Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 - (Page 37)

IN PRACTICE WIKI TRAINING INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY FOR RMC VANGUARD MORTGAGE MC Vanguard Mortgage Corp., an independent mortgage company based in Houston that serves customers in more than 25 states, has doubled its employee population in the past two years, despite problems in the mortgage industry. This combination of growth and a rapidly changing business environment makes corporate training and education a key organizational priority. That’s why Teo Mayes, RMC’s chief technology ofﬁcer, turned to a wiki as a means to deliver learning. “The mortgage industry is constantly evolving [and has] a lot of turnover, so it’s important that we have the ability to educate people quickly,” Mayes said. “There have been so many changes in our industry in the last nine months, it’s tough to keep up. Loan ofﬁcers are constantly in our underwriters’ ofﬁces asking, ‘Can I do this? How about this?’” RMC had been using the traditional shared server/forest of folders approach to store all this information, but this solution didn’t offer the necessary ease of use or accessibility. “Employees have the ability to work from home, so they’d have to log in to a terminal access port to reach the server,” Mayes said. “It was a big pain. We wanted a better way to securely publish information for use by our people, wherever they were.” Mayes used templates from PBwiki to structure the wiki as a training and educational resource. This allowed RMC to R integrate all sorts of information, ranging from Web links to ofﬁcial documents, and the searchability of the system made it easier for loan ofﬁcers to ﬁnd what they needed. This kind of training is crucial for RMC, since the company has been adding a lot of new people who need to come up to speed quickly. The goal is to provide the necessary training while minimizing the time drain on experienced, productive employees. “Our underwriters use the wiki to educate the loan ofﬁcers,” Mayes said. “Anytime something changes, they post the new information to the wiki. Now the watchword in the ofﬁce is, ‘Did you check the wiki?’” The wiki also has increased productivity. Mayes reported that it saves each of the underwriters about 30-45 minutes per day, and it has saved signiﬁcant amounts of time for the rest of the employees when it comes to ﬁnding documents, passwords and other information. RMC also found that the wiki provided many beneﬁts beyond training and education. “We’ve created a page for each of our employees, and a company directory with links to every page,” Mayes said. “We’ve even set up an internal ‘For Sale’ page for people who have anything they want to get rid of.” CLO Chris Yeh is vice president of enterprise marketing for PBwiki. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. Many people have had an experience similar to Dan’s: People learn material much better when they teach it than when they’re sitting passively in a classroom listening to someone explain it. That’s why technologically enabling employees to create learning content holds so much promise. To visualize how this might work, think beyond the creation of blogs and wikis to an even richer use of Web 2.0 technologies. Platforms that enable nonprogrammers to build remarkably sophisticated software for speciﬁc purposes are becoming increasingly common in software markets. These platforms can enable nonprofessionals to create software modules that help different types of learners master topics that they would have otherwise struggled to learn. Human resource coaches could create them to demonstrate a certain concept in an alternative way to a particular employee for whom the training manual just wasn’t clicking. Managers could assemble a module to help explain how to do a task to an employee in their division in a different way from how they explained it in a group meeting. And even employees could use them, as they seek to explain a process they are using in a unique way to certain members of their working group or adjacent groups that are struggling to understand it. Note that these sound like tools for tutors. That’s the point. These tools allow employees to design modules that can target individual learners and allow access to them asynchronously for the training they need. Over time, a corporation will build up a library of modules and tools to explain different concepts in different ways. And as the content is used over time, users will rate it, just as they rate books on Amazon and movies on Netﬂix, so that others can ﬁnd the tools that match the way they learn best. Employees also will be able stitch the modules together to form new training courses for different types of learners. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 tools to allow employees to create meaningful learning content to teach, train and learn has great potential. Going beyond blogs and wikis, which are largely limited to verbal-linguistic learners, and using the power of a collective group’s varied learning styles offers even more promise. Doing so through a user network can break through the fundamental challenges to allowing employees to learn in the way they are best wired to learn, which could transform corporations into robust learning organizations with exciting implications for productivity in the future. CLO Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn are coauthors, along with Curtis W. Johnson, of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. They can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • July 2008 • www.clomedia.com 37 http://www.clomedia.com

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

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five A Customer-Driven Approach to Molding Tomorrow’s Leaders The Home Depot: Accelerated Leadership CLO Profile Birth of a Salesman: Selling Learning to Solve Business Issues Selling Learning’s Potential at Siemens Transform Corporate Learning With a User Network Wiki Training Increases Productivity for RMC Vanguard Mortgage Lessons From the Feds: Mapping Learning to Strategic Initiatives Department of Labor Centralizes Content Synchronous and Asynchronous: What’s in a Name? Coping With Cultural Barriers to E-Learning The Manager’s Responsibility for Employee Learning Case Study Business Intelligence In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008

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