Mission E-Possible: The Cisco E-Learning Story

Training & Development, Feb, 2001 by Patricia A. Galagan

The council's first task was to uncover all of the e-learning activities in the training underground and then to create processes and standards they could share. Simultaneously, IT began to provide tools for integrating e-learning across Cisco- everything from virtual classrooms to video server technology to templates for content development.

"By no means is everything integrated yet," says Metz, "but at least we're headed in that direction."

In addition to its mission to integrate e-learning across Cisco, the Internet Learning Solutions Group provides elearning to three audiences: the 10,000 systems engineers and account managers who make up Cisco's field salesforce, the employees of the 40,000 channel partners who resell Cisco products, and hundreds of thousands of end-user customers. Rapid learning for those audiences is considered key to Cisco's growth strategy.

The ILSG's first move was to create a learning portal containing all of the learning resources that the company had for systems engineers and account managers in the field.

"The head of worldwide sales challenged us not to create more training," says Metz, "but first to aggregate, organize, and rationalize the resources that already existed but that nobody could find."

Called the Field E-Learning Connection, the portal puts learners in touch with more than 8,000 learning resources, including online learning, live class schedules, white papers, PowerPoint presentations, recommended books and videos, and more. It's organized around a set of learning roadmaps covering the jobs of every person in the field organization. About 95 percent of Cisco's 10,000 salespeople have logged on since the Field E-Learning Connection was launched in August 1999.

Diane Bauer is senior manager for elearning marketing in the Internet Learning Solutions Group. With a beeper, a phone, and a security card clipped to her belt, Bauer accessorizes like a California dot.commie. Her outfit the day of our interview is navy pinstripes, but it's about three generations from being a suit. Over the back of her chair is a baseball jacket.

A veteran of two and a half years at Cisco, Bauer was brought in to manage field training when it was still staunchly instructor-led. "At that time, the field executive team wasn't convinced that anyone could learn anything over the Internet," she says.

Bauer arrived at the peak of the training problem. Salespeople and systems engineers were struggling to keep up with new products and technologies. The salesforce, a group of product sellers who "knew their feeds and speeds," were being groomed as solutions providers. And the systems engineers were making the transition from generalists to specialists. Their learning needs were huge.

"There was no standardized way to develop engineers. It was typical to start writing a course for them, only to find there were nine other courses just like it in other parts of the company. Everything we were doing was not meeting their needs," says Bauer.

The field executives were clear about what they wanted from training, says Bauer. They wanted to solve the problems that had plagued classroom training regarding timeliness, relevance, worldwide accessibility, and learner accountability for results. The field executives also wanted to endorse the content and design of all of the training created for their groups.