* National City provides flexible e-learning
Last time, we talked about taking training in bite-sized chunks on the fly and whenever you have time. IBM has been promoting such “learning on-demand” for the past 18 months, and today, we take a look at how one organization, financial holding company National City, is offering flexible learning schedules.
At the beginning of the year, Cleveland, Ohio’s National City needed to train some 15,000 end users at 5,000 of its corporate banking company customers on the new treasury management applications it was about to roll out. The training of two applications – global information reporting (check balancing) and Automated Clearing House processing (initiates transactions) – had to be done within 2 months.
Previously, National would train customers in groups via Web casts but National City didn’t believe that Web casts could reach out to people with differing learning needs and that it would be difficult to schedule time with trainees. It also wanted to be able to monitor whether each individual had taken the training, says Terry Schade, senior vice president at the wholesale banking division of National City.
It worked with IBM to develop a learning management system – which would be hosted by IBM – that customers would be able to access 24/7. National City created 20 training modules – 14 for ACH and six for global information reporting – targeted at six job profiles. Trainees would identity themselves to the learning management system, which would recommend courses that they should take, according to their job profiles. No one had to take all 20 modules, only those relevant to their jobs.
The modules were between 20 and 45 minutes long and were context sensitive, guiding users how to use the new applications as they practiced, and providing help when they got stuck. “We set a range of time and published that in a matrix so people could see how long it would take to take each module,” says Schade. Students didn’t have to take the modules in order, except for the intro and summary courses.
As well as training 200 internal users, National City trained its corporate banking customers in three waves, starting at the end of February and finishing at the end of March. Schade says the flexible training method is useful to get people “on the same baseline” before they receive more training in group sessions.
Schade says customers are happy with this learning method because it makes it easier to train new employees. New hires can just take the same training modules.
Schade says what he would do differently is to introduce all the topics that the system would cover and allow people to opt out of certain modules. Also, some of the modules were a little long and could have been useful broken into two, he says. National City is also looking at producing an FAQ Web cast that users could download. The Web cast could be of training with one or two customers, including the Q&A session, so that other customers could view and learn from the sessions.
Next time: Learning with Pep Boys and Cingular Wireless.
*** FREE NETWORK WORLD TECH TOURS:
After a short spring break, my Events colleagues are back on the road with Network World’s free Technology Tours. This month, Network World columnist and President of Nemertes Research Johna Till Johnson will be presenting this year’s VOIP ROADSHOW. The VoIP tour is one of our most popular events, so make sure you sign up to attend. At the seminar, you’ll learn about VoIP and wireless, integrating VoIP and messaging, VoIP and telecommuting, and VoIP and security.
For more about the 4-city VoIP tour that’s taking place June 7-16, please go to:
http://www.networkworld.com/events/voip05/index.html
We’ve also added two new dates to the WIRELESS AND MOBILITY TOUR. My colleagues Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group, and Keith Shaw, Network World senior editor of product testing, will be in Boston on June 21, and Denver June 23.
For more information about the Wireless and Mobility Tour, please go to:
http://www.networkworld.com/nlitedu2078
