Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 50)

VANGUARD AWARD • GOLD • DIVISION 1 Linda Landry Senior Director of Global Learning and Development, Nuance Communications Call her Wonder Woman: In just one short year, she helped her company launch a state-of-the-art corporate learning organization from scratch — for less than $250,000. For this reason, this year’s Division 1 Gold Award winner in the Vanguard category is Linda Landry, senior director of global learning and development at Nuance Communications, a technology company that creates speech recognition software and imaging products. “Learning and development was brand new when I ﬁrst came to Nuance almost two years ago,” Landry said. “The company had been in existence for about 10 years, but the focus had always been on moving forward. The executive team recognized that it was time to make a serious investment in employee development in order for the company to keep meeting its business goals.” Landry had her work cut out for her. When she was hired, the technology company had not yet created a budget for learning, and the employee base was globally disparate and growing rapidly. And Landry was the only learning professional on staff. But her excitement and determination were not to be underestimated. “I think I didn’t get a wink of sleep the ﬁrst year — partly because I was so excited about the opportunity to create something from scratch and partly because of the effort it took to build a full-service employee development operation within 18 months,” she said. Knowing she’d need resources for learning initiatives down the road, Landry ﬁrst set out to develop relationships with Nuance’s executive team, soliciting their feedback and gaining their buy-in. She then personally surveyed one-third of Nuance’s managerial staff to determine where the biggest gaps in learning were and developed a learning and development plan to respond to those needs. Landry’s strategic plan aligned learning to business goals and involved three main components: a Web-based corporate university — Nuance University — that makes training available regardless of location and time zone, a development planning process for each employee and a performance management program. She also hired a global performance manager to develop programming around career ladders, high-potential and leadership development, and management development. This has resulted in a variety of initiatives, including new career-ladder and high-potential programs. Landry also restructured Nuance’s competency model from 25 main competencies to ﬁve core and ﬁve manager competences, which were based on the skill gaps she identiﬁed through the needs assessment. This downsizing meant her team could measure progress through appraisal data year over year. “We were able to link performance to learning and ROI right out of the gate,” Landry said. “This is making it relatively straightforward to prove ROI: We can see from our performance management data whether we’re helping employees become more competent or we’re not.” Another of Landry’s notable achievements was her organization of the ﬁrstever Nuance Research Conference in March. The conference brought the company’s global research teams together to brainstorm and network, and resulted in a 95 percent overall satisfaction score. To better communicate progress on planning, funding and other activities within learning and development, Landry helped Nuance establish an employee communications function. This function produces a company newsletter, organizes quarterly meetings, administers the new Nuance global employee survey and more. The impact of Landry’s work thus far has been demonstrable. Nuance has a full staff of 10 learning professionals and a corresponding $1.5 million budget. In its ﬁrst quarter after launch, Nuance University witnessed 1,000 unique users download 2,000 courses. Landry said winning the Gold Vanguard award can only enhance her team’s work in the future. “For a young learning organization like ours, receiving this award has boosted our credibility in-house and helped to validate the sizable investment our executive team has made in learning programs,” she said. “It was a leap of faith for our execs, but Nuance University has quickly become our global learning hub. Winning this award has helped to validate our approach and will make it easier for us to keep building on our successes into the future.” Perhaps it also makes those sleepless nights worth it, too. “All the heavy lifting over the previous year was considered important and worthy of recognition by my peers — professionally, it doesn’t get any better than that,” she said. – Agatha Gilmore 50

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

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 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.