Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 - (Page 51)

case study For a moment, presume the employees you are responsible for developing are involved in one of the most technical and advanced disciplines in the world. (For many readers, this probably isn’t too much of a stretch.) Now, imagine that the workforce you’re delivering learning to isn’t really a workforce, but rather is an assortment of workers who come from many different contractors and are spread out over numerous geographic locations. Then, picture every task that they (and you) perform being bound by extensive and tedious bureaucracy. If you can conjure up this byzantine scenario in your mind, then you have a pretty good sense of the kind of environment that Cheryl Ann Seminara works in. In her role as the training and organizational development lead for Apogen Technologies, Seminara has been contracted to Sandia National Laboratories, a government owned/contractor operated (GOCO) entity. Specifically, Seminara’s role is to run learning and development for the Yucca Mountain Project, which has been under way for several decades. In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) started studying Yucca Mountain, which is located less than 100 miles north of Las Vegas, as a possible repository for nuclear waste. Subsequent policies formulated in Congress laid out the need for the DOE to devise a specific solution for nuclear waste disposal. Since then, the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) has been working to establish the site as a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials. Currently, the Yucca Mountain project has 620 people working full time on assignments that range from scientific research to underground construction. “We drilled a big hole in that mountain and ran some rock samples,” Seminara said. “Now, we’re trying to produce a license application, which is a 70,000-page document. How do we get from one end of that to the other? What is the exact process? That’s what we’re working on right now. Every part of this license application goes through an audit to make sure it follows the high standards of quality assurance. If any part of that is found to not follow procedure, then we have to fix it quickly or the work will be in jeopardy. This is a project that’s been going on for 25 years. Can you imagine someone saying, ‘That work we did 10 years ago? We can’t use it. Oh, that’s the basis of everything you’ve done so far? Too bad.’ It’s a heavy burden.” To complicate matters, although most of the learning is mandatory, much of the employee population is not at Yucca Mountain. Many of them are working thousands of miles away. “My workforce is spread out all over the world,” Seminara said. “I might have people working at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Tenn., Argonne, Ill., Berkeley and other places. I’ve got six people in London right now who I’m working with to complete their training. I don’t have the budget to get them all together.” To deliver learning to this dispersed audience, Seminara relies on a combination of remote instructors and e-learning programs. “Previously, we were flying trainers to all the labs, or flying all the lab personnel to Las Vegas for training,” she said. “We don’t have the time or the money to do that. What I can do is identify a training coordinator in each of those areas who can act as my liaison to those learners. I train them on how to help me with that. The other thing we do with this blended-learning approach is deliver courses online in 20-minute modules that are focused on one or a couple of procedures that pertain to a particular process. So we created online programs, and we’re also looking at webinars to do some live sessions where participants can ask questions. We want to do that for quick training when we don’t have time to go through the full production process.” In addition to the challenge of geography, most workers have different (and sometimes dueling) professional loyalties between the project and the contracting companies they work for. “We refer to the folks we’re training as ‘members of our workforce,’” she said. “These are folks who are either doing work as employees of Sandia National Laboratories or have been contracted by Sandia to do work. I would say about 85 percent of our workforce is contractors. So training has to take on some untraditional roles, which is a huge challenge. I have people who are working for many different companies, which have their own training requirements, and I have to say, ‘You also have to take this other training.’” CASE STUDY continued on page 56 “We might be a government agency, but we have to think about the organization itself. How do its employees interact? How does it grow?” – Cheryl Ann Seminara 51 February 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer http://www.clomedia.com

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

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Business Impact Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Learning Solutions Home Depot: Building Better Associates CLO Profile Environment Realizing the Vision of “One Philips” Tactics Sun Microsystems’ Next-Generation Worker Video Game Recruiting Tool Productivity The Regence Group: Blended Measurement Human Capital NASA: A Case Study in Technical Leadership Development Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

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