Chief Learning Officer - December 2007 - (Page 38) clo profile NAME: David Lamb TITLE: Vice President, Learning and Media Services COMPANY: Rollins SUCCESSES: • Led design and development of a corporate Satellite Interactive Distributed Learning system installed at 360 Orkin locations. Project was on time, within budget and has provided higher benefits than committed in the business case. • Received a 2006 Chief Learning Officer magazine Learning in Practice Award for Learning Innovation. • Led design and build out of the $5 million Orkin Learning Center, which includes a 2,200-square-foot house, a “house under construction” pavilion, restaurant, bar, hotel room, hospital room, grocery store, commercial kitchen, warehouse, and indoor and outdoor garden nursery, all of which are used for hands-on training. • Facilitated Orkin joining the LearnShare consortium; established a strong partnership and quickly deployed the LearnShare LMS without a hitch. LEARNING PHILOSOPHY: “Internal learning organizations need to think and act as external learning services companies. We must provide our learners with the knowledge and skills required to create business value. Building the right learning team and then continuously investing in their capabilities ensures that we provide the highest value proposition for our clients. And we should have some fun along the way.” “We’ve got people who come out and go into your home and provide services where there are environmental concerns. We need to make sure that our people are very knowledgeable and very skilled, and do it right the first time, every time.” — David Lamb, Vice President, Learning and Media Services, Rollins directly on a monitor or a desktop PC. In January 2006, the company launched the system, and it now delivers broadcasts six to eight hours each day. “Initially, it was training for our pest management professionals, about 3,500 technicians out of our 8,000 total employees. We’re looking to deploy this to other countries, and we’re also providing sales training using the same solution,” Lamb said. Because pest control is such a highly regulated industry, field sales personnel require a lot of very specific technical knowledge in order to effectively sell the company’s products and services. This learning tends to change from state to state, but Lamb said it is the core of what’s required for each technician. “It’s things like understanding the label and the law associated with that label for all of the materials that they work with,” he explained. “It’s what tools they have in terms of the sprayers, drills and all the equipment on their trucks. It’s how to load their truck and how to provide service once they get to the customer’s premises. Services tend to be in three major buckets: residential pest management, commercial pest management and termite.” Despite widespread knowledge that learning and business or process improvements go hand in hand, many learning leaders still struggle to connect development initiatives directly with the business. Lamb said putting together a strong business case filled with hard numbers was a good part of the reason his company felt comfortable making such an expensive investment with implications for a huge chunk of its workforce. The business case clearly outlined why the old model didn’t work. Before, half of the organization’s training happened at the learning center in Atlanta, but the rest happened in hotel meeting rooms around the country. This required the company to ship out the necessary training equipment and pay flight and hotel fees. “The travel and living expenses associated with that model were just horrendous,” Lamb said. “The $5 million is the total cost of the program for the first three years including hardware, software, installation, configuration and the staff that’s running this. We built a studio, like December 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 38 http://www.clomedia.com
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