Going to e-School
on Employee Training.

by Ken Freed.
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There's a ways to go, but operators are beginning to see the value in online learning.
 

Whenever a new field technician or customer service representative joins the staff of RCN Corp., much of the training is done through online distance learning.

Based in Princeton, NJ, the facilities-based "overbuilder" competes head-to-head with incumbent cable operators and phone companies in seven of the top ten U.S. markets &endash; Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

"We see online learning as part of the culture within our company," said E.K. Ramani, the senior vice president in charge of operations and customer care. "We call it the 'RCN Experiences' because our training does more than teach the necessary skillset. We teach a whole way of doing things that's different than our competitors."

Through both online and classroom sessions, for instance, RCN technicians are taught that before they enter any home for an installation or service call, they must always pause to put on a clean pair of blue surgery room booties to protect the rugs or carpeting in the household. "I cannot tell you how many letters we get from our customers who disbelieve how much we care about them. We instill this thoughtful 'bedside manner' as part of our training."

Using media networks to train technicians and customer service representatives is a growing trend in the cable industry, although the idea is not so new. The challenge is doing it right.

"There's a lot more talk about online learning in cable than there is online learning actually going on," says Tom Brooksher, the president/CEO of NCTI, the Denver-based national cable training institute that since the advent of telecommunications now goes only by its acronym. "There is a growing body of online training content available from companies like ours, and more is being developed every day in anticipation of the demand, but cable has not rushed to embrace it."

Brooksher estimates that perhaps 90% of the cable industry training are still being done in traditional classroom settings coupled with "a significant amount of self-study." Most of the cable training materials are printed on paper rather than in electronic form, he adds, "but a lot more than ten percent of the content is online."

NCTI is steadily moving its catalog of printed materials into web-based formats, he reports, but the long-respected company is not publishing material in fixed media formats like CD-ROM or DVD. "Whether delivered on the Web within a digital network learning management system [LMS]. We think online is the way to go."

While pickup may be slow, he says every major cable company is moving into distance learning because of the cost efficiencies. Online solutions cut the expense of flying trainers out to all the divisions or else bringing personnel to a central training facility. Putting curricula materials into digital format also reduces costs over printing. Electrons are cheaper to duplicate than atoms.

Brooksher says most of the major cable operators have installed learning management systems. The LMS stores the digital training documents on servers for instant on-demand delivery to computers connected within intranets or extranets. The LMS also tracks the training of every employee.

He then notes that few cable operators have taken full advantage of the LMS technology's potential. "We have electronic content ready for them, but most of them still want our paper-based training products."

Nevertheless, he says cable operators are increasingly serious about e-learning for staff training and development.

Comcast last June hired Rebecca Ray as the president of Comcast University, which oversees all training and development efforts within the cable compasny natioanlly. Involved in financial services ventures prior to joining Comcast, she had launched the corporate university of American Skandia and led the learning and development functions at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and Prudential Securities Inc., this after teaching management at New York University.

Comcast spokesperson Chris Ellis says the top U.S. cable operator (with 21.3 million video subscribers and 4.3 million broadband cutomers) is not yet ready to discuss the changes that Ray making in the training and development arena, but offers assurances the distance learning component is a major emphasis. Because Ray is so new on the job, Ellis says, he's unwilling to comment on the fiscal or educational results Comcast expects from her efforts.

Ray has her work cut out for her. According to a former Comcast affiliate who asked not to be identified, the company has spent more than a million dollars developing its learning management system without much appreciable return on its investment, so far.

At Time Warner Cable, the senior vice president of customer care, Dave Temlak, declines to disclose any specifics of online learning programs within the company,including anticiapted results. But in terms of general principles, he says TWC is implementing "effective training across the enterprise" with face-to-face classroom sessions, coroprate training of the regional division trainers, and e-learning.

In terms of e-learning, he says TWC is still developing its training capabilities "on the transport level" with an LMS and the Web to provide "distance learning opportunities wherever possible." Remaining in abstractions, "We believe e-learning technology will come to make a major contribution to our training efforts."

Why the reticense of Comcast and Time Warner in providing details? Compare cable's long ballyhoo for distance learning with Brooker's comment on how little of cable's training activites are online so far.

Online training is a priority at Adelphia Communications, says Regina Hutchinson, the vice president of learning and safety based in Denver. With major efforts pending until the company's emergence from bankruptcy restructuring, "we've started to venture into distance learning and already have some courses online, such as training the customer service and field technicians on using high-speed data services, which seems perfect for teaching online."

The e-learning courses at Adelphia are available during the workday, she explains. The CSRs can do the training at their own workstations in modules that may take from 20 minutes to an hour to complete. Field technicians come into a corporate training center where the computers are waiting for them. Adelphia is gradually installing e-learning kiosks in each city to save time and travel expenses.

She also declines to provide any hard numbers on expected savings or the anticipated return on their investment, but how much are plane tickets, hotels and meals?

She does report that the online training programs at Adelphia are mostly text with some graphics. "We don't have any streaming video because the infrastructure for it is not in place just yet, but we'll get there."

Even when the company moves full bore into online learning, there are some skills that cannot be taught electronically, such as pole climbing, and must be done in real life. Also, observes Hutchinson, the staff enjoys the social aspects of classroom training, everything from the camaraderie to the donuts at the back of the room.

"We'll continue to use a blended solution for training delivery," she says. "We'll use the classroom where its most effective, and we'll use a learning management system or the Web when that's the best way to go." She says about 20 percent of the training is now on the LMS.

How can cable companies use their distance learning systems to gain the most benefit?

Advance assessment and planning is crucial, says Carmine Porco, the vice president of Prescient Digital Media in Toronto, a consultancy specializing in e-learning intranet development. Their clients include Bell Canada, Cisco Systems, Sprint PCS, and AOL Time Warner.

"You need to do site visits for staff interviews and focus groups," he says. "Find out how your people prefer to be trained. Is a video of an interaction with a difficult customer going to be more effective for a CSR than reading instructions on what to say?"

Companies then need to create a workable plan for managing their educational activities and assets. They also need to establish realistic criteria for measuring the results of online training. "Benchmarking your performance standards is vital."

Providing incentives is another important element. Without naming names, Porco recalls a telecommunications company that offered a $1000 bonus to the first 100 employees who successfully completed a voluntary online training course. Another venture in the insurance services sector mandated an e-learning program for all employees with fiscal consequences for those who resisted.

"The question is how to calculate your return on investment," he says. "Be sure not to build your business case only on the financial benefits. The money you save on travel to a classroom course may end up costing you more in the long run if the material is not truly suited to online learning."

A learning management system supposedly will pay for itself in two years, he cautions, "but when you look under the covers, are people really learning what they should and how they should? Sometimes, e-learning is best only as an enhancement or reinforcement of classroom training, not as a replacement for it."

Encouragement for investing in online learning comes from cable systems pioneer Glenn Jones, chairman of Jones International in Denver, who established Jones International University, the world's first accredited Web-based degree granting institution.

Although he sold off his systems to focus on e-learning, Jones now offers training materials to cable operators &endash; like a general safety course, set-top box installation courses for each manufacturer, and a customer service course &endash; which operators customize with their own corporate branding.

"The change to distance learning is not easy," he says "but cable people are already technologically minded, and that helps a lot. The main thing is to apply the best practices from instructional design and make the online interface as user-friendly as possible."

Cable is positioned for explosive growth in distance learning, says Dr. Bernard Luskin, the director of the media studies program at the Field Graduate Institute in San Bernardino, Calif., offering the world's first Ph.D. in media psychology. A trailblazer in distance learning since the Seventies, Luskin in the Nineties led the entry of Jones International into online education.

To fulfill the potential, Luskin says, cable operators must make sure they have fully qualified "chief learning officers" who understand media affects in terms of both personal motivation and corporate culture. "You need to overlap an effective learning environment with a clear vision of what you're trying to do. The key is putting as much emphasis on the staff's personal growth as on job performance."

Says Jones, "A well-trained workforce is cable's best defense against competition in the marketplace." .

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TRANSMIT

First published December 2003 in premier of Transmit (c) 2003 by Ken Freed

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