Leveraging Technology to Drive Business Value (University of Farmers) at Corporate University Week

My live blogged notes from today’s closing session at Corporate University Week.

Leveraging Technology to Drive Business Value

Art Dobrucki, CPCU
Director of Learning Strategy & Performance
University of Farmers- Farmers Insurance Group of Companies

Start with the end result in mind. What model do you use in your org? At its heart does it have business value?

Create a technology roadmap for learning: What technology solutions will help people do their jobs better? lay that over the technology solutions you have. Figure out where you want to go.

Some things they’re doing at U of Farmers…

Making use of video – they now have a video studio – think breaking news stories with experts to keep employees informed about a current crisis (Farmers = insurance company). Then repurposing these videos in the LMS, for mobile, etc.

Audience Response systems

Using iPads with video to record roleplays and then review them with instructors.

Have two brick and mortar university facilities. (19 classrooms, offices, webinar rooms, assessment center, media studios, learning labs – cars to get under and look at damage, houses to explore)

Seven years ago he had a department of seven. Had a huge issue with retention –alarm bells were going off. Needed to develop and retain talent.  Demonstrated that learning was able to drive results that the company was looking for with agents.  Built on that success. Start demonstrating business value to get the investment…

A learning portal

Reskinned their learning portfolio – there are pathways to go depending on whether you’re new employee, on a leadership path, etc. RSS feeds.

Mapped competencies to make it easier for people to find resources. (14 leadership competencies that applied to everyone; 28 additional core competencies).

So click on “Coaching” or “Negotiating” – go to a page with definitions, self-assessments (what’s my level of competency), then direct people to resources: books, courses, recommended experiential activities (what conversations should I be having? what should I be doing?)

Are your portals just a gateway to your LMS or have you mapped your content and resources to help employees find what they need to master particular competencies?

Engaging learners in the moment of need

Think about the trends in the marketplace

Think performance support!

Capability Readiness for a Changing Workforce

Mobile and tablet devices.

Don’t put courses on them – but information you need to know at the point in time (e.g., about to go make a sales call at a dry cleaners – top five questions to ask)

As new devices come out – buy one or two for your department and bring them in house so people on your design team can start playing with them.

At Farmers, starting doing podcasts when iphones started coming out – found out not a lot of demand for that – so now using those skills in video…keep experimenting and see what works for your organization’s needs.

$100K per year on training binders – instead put those guides onto iPads that they use for the training week.  Can take notes and annotate the guides and then send them to yourself at the end of the week. Training dept refreshes the ipad at the end of the week.

Using videos to assess sales skills – video gets uploaded to a server and the certified teachers evaluate the skills.

Remember that you can’t always hit home runs. If you say everything’s a home run, you’re going to start losing credibility. (Start measuring!)