“Leapfrogging the Organization Training Capability”

The Situation

The organization is a diversified global financial services company that is headquartered in New York.
The company is best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses and is one of the top 30 Most Admired Companies in the World.

The organization is based out of four major cities in India, where back office operations are taken care of.  The client had recently grown significantly in both grown in size and complexity. A large number of new hires had come into the system and many people had moved into higher roles to manage the ramp up.

The complexity

The steep ramp up meant that more people had to be trained for doing the operations and many others were required to be trained on doing their new roles. All this had to be done consistently over a period of time with great efficiency and effectiveness.  To do this the internal training team needed to do training on both process and other behavioral skills.

Most of the trainers in the training team were internal hires. They had good communication/ presentation skills and keen on becoming trainers, but were not from the training/ HR domain nor trained on the science and art of training and development. The organization wanted to ensure that the investment being made on training and developing these employees were giving the desired results in the best possible manner.

One of the biggest pivots for this was to ensure that the trainers were adequately skilled to deliver the training in an effective manner to ensure learning among the participants. The other was to re look at the design of some of the key programs and make them more efficient in terms of ensuring learning and the program duration.

The solution

The organization invited Vyaktitva to partner with them to help meet these objectives. Vyaktitva used the ADDIE* model for the intervention and begun by conducting a detailed Analysis – talking to hiring managers, participants, training team, business and HR leaders to excavate the true learning and performance gap and opportunities. Based on the Analysis, Vyaktitva recommended and designed a ‘Learn + Do’ intervention.

It involved the trainers to attend the customized intensive ‘Big Ticket’ program of Vyaktitva on Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. This program was spread across 5 weeks and conducted 1 day a week. Teams of trainers were created and each team was given one of the key programs to re-design. Each session focused on an aspect of Instructional Design which the trainers learned about during the session and during the week used on their real life project/program. This was presented and discussed in the next session and feedback was given by the instructor and the other participants. The instructor was also available to each team during the week for more focused coaching on the project.

The final presentations/mock sessions were made to an internal Learning and Development team who along with the instructor evaluated the participants on the detailed competency indicators of Instructional Design and Facilitation Skills. Participants who qualified were certified and felicitated at an organization ceremony.

The Organizational Impact

1)      Better Designs = more learning + less training duration: The intervention ensured that all the key programs were revamped to become better instructionally designed and thus ensuring better learning. Better designs also enabled the organization to cut down the duration of some of the programs leading to huge savings.

2)      Better Delivery of Training = more learning + less attrition during training : The organizational competence on training delivery leapfrogged with all the trainers getting certified leading to more impactful training, better management of participants’ learning needs.

3)      Common framework of training design = better future interventions: A shared understanding of the principles of people development, common framework, templates and vocabulary was established in the organizations which help ensure that all future interventions were of a certain standard and quality. This would ensure the sustainability and long term impact.

*Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation & Evaluation