to provide cutting-edge technology in all parts of the globe. Teams in different parts of the world might not have the right kinds of information available. With this system, we know the information is authentic, credible and distributed equally to our operations around the world. It provides a level playing field in terms of information for our employees, which they can use to provide the best solutions to our customers. That’s something I’ve seen in the evolution of our training.” — Brian Summerfield, bsummerfield@clomedia.com To combat this problem, many organizations have invested in libraries of training materials. However, these are of little use, unless they are easy to locate and even easier to consume. Regrettably, as a learning industry, this is one area where not enough has yet been done. Faced with a dearth of easily accessible learning assets, employees may turn to traditional algorithmic search engines to glean the information they need to perform day-to-day tasks. These are the same search engines we use on Friday night to look up the telephone number of the local pizza joint. However, since consumer search engines sometimes do not distinguish good content from bad, accurate content from flawed or serious content from satirical, relying on consumer search engines can lead to an inordinate amount of time spent sifting through irrelevant information before ever finding useful data. Is someone searching for “Java” and “Ajax” in need of information on coffee and cleanser or programming techniques? Not only is this a waste of time, it offers endless distractions for employees, who are easily pulled from the task at hand by links to advertisements and irrelevant content. And worse, the learning organization has no visibility, no data and no opportunity to intervene with trusted, relevant training assets. In fact, employees spend 12 hours a week on information-gathering tasks — often to no avail. According to a study by Accenture, managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information, and half of what they find is of no value to them. IDC research shows that knowledge workers spend 15 percent to 30 percent of their time gathering information, but these searches are successful less than 50 percent of the time. Moreover, the sheer volume of information is overwhelming. The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. Users need a way to parse this information and access what will best help them accomplish their mission. Equally important, users need an easy way to search rich-media assets, such as videos or training simulations. These learning assets have diminished value if they are not readily accessible and easily searchable. Additionally, today’s workforce has expectations for the learning experience that are much higher than their predecessors. These emerging learners grew up with the Web, PCs and BlackBerrys, and generally eschew rather than embrace live classrooms as the January 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 30 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - January 2008

Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 Editor’s Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Environment Sips of Knowledge at E. & J. Gallo Winery CLO Profile Productivity UST Global: Opening Employees’ Eyes to New Learning Tactics Applying CRM Concepts to E-Learning Human Capital Capital One: Experiences in Innovation Learning Solutions Macy’s: Using Feedback to Develop One Leader at a Time Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - January 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.