Chief Learning Officer - August 2006 - (Page 30)

CO0806.qxd 7/19/06 10:01 AM Page 30 environment in practice: a portion of their training budget to a central pool under the control of the CLO. A r m y National Guard: E v a l u a t i n g Educational Effectiveness The governance council requires a charter, a clear understanding of how it will make decisions. Is the model consensus-based or majority rule? Will voting A recurring news item of late has been about branches of the U.S. militar y missing their be weighted one person/one vote or by the number annual recruiting goals, instigating fears of a manpower shortage in the services. of employees or amount of revenue represented? Particularly stretched in terms of personnel is the Army National Guard, which has gone Equally as important, working closely with the CLO, above and beyond its traditional mission to put more boots on the ground in U.S. the- the governance council must adopt and implement a aters of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, this strain has led the Army National vision and strategy for the future of learning within Guard to invest heavily in recruitment and retention. its organization. The council's horizon should be a Our contemporary operational environment is extremely high, said Chief Warrant Officer minimum of three years, enabling it to actively man- 3 Dwayne Jahner, chief of the Army National Guard Strength Maintenance Training age change and make the investments that will bring Center. What the Army National Guard is facing and all the services for that matter its future vision to reality. is the extremely difficult task of trying to recruit young Americans. We're throwing a lot of resources and personnel into that. Business-Unit Performance One way in which they're advancing their recruitment and retention efforts is by equip- The next stage in the development of learning gov- ping the personnel responsible for this mission with the requisite core competencies ernance most often sees the CLO working closely through training. Our mission statement here is that the strength maintenance training with the business units to develop learning strategies center is committed to developing and delivering quality, relevant training that positively that fit into the context of an overall enterprise learn- impacts the end strength of the Army National Guard, Jahner said. We break it up by ing strategy. Having addressed delivery and other exe- recruiting and retention commands within each state. cutional issues in the common learning processes Unlike in the U.S. Ar my, which has personnel solely focused on recruitment, the Army stage, the focus now turns to how well learning National Guard has staff working on recruiting and retaining soldiers. Right now, the reflects the organization's business objectives. force consists of 5,100 recruiting and retention NCOs non-commissioned officers along with support staff and leadership, so we're looking at a force of about 7,000, This is also the stage at which it becomes critical to Jahner said. We get their career path started by training them up in our MOS military prioritize those objectives. For example, if fostering occupational specialty 79T. Training them involves a three-tenet mission. We not only innovation across the enterprise is an organization's train them to recruit them, but we also train them what they need to know for retention top business priority, learning investments that sup- and then attrition management for those who have been identified as at-risk soldiers who port that objective will take precedence over those might want to leave the Army National Guard. designed to develop specific leadership skills. Recruitment and retention R&R education is delivered in three main ways: e-lear ning, There must be active and ongoing engagement resident training and mobile training teams sent to all 54 states and territories in which between the CLO and the business units. The goal is the Army National Guard operates. For years in the military, it was podium training with to develop an integrated learning plan that achieves subject-matter experts standing in front and delivering the material, said James Holmes, deputy chief of training development for the Strength Maintenance Training Center. But an appropriate balance between programmatic met- as time has gone on, we've actually moved more toward e-learning. rics and enterprise-based learning measurements. Nearly 2,200 new R&R NCOs more than three times the typical annual total were Enterprise Readiness trained during the fiscal year 2005. Additionally, about 6,600 soldiers went through In the most mature learning governance models, courses delivered by the mobile training teams in the same year. Satisfaction rates for CLOs have established close working relationships Strength Maintenance Training Center training are very high, Jahner said. After each course, the center runs surveys that ask if it provided learners with the tools and skills with senior management. They have a seat at the necessar y to do the job. According to Jahner, some courses have received 99 percent table to set the agenda and support multi-year initia- favorable responses in this regard. By using all those methods getting away from a tives such as dedication to values, globalization, fos- lecture format and using distance learning, student-led learning and scenario-based tering innovation and even changing the core nature training they become combat multipliers, he said. We can't be everywhere, yet our of the business. Learning governance is fully embed- demand is so high that we've got to deliver different methods to make sure that it gets ded in the organization's strategy. The CLO's area of to the target audience. We need to get more flexible and balanced. responsibility may broaden to include talent manage- ment and recruiting, and his or her reporting may The states will call us for mobile training teams, and what we do is package the training according to their needs, Holmes added. What they're facing in Alabama probably isn't shift from human resources to the COO or CFO. the same as they're facing in North Dakota. So we have to be able to adapt to that audi- Just as IT governance bodies have needed to make ence and get them the training they need that produces the results they expect. August 2006 long-term decisions on such fundamental issues as a Regardless of location, though, a large element of the curricula focuses on communication. shift from client/server to a Web-based environ- R&R personnel have to interface on a regular basis with educators, parents, students and ment, the learning governance council must com- I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer soldiers. Therefore, it's necessary to educate them on how to initiate a dialogue with all of mit to far-reaching decisions. Will learning become these groups and foster open interaction, Jahner said. We developed our comprehensive more embedded or ambient? Will learning contin- communications skills, which in our business is the sales package that we throw out there ue to take place in class-sized chunks, or will a to get these people trained to speak to the public. We're getting younger soldiers out there. learning module be as brief as a five-minute podcast We're getting soldiers who have already gone through deployment, so they're able to react downloaded to the learner's PDA of choice? How to questions that parents and educators have about deployments and `what if?' We do the will the organization recognize and measure these generational training so they can ID and understand which generation comes from what era brief learning moments versus conventional meth- so they can adjust to that and relate to what they're going through. ods of measuring learning effectiveness? How can http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - August 2006

Editor's Letter
Table of Contents
Trends
Effectiveness
Taking the Lead
Best Practices
Learning Solutions
In Practice - U.S. GAO
Environment
In Practice - Army National Guard
CLO Profile
Productivity
In Practice - PerkinElmer
Case Study
Human Capital
In Practice - Countrywide Financial Corp
Tactics
In Practice - Siebel
Business Intelligence
Advertiser's Index
Editorial Resources
In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - August 2006

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