Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/65226
Learning Training 2.0 Outsourcing learning programmes that have solid analytics can improve how human resources departments deliver tangible results to their organisations' bottom lines. That was the take away from presentations and subsequent reflections by two HR leaders—Bank of Ireland's Eamonn Eaton and Unilever's Jonathan Donner—at the recent HRO Today Forum Europe in Barcelona. First up, Eaton, head of group learning and engagement for Bank of Ireland Group. Eaton explains that in 2005 his company began partnering with Accenture to develop and administer Learningzone, the financial services company's internal learning programme. Driving the initiative were Bank of Ireland's twin goals of developing employees for career advancement while simultaneously increasing their day-to-day productivity. "We have moved into a very different world and a very different space where people really have to think about their transferrable skills and their futures," Eaton says. "We're now partly in the business of helping to equip those people, not just to deliver the strategy of our bank and to serve our customers, but also to use the time at the organisation wisely, to try to learn and gain experience, so they can move on and do other things within our organisation or elsewhere." The company opted to outsource, Eaton recalls, because it was in the midst of transforming from a vertical to a horizontal structure. Each business unit had its own IT, HR, operations, and other functions, and much of those functions were being moved to a shared-service platform. Learning transformed from 15 autonomous [40] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | WINTER 2012 How two organisations took their learning programmes to the next level. By Katie Kuehner-Hebert training departments to one central platform, and so it was easier to outsource than to try to integrate 16 departments internally. The initiative got off to a slow start, with next generation technology holding the project back two years. Plus, the in-house learning team went from 105 to five people, which was "hell on everybody who had wanted to deal with the people they knew," he recalls. By 2007, the programme was nearly up and running, but the economy turned, and Bank of Ireland had to refocus on raising capital. "Something saved us—we had built the learning model to be flexible so we could scale upwards, but we found that we could also scale it downwards, and we were rapidly able to contract," Eaton says. With the banks' former learning model, his team would have had to cut budgets, close buildings, and reduce headcount, but since it had already reduced its learning team from 105 to now two, those drastic cuts weren't necessary. And the learning programme had shifted from 90 per cent classroom to split roughly between classroom and web-based. Bank of Ireland was also able to negotiate a new contract with Accenture for 2010 to 2017 with better pricing, a 20 per cent cost reduction, and a different mix of services that met the company's expanded requirements, Eaton says. "If I had gone into outsourcing as just as a matter of cost, I would have failed," he says. "But with the mantra of flexibility, scalability, and adaptability, we were actually able to cope with what happened next."