Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
Issue link: http://elmezine.epubxp.com/i/48330
Elearning! U.P.S. Throws Out the Old, Rings In the New In 2010, U.P.S. grew revenues 9 percent and net income 90 percent. This $49 bil- lion company invests in its people — from recruiting interns and career mapping to attracting critical talent. One such program is U.P.S. Global Leadership Development for new man- agers. By taking it on-line and global in 2009, the company, in effect, reinvented the training. "At U.P.S., we have a very deep and prideful culture around developing our people," notes Anne Schwartz, vice presi- dent of Global Leadership and Development. "In 2007 and 2008, we re- examined our critical skills and leader- ship competencies and created new job models for the enterprise as well as new leadership competencies." At that time, the existing four corporate schools were not connected to the newly established leadership competencies. "When we took it down, Schwartz relates, "we wanted to ensure it was aligned to new leadership competencies and send more people through. We worked on new architecture. We started down this path in 2007 with the founda- tional job models and competencies under one effort for the enterprise really kicked off all the other work. "We've had a little bit of difficulty try- ing to describe how technology will help this new piece along, but management is very, very supportive. We actually have a management development committee that works with us to provide strategic align- ment with senior leadership. We talk to them frequently about where we're head- ed. They give us a lot of feedback." A couple of short-term schools were offered during 2009 that would bridge the old with the new. They included an ele- ment called "Our Company, Our History, Our Vision" that utilizes collaborative learning. In the past, lectures had been in the talking-head modality with some PowerPoints, breakout sessions, and debrief and report-backs. The redesign included case studies around a fictitious company. Teams actually had to work through how that product gets from China to a shelf in U.S. for sale. In that collaborative work, they had to figure out what products and services and which business units were involved. "They absolutely loved it," Schwartz notes, "and the crowd who went through the old type of learning wants to come back and go through again." for first time ever in 2008; and in January 2010 we launched on-time, just- in-time learning with our U.P.S. Learning Center." As part of the corporate school redesign for front-line supervisors, the learning team took content that would be appro- priate for introductory or foundational training, mapped that content to the new leadership competencies, and packaged it in an interim solution from which super- visors can grab content at their leisure. There's also a system for tracking employ- ees and monitoring their progress. Supervisors aren't the only ones bene- fiting from the company's focus on train- ing and education. The U.P.S. Integrad program for drivers received a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to do a generational analysis of learning styles. After more than a year of research and analysis, U.P.S. created a training product for package drivers — those employees who are on the road virtually every work- ing day of the year. "In Landover, Maryland, we built a Laura Collings of U.P.S. The year 2011 sees the testing of U.P.S.'s Strategic Leadership Conference for 600 vice presidents worldwide that launched last month. Two director-level launches and a supervisor/manager-level program will also launch before the end of the year. OTHER PROGRAMS The U.P.S. Learning Center also under- went a major restructuring. "We're trying to put up a learning ecosystem so that we have a blended learning environment," Schwartz relates. "We actually launched virtual classrooms learning lab that's 85 percent hands-on, utilizing learning stations, simulators and four package cars right in the building where students are exposed to computer- based training," Schwartz says. "They apply that training immediately on the package cars collaboratively in teams of two. Based on the success of that training product, we just opened a second learning lab outside of Chicago." In the short-term, the plan is to get all the new training products up and run- ning and get management teams world- wide to understand them — as opposed to the old corporate schools. At the same time, Schwartz and her team realize that corporate culture must embrace the just- in-time mode. "It's a cultural shift for us into new-world leveraging technology, and we're right in the middle," she notes. "You can't let technology drive what you want to create, you have to determine what technology moves your strategy." May / June 2011 21