Take E-Learning to the next step: E-learning programs move beyond online catalogs to individual assessments and professional development plans - Focus on Training & Development

HR Magazine, Feb, 2002 by Kathryn Tyler

E-learning holds a lot of promise for training and development. But many companies aren't using the technology to its full potential.

"The [typical] approach to e-learning is 'here are a whole bunch of courses, good, bad, right, wrong. Pick and choose what you want from this menu,"' says Marc J. Rosenberg, author of e-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age (McGraw-Hill, 2001). What employees want and need, Rosenberg adds, are recommendations and an outline of a learning plan they can customize with their managers.

E-learning can do all that and more. Imagine a system that analyzes employees' performances based on a system designed specifically for their jobs. Imagine that the system automatically spits out a series of recommendations--online courses, classroom training, books, mentoring--to address an employee's weaknesses. And imagine a system that increases manager accountability by tracking when he evaluates his employees, whether he has produced a development plan and how the employee acts on that plan throughout the year.

That is exactly what the training department at Anheuser-Busch implemented. In 1997, the St. Louis, Mo.-based beer brewer introduced the Wholesaler Integrated Learning (WIL) program to its 700 independently owned distributors and their employees, as well as to the 13 company-owned branch operations and 12 breweries.

"Prior to 1997, all training was live instructor-led classroom [training] at headquarters, in hotels or [at] wholesaler-ships nationwide," explains Tom Nolan, WIL director.

An employee can access the WIL web site from anywhere and take a test that measures his proficiency in areas deemed important for his job description. The test is scored instantly, and the employee sees the gaps between his abilities and those required for his position. The system then offers suggestions--classroom training, online courses, books and on-the-job activities--on how to close those gaps. "The plan report is linked to a list of available resources and then to the enrollment system," says Nolan.

Anheuser-Busch has expanded training and development opportunities to include several methods of delivery, such as interactive satellite--almost all of it available at each employee's workplace. "WIL has grown from reaching 3,500 students to more than 32,000 distributor employees," says Nolan. "Currently, more than 20,000 users have completed competency assessments and are working on their assignments."

The Logistics

To create WIL, Anheuser-Busch spent more than a year collecting information about job skills, knowledge and attributes to create a job competency database.

"Core competencies are the same for everyone in the organization. And although every employee has specific competencies unique to their position," most competencies can be used for more than one job description, explains Scott Matthews, vice president of marketing and communication at Maritz Learning, the e-learning division of Maritz Inc. in Fenton, Mo., which helped Anheuser-Busch create its program.

"Creating competency assessments is like a bunch of Lego blocks," Matthews continues. "Once you have a database of all the skills, qualities and knowledge that employees need, you assemble them to create unique job descriptions. If you create a new role or [if] an existing role changes, you don't have to re-create the system from scratch." Instead, you can assign a value to a competency from the pool and build a new job description. For example, although a marketing employee and a sales employee each require Microsoft PowerPoint skills the sales rep may need a lower level of proficiency than the marketing person.

"Once the organization takes the time and effort to build a competency model, it will have 70 [percent] to 90 percent of all the skills and competencies needed within the organization. It may only need to tweak or customize this database for the last 10 [percent] to 30 percent," says Matthews. Anheuser-Busch has about 200 different roles and almost 400 different competencies.

Rosenberg warns HR professionals not to get mired in creating competency models. "The problem is that you could have thousands of roles in a company. We get hung up trying to prescribe learning plans for every possible occurrence," he says.

To avoid getting bogged down, Rosenberg suggests consolidating job titles into general roles and letting employees and their managers do the fine-tuning.

"Focus on the most critical elements. Look at top performers, and determine the skills and knowledge that [sets them apart]," recommends Brian Carlin, president of Maritz.

While it may appear that this type of system is out of reach for smaller companies, experts disagree. Theoretically, a smaller company would have fewer job descriptions, so the time and costs associated with collecting core and unique competencies would decrease.

How long does it take to establish this system? "It depends on the number of job roles you have and how granular you want to get," explains Carlin. "If you start with off-the-shelf competency models, you can be off and running in a couple of weeks. If you want to do a completely customized job, it can be three to six months [or more] to go through that process."