Veterans Affairs Learning University at Corporate University Week

My live blogged notes from Corporate University Week.
Alice Muellerweiss, Dean at Veterans Affairs Learning University
Trained 200,000 in the first 9 months of the learning organization. Veterans Affairs Learning University (VALU) started in 2008ish…
Support over 20,000 Veterans
Strengthen the way we serve veterans by employing more veterans – Recruit, Retain, Reintegrate our Veterans
VA for Vets program: goal is 40% Veterans working within VA
Diverse mission (still serving two family members from the Civil War!)
Mission to transform the VA to a 21st Century Org. We had antiquated systems and processes. Had a staff of 16 – had to hire in a leadership team…
16 initiatives from healthcare to backlog to human capital.
People will make the mission. Taking care of people is about developing them.
Had three stovepipes: Health, Benefits and Memorial Affairs
Created competencies, measurement, lots and lots of activities…
Don’t have a brick and mortar…people go to training on their site (more convenient for student).
When do bring in sr. execs use other people’s infrastructure (hotels) – to save money, to stay agile
10% training is f2f; 90% is online.
MyCareer at VA – just rolled out this portal. employees can see and chart their path for development. Tools to determine if they’re fit for a particular job.
In the military, you have a path…from private to general.
People leave their organizations for two reasons: their supervisor, lack of career development.
Reginald Vance, was IT initiative lead – became Director of Learning Infrastructure at VA
Human Capital Investment Plan (HCIP) – 4-5 projects identified (these pulled out to 22 projects that needed to be managed)
VA LMS was one of the first and last projects on that list.
Wanted it to be as easy as buying books online.
MyCareer at VA: Prepare, Explore, Plan, Develop – employees go into system and assess themselves to see where they are, start looking at jobs at the next level. This system just launched.
To be competent in your job to better serve our Veterans.
Providing competency model for employees, giving a career mapping tool – from an LMS to a full Talent Management System – no one else was doing this in Federal govt.
The old LMS – no one liked. Hard to log in, hard to pull records.
Went out and asked stakeholders what they needed, what they liked/didn’t like about system. We scrubbed everything and went back to the drawing board.
Use Plateau SaaS model as the TMS.
Serve 350,000 VA employees. Serve additional contractors.
Have since delivered millions of training instances…

• Simplified reg/login process
• When first login in – you see a To Do list
• Some courses are self-assigned
• Using video vignettes 3 or 7 or 15 minute-ish videos for just-in-time…
• Tool helps supervisors walk through conversations with employees
• www.mycareeratva.com (go check it out and use some of the tools – this stuff is public and anyone can use it).
• Shows you where the jobs are located –
• Shows what the future of specific jobs is (e.g., in one year it’s not going to be needed), so it’s got some forecasting capabilities
• Outward facing and inward facing elements of the system.

ROI
At the VA, we have to defend every penny. VA got a ton of money for people development. Working hard to measure the impact.
In two years of investment seeing a pos return of 17% (learner gain on pre and post testing) – but some things have just launched so haven’t started measuring yet.
Seeing a difference in the field in the care our Veterans are getting, customer service…
The Secret Sauce
Having the champion – the senior most champion you can have (Veterans Affairs Secretary Shinseki)
The autonomy for vision (they were given an initiative and then had the autonomy to deliver on that)
Hiring terrific leaders – and empower them to get the job done. Hold them accountable.
The funding
Accountability (Dean Muellerweiss reports weekly and monthly on numbers)
Now have 60+ people on her team – growing to 73; a number of vendor partners; lots of learning leaders across VA (they don’t report to Dean – they help get training to the field);
Initially had to outsource a lot of their training function now looking to bring some of this back in.
Secret sauce:
where strategy fails: when the strategy is developed by one person and handed off.  Have to develop it together.
For the VA – it’s been time critical to launch the portal – if it’s not integrated into the fabric of the VA it could go away with the next political appointment.
Note: later in the afternoon, the VA team won the award at CU Week for best new corporate university.

Developing and Marketing your Learning and Organizational Development Brand at Corporate University Week

My live blogged notes from Corporate University Week.

Developing and Marketing your Learning and Organizational Development Brand

Judy Whitcomb SPHR
Chief Learning Officer, Vice President, Human Resources and Learning and Organizational Development
Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt)

She started off sharing stories about their organization.

Start with an analysis of how the learning brand is being perceived within your organization. Then figure out where you want to go and what you want to do? Identify 5-6 key words that you want to use to identify your brand within the org.

They started off with the perception that the learning org was a bit difficult…

Learning materials and LMS strongly aligned with their visual brand…

Keys to a successful marketing plan:

• recognize that emotions are powerful communication tools
• engage senior leaders in telling the story
• involve cross-functional leaders to be advocates
• repetition, repetition, repetition
• leverage your business policies
• Recognize how learning will support practices, etc.

Tent cards, emails – what’s new

Ongoing webinars to train and promote features and benefits (don’t turn on allt he features of your LMS right away – let people get used to it

Recognize results

Target learning strategy with specific needs that employees have (“how do I write a better marketing plan?”)

Company newsletters

Linking Succession Planning with Current and Future Biz Needs: Jill Zimmerman at Corporate U Week

My live blogged notes from morning session at Corporate University week.

Linking Succession Planning with Current and Future Business Needs – Talent Review Process Excellence

Jill Zimmerman
Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Development, Human Resources
Discover Financial Services

About Discover

• Discover = started in 1986; leading credit card issuer, over 50 million card members; also in personal lending and direct banking.
• Vision: “To the be the most rewarding relationship consumers and business have with a financial services company.”
• Mission: to help people achieve better financial future

Succession Planning

• Process
• Tools
• Key success factors

Key success factor #1: always start with a bus strategy. Proactively build a robust talent pipeline to meet future bus and succession needs.

Key success factor #2: keep both the job and the people in mind. Do we have the right jobs to meet the needs? Do we have the right people?

Key success factor #3: use a common set of metrics. At Discover, set of leadership behaviors that apply to everyone at the company. 

9 box…

Have a job scorecard – what skills are required for a job? what leadership skills are required for that job? do you have a successor for that job? is there backfill for that successor? (if there’s not a deep bench, you may have to go outside the company).

Have a people scorecard (focus on the people) – create an accurate depiction of the people. What business skills? What leaderhip skills? What do we need to do with this person? identify individual gaps.

 

Key success factor #4: development must be on-going.

70/20/10 model:

• 70% experiential – things people can practice and do on the job
• 20% learn from others – mentors, coaches, managers, role models
• 10% learn on own – classes, articles, books

People usually identify that 10% – but we need to get better at identifying the 70%

Key success #5: CEO/COO must be active owners

Ongoing mindset; dedicated time; trusting and transparent discussion; accountability

Create a Candidate Slate

How will you know if you’re successful?

• Retention
• Engagement
• Internal Mobility

When people feel there’s opportunity, movement and growth – they’re more engaged. (They do anonymous surveys that is tied back to other data so they can see who’s staying, who’s transferred and who’s more engaged).

Retain and engage your most critical resources.

What are people good at? What are they interested in? What business needs can they meet?

Have done exit surveys – 3 years ago #1 reason people were leaving was internal mobility. Today’s it’s other reasons like relocation…

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!)

Allison Anderson Learning Together at Intel at Corporate U Week

My live blogged notes from CU Week. @allisonanderson

Learning Together: How Intel’s Learning Community of Practice Role Models “New” Learning with Allison Anderson

50+learning orgs at Intel – well over 650 people taking care of learning…Most people don’t have learning or training in their titles…hard to say exactly how many.

Highly diverse population – lots of people with lots of different needs.

No CLO – completely decentralized. We like having learning orgs distributed close to the business. (do have senior managers in learning positions)

And very global.

With such a decentralized model, the rely heavily on Communities of Practice (a comm of people who are working on something similiar, similar work tasks…)

Why a COP?  “overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy.”

LCOP (Learning Community of Practice) is their COP of learning people from around the org. In 1999 there were three people…today over 400 people involved.

Keys to success (what has helped this community thrive?)

• Purpose & Identity having a very specific purpose will help you.
  
  Today’s Learning Community at Intel – to increase our own performance to have a greater impact on employees at Intel.
  Have a clear mission and goals and review it regularly.
  
• Articulate Business Value
  “my metric is people are engaged and participate” – do I track this back to a metric? Nope…not to say that you can’t find relevant metrics.
• Content  & Engagement
  LCOP meets once a month – do peer presentations. Hear what happens in other learning groups across Intel. These are virtual/online.  Maybe 35 people for these meetings – people can decide what topics appeal to them?
  Internal conferences. Usually F2F but sometimes virtual.
  Like to bring in external speakers – internal people don’t get to get out too much – they enjoy hearing from outside colleagues.
  Do lots of synch and asych dialog.
  The use a social computing tool – called planet blue
  People are more than robots who go to work every day – we’re people – it’s ok to have fun, too!
  What does engagement look like? (She shows a screenshot of a whiteboard from a webinar session) – 35 people online at the same time typing on the screen at once.  It even engages the introverts—you get a lot more dialog going.
  
• Leadership & Support Needs a good community leader – someone who’s dedicated and passionate.  You need to have a thoughtful guide, beacon, evangelist—this helps to build and maintain a successful online presence.

Corporate University Week: Leveraging Learning to Engage Employees and Foster Culture at BMO

Second presentation as part of the Corporate University Week opening session.  These are my live blogged notes.

Barbara Dirks
Chief Learning Officer Institute for Learning
BMO Financial Group (1600+ branches in North America)  Bank of Montreal…

Vision: To be the bank that defines great customer experience.

Starbucks, Disney, – they have a unifying vision.

L&D function is now more strategic part of the organization.

World class corporate university in Toronto. Also a CU in Milwaukee area.  Plus satellite locations. “The Institute for Learning” – established in 1994.  Originally a more supply-based organization. Over the past three years become far more connected to the business.

Employee Engagement

Employees spend about 6.2 days a year on learning.

What is employee engagement and why does it matter?

Say….Stay…Strive

speaking positively about the org…intense desire to be a member of that org…to contribute to the business

How do we design/dev learner that drives engagement?

Four key focus areas:

• Orientation and new hires – to cement relationships with new ees.  Inspire engagement and make people feel welcome. How do you fit into the big picture. Research shows that those orgs that spend the most on orientation have highest levels of engagement.
  
  Shows elearning menu which is a blueprint of the organization. Different “rooms” in the building – can’t move from room to room until you’ve viewed all of the videos, etc. in each room. CEO’s vision, etc. Launched through the LMS so they can track that people have done it.
  
  In addition to general orientation, provide role orientation (e.g., branch manager curriculum) – takes 7 months to be role ready to be a branch manager…
  
• Leadership Development
  
  Starts with orientation. Very deliberate in development of program – senior leaders. Mandatory thing – 1.5 day senior leadership orientation.
  
  Need strong leaders to drive engagement of employees.
  
  3 phase leadership curriculum: first time managers, for managers of managers, for executives.
  
  3 days in a classroom setting followed by the on the job practicum…over 6-18 months.
  
  Won an ASTD BEST Award for this program.
  
• Customer-Focused
  
  It’s important that employees should care that a company/customer is doing well financially.  Bring the voice of the customer into the classroom – big impact.  Through videos, audio…Developing a course now on understanding our customers – to make a better connection for those in the back office – their role in the ecosystem of the customer experience.
  
  
• Blended Learning
  
  Supplements to in-class learning – videocasts, podcasts, webinars, social learning – want to be able to deliver learning anytime, anywhere.

***

Annual employee surveys show positive trends.

Collaboration is also a key theme. How people work together for the vision to succeed. That collab starts at the top.

What does leadership mean? It means being with people. It’s reinforcing the vision. It’s dialog. It starts at the top – the CEO role models this.

Also do a number of internal conferences for the 5000 managers of people.

Merged three organizations and had to merge cultures.

They do a lot of work with Root Learning to create “learning maps”.

Discussion about how to measure the success of learning – she says so much of it is intangible (in discussing their orientation program on vision/culture)…

Corporate University Week Opening Keynote: Verizon Wireless & Bellevue U Collaboration

I’m at IQPC’s Corporate University Week in Orlando, Florida.  Unlike the typical elearning conferences I go to where we’re talking a lot about practice, this one is focused at a more strategic level. Leadership is the word.

It’s small and cozy – about 16 vendors (of which we’re one) – and about 150 attendees.  I’m looking forward to some really substantive conversations!

These are my live blogged notes from the opening session.

Michael E. Echols, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives and the Human Capital Lab
Bellevue University (www.humancapitallab.org)

General theme of the conference: linking learning outcomes to business objectives.

In the past, we’ve looked backward and heavily valued ROI…ROI looks backwards at a financial parameter – but there’s a lot more involved in business outcomes.

If you look at biz objectives – mobility, recruiting, retention are also factors.

The ROI conversation is dead. It’s backward looking and exclusive to financial.

Think about business outcomes in a broader perspective.

Risk management is a big priority in today’s economy. What does risk mean in learning community? Classic HR parameter of retention is a risk parameter. If you want to talk about your impact—growth and risk – you have a direct impact on risk in your org. The risk is that you invest in your people (your human capital) and they leave.  Retention and turnover is a risk parameter.

Good ideas – that’s what’s in short supply (not cash). In the US economy, cash is not the scarce resource. Your companies need to have good ideas – and you need to help connect those good ideas to business outcomes.

Bellevue University and Verizon Wireless Collaborative Effort – Case Study – “How to Leverage University Partnerships Within Your Organization” Dorothy Martin with Verizon Wireless

Three years ago the concept: a collaboration between a university and a corporation.

linking tuition assistance to talent management

Professional 12 course program over two years that leads to a bachelor’s degree – focus on retail. It’s funded through Verizon’s LearningLINK program. Professional Retail Sales & Management program (PRSM)

Goals: pos impact on biz outcomes, reduce turnover, increase mobility, connect retail employees across US…

Three key elements: co-designed curriculum, co-branded communication (a concerted internal marketing effort), measurement

Where is it today? Business results and lessons learned

1. Curriculum Dev

Curric dev took one year for the 12 courses.  It focuses on retail industry from universal and contextualized (verizon specific) perspectives – learn general and how it’s applied at verizon.

Ended up with 45 Verizon Wireless SMEs. (retail store managers, district managers, vps, etc.)

2. Co-branded Comms

Brochures/ecards  went out to 2,400 retail stores.  Management and employee webinars. Created a co-branded web portal to get more details and how to enroll.

Lots of participation from sales/marketing (86%)

1,147 participants to date. 60% retention rate. Graduated over 200 participants so far. 97% of grads have STAYED in the business.

3. Measure

Study on the PRSM program and the business impact. (multi-variant comparative study – sample size over 150 with a comparison group).

• 23% higher performing rating (than those who didn’t go through PRSM)
• 50% higher Leading rating
• more likely to have received a promotion
• significant increase in sales revenues for those who went through program
• They sold more goods!

Verizon is now working with Bellevue on a second program direction at Call Center Operations & Management.

Now doing a new study – looking at the value of hiring someone with a degree vs. someone who was hired without a degree and given the opportunity to get a degree.

Looking at taking this beyond the Wireless division to other areas across the enterprise.

Senior Mngt continues to invest.

20% of employees are using LearningLINK (their tuition assistance program) – compared to the national average of 5%.  Sr. Mngt really understands the value of this and supports promoting these programs.

“Context accelerates learning”

The PRSM program is a dialog, collaborative cohort model.  100% online.