Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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Elearning! Learning and Corporate Culture Go Together at Intel strengths feels better than putting all the development attention on my weaknesses." High on the list of Intel's recent success- es is its career development workshops. "They establish a framework and com- Intel is more than a successful enterprise — it is an advocate for learning beyond its organization, across the U.S. and globally. The company invests about a quarter of a billion dollars each year to help employees learn (in the classroom and on the web), connect (with peers, experts, and col- leagues), and gain experience (in labs and workshops as well as on the job). "Intel has an incredibly strong corpo- rate culture and our success as a manufac- turing company has tended to color our approach to employee development," says Tal Zorman, director of Intel Learning and Development. "However, as we grow from the world's largest manufacturer of semi- conductors to one with a vision to create and extend computing technology to con- nect and enrich the lives of every person on earth, our attitude toward the growth and development of our employees has expanded as well. One of the things we've done recently is to shift our learning cul- ture to encourage employees to proactive- ly seek opportunities for individual or team growth, even in the absence of a spe- cific problem to be solved. Our focus has been to engage learners at all levels, from executives who actively teach courses and provide informal opportunities down to the most junior employees who have very clear developmental paths." "We have a large engineer and technical workforce — probably two-thirds to three- fourths of our employees are technical in some way," Zorman observes. "So we've been historically biased toward problem- solving, but we've shifted that to finding out what's good and making it better. "The culture shift is relatively recent in terms of the company's overall arc. Culture doesn't change overnight but it seems to be working very well. Shifting the conversa- tion to focus on my leveraging my mon vocabulary, facilitated by experienced Intel managers who can help to make that bridge between exciting theories and prac- tical application in what's still a very tech- nical- and engineering-based company," says Zorman. "Those have been very wide- ly attended — 10,000 to 12,000 partici- pants per year. Some employees at remote sites work on their own, but because we're trying to create a cultural where employ- ees feel than can build successful careers, responsibility for their own development and actually seeking opportunities rather than viewing our training as either a pun- ishment or distraction from their jobs." GOING SOCIAL AND MOBILE Intel's sales and marketing workforce has been leading the mobile learning trend. Intel offers all kinds of training involving smartphones, podcasts and on-demand options that are deliverable through mobile devices. "Those options aren't available for all employees, although I suspect that we'll see increased popularity of mobile options. They won't replace everything that's cur- rently in the classroom, but they will add choices so we can get consistent content across multiple venues. That way, particular employee groups can have access to what- ever development experience resonates best with them. Rather than forcing any group toward an experience that's sub-optimal, we are looking more toward consistent, certifiable content that's available via what- ever preference any group has." Social learning has also taken a foothold at Intel, especially through its on-line cor- porate wiki called, not surprisingly, Intelpedia. "We think that social learning is at the Lisa Malloy of Intel, Catherine Upton of we found it better to have in-person events. Participants work with peers and colleagues and are led by an experienced senior manager to increase the trust and believability in what we're doing." Are Intel's other learning-based initia- tives working as well? It appears so, based on annual employee surveys. "It's too early to plot a statistically sig- nificant trend but the anecdotal evidence is good," Zorman asserts. "We're hearing about more individual motivation and engagement. In partnership with their managers, more employees are taking beginning of its potential," Zorman says. "There's no doubt it's important and pop- ular; the challenges are how we're going to address issues of credentialing or rating so that inaccurate or incomplete information gets weeded out or corrected quickly. We don't yet know if some sort of peer review system will be the right approach, or if we might even want to be more restrictive in some areas. They're challenges that can and will be solved." A corporate-supported blogging system called Planet Blue supports the learning culture. An example, experienced man- agers host blogs and online discussions for Intel's new-manager program. All in all, a learning culture that is entirely worthy of winning the No. 1 spot on Elearning! magazine's Learning! 100. May / June 2011 19 Elearning!