Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 - (Page 40)

IN PRACTICE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR CENTRALIZES CONTENT T he Department of Labor (DOL) fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions, advancing their opportunities for proﬁtable employment and protecting their retirement and health care beneﬁts. DOL also helps employers ﬁnd workers, strengthens free collective bargaining and tracks changes in employment, prices and other national economic measurements. With approximately 17,000 employees, DOL administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws that cover many workplace activities for 10 million employers and 125 million workers. While each DOL employee across its 26 separate agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Labor Statistics and Women’s Bureau, is required to participate in common-needs training — general training for all DOL staff — employees also are required to complete speciﬁc courses unique to their agencies’ missions. As a result, DOL was challenged with managing disparate areas of content administration, inconsistent content management and delivery, and multiple training types in various formats. DOL chose to implement a learning management system (LMS) enterprise-wide, with a primary goal of consolidating all of its legacy learning and training systems into a single program, called LearningLink. Within DOL, the training department owns the overall LMS system and manages content for common training. Via LearningLink, the training department is able to provide all employees across DOL with access to common-needs training, regardless of their speciﬁc agency afﬁliations. And at the agency level, each has its own LearningLink domain to deliver and track agency-speciﬁc training. With this system in place, DOL has the means to access and track both common-needs and agency-speciﬁc training. A single login for all training provides DOL employees with a consistent user experience, making it possible to administer, access, manage, track, store and report on the data from both training tracks on a single platform. Additionally, employees are empowered to manage their own training compliance. “All new employees are required to take computer-security awareness training,” said Michael Gerwitz, project manager of the Department of Labor’s e-training systems. “Every employee has the ﬂexibility to manage courses outside of mandatory training through the system. Plateau automates and simpliﬁes those processes, which saves a lot of time for learning administrators.” Additionally, to manage the spectrum of training content DOL employees access through LearningLink, DOL selected Plateau’s iContent solution. Previously, DOL’s content had been managed through a legacy content management system or stored on DOL’s intranet. Administration was spread across the organization, resulting in inconsistent content delivery and management. All course content for DOL employees, whether mandatory or optional, now is stored on this system and made available to employees via LearningLink. This enables DOL to deliver content through a variety of formats. DOL courses are presented using static HTML, dynamic HTML with Flash interactions, Word documents and other media. The centralized content system has yielded measurable savings for DOL by eliminating server-resource costs and improving productivity. Learning administrators and executives can focus on implementing key strategic learning initiatives instead of managing the day-to-day processes associated with content administration. CLO ment executives to forecast employee retirements and job vacancies and help them identify potential candidates from the broader organizational talent pool based on how skills possessed by remaining employees map to the skills required for vacated positions. Where their private-sector counterparts have been lauded for the speed with which they adopt new learning and performance-related technologies, it is the public sector that has been most effective in integrating learning solutions with broader HCM goals and strategies. The President’s Management Agenda and the rapidly aging government workforce have encouraged the development of integrated learning programs that not only develop employee talent but also increase workforce productivity and drive business performance. Top-Down Leadership Although the retention of institutional knowledge is an issue at all levels in government agencies, it will be most heavily felt at the top. According to the U.S. GAO, government employee retirements are projected to include nearly 59 percent of federal executives by 2011. Succession planning poses a challenge for most organizations, largely because executives are unsure how to approach the succession planning process. For government agency executives — many of whom face issues associated with leadership that often is decided through political appointments and navigation of the government’s clearly paved merit system — the challenges are even more complex. Despite the challenges, the ideals used by government agencies can assist private-sector peers as they shape succession plans. Strong succession plans, regardless of industry, are approached through an integrated process. Succession planning should not focus on “people replacement,” but rather on strengthening and identifying talent at all levels of the organization. These plans should identify critical roles in the organization, determine staffing needs and provide a framework for identifying the best candidate replacements. Learning and development activities should be assigned to candidates to improve their readiness to assume these leadership positions, and organizations should monitor and measure their progress at regular intervals to ensure they are on target to assume those positions when necessary. When tied to learning, succession planning can be a powerful catalyst for organizational transformation and continued development. Laboring to Fill a Gap With a total workforce of 17,000 — and an expected management retirement of 54 percent in the next ﬁve – Shelly Heiden 40

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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