Last week, we discussed how financial holding company National City used flexible online training to educate 15,000-plus customers on its new treasury management applications within 2 months. Today, we have a similar story about training in the fast lane at Cingular Wireless.

Customer service reps in Cingular's retail stores are able to take short training courses of up to 45 minutes long at terminals located at the back of the store. Its learning management system was put through its paces late last year when the company acquired AT&T Wireless. The company's goal was to launch a "common service experience" on Nov. 14, says Rob Lauber, executive director of learning services at Cingular.

The "common experience" meant that from that day, AT&T Wireless customers could walk into a Cingular store, get all their questions answered, and pay their wireless phone bills. This required training Cingular and AT&T Wireless staff on how to handle the different point of sale systems at the two companies' stores and how to upgrade customer handsets depending on which company's plan the user is on. Cingular created training materials for 23 different audiences that included legacy Cingular staff, retailers, dealers, third-parties and national retailers, says Lauber.

The company had to train more than 100,000 people in 5 weeks, starting Oct. 5 and ending Nov. 14. The snag was that as Cingular was acquiring a direct competitor, and was legally prevented from sharing future strategies - including training courses - with AT&T Wireless until the acquisition had been approved and was closed. So Cingular was only able to train its existing 39,000 employees, while it waited anxiously for word that the U.S. Department of Justice had approved the merger, which happened on Oct. 25. Cingular began training 80,000 AT&T Wireless staff the day after the approval, as the Nov. 14 deadline loomed.

Within the 5 weeks, Cingular delivered 2.2 million hours of training, according to Lauber. Each employee received between 15 and 18 hours of training - eight of those were instructor-led training. At the terminals, staff were able to log in and see their own learning plan, which includes details of the courses they had taken and others that are available according to their job function.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.