Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/65226
Learning Bank of Ireland and Accenture developed an enterprise-wide model. Bank of Ireland drives the direction of the training, and the companies build content together at offsite centres. "Don't get into your head that Accenture provided us courses and content," Eaton says. "It's still the Bank of Ireland's curriculum that we deliver—the partner just helps deliver it." The main training centres are in Dublin, Belfast, and Bristol, with remote training in a few others. Learningzone also consists of a learning management system (LMS), which provides the IT platform and infrastructure for groupwide e-learning and learning administration such as online tracking. The overall programme is a combination of generic, customised, instructor- led, and web-based training. After collaborating with business unit leaders, teaching now focusses on five key areas: skills to grow the bank; skills to run its business more effectively; skills to change the bank; skills to lead its people more effectively; and skills to manage its customers more effectively. "We're very clear that our purpose is not just a hug, love, and cozy training department, but we're actually part of the engine that's driving the business forward," Eaton says. His team continues to work internally to ensure that content is aligned with the business strategy. Monthly performance metrics are measured against benchmarks. New initiatives include an iPhone learning application and web- based courses for customers. Universities are now certifying Learningzone's leadership management courses to enable company employees to receive post-graduate qualifications. Next up: Eaton and his team are exploring how to partner with other parts of the bank and outside providers to use the learning programme to generate income for the company. "If I can actually start selling my service to customers of the bank or other strategic partners where they pay the price, that is enough of a benchmark to prove that my learning service is actually working," he says. Unilearning A global consumer company that sells its products in more than 180 countries, Unilever has worked with Accenture for development of its learning programme. Outsourcing came out of the company's mission to rationalise costs and transform itself into a "leaner, global, interdependent enterprise," says Jonathan Donner, Unilever's vice president of learning and capability development. Unilever was also determined to double business by focussing on developing and emerging markets—while simultaneously reducing its environmental impact. As part of this mission, Donner's team was tasked with establishing a single global LMS, aligning thousands of local programmes through [42] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | WINTER 2012 a single, global general skills curriculum, and launching a global learning service. This was no easy feat. Learning programmes across the organisation were "forcefully ripped out of the ground and replaced with a global service and build," Donner says. "But we had this idea that we would increasingly become one, we would harness the whole, and therefore we could represent something that would have great meaning to both stockholders and the markets, but also the consumers." Unilever partnered with Accenture to create the Unilever Learning Academy and, later, an online "learning passport" for each Unilever employee. In 2009 when Paul Polman became Unilever's chief executive officer, his direction was to focus on emerging markets such as Singapore, and learning began to revolve around several areas. Key focusses now include leadership, business volume, sales capability development, supply chain mastery, transport, rapid adaptability, and global scalability. "I found it really interesting that one of the first things they wanted to deliver, even without a strategy, was a training centre," Donner says of the location in Singapore. "We used it almost as a totem or a lighthouse, that Unilever was coming, and this is how we wanted to demonstrate our presence." As a result, learning is now much closer to the front end of Unilever's strategy because of Accenture's ability to scale quickly. Roughly 400 programmes are delivered monthly in 140 countries in more than 40 languages. Importantly, Donner is now able to use analytics from the programme to help business leaders make strategic choices, such as whether to commit the full learning budget to increase commercial skills in China and Russia next year. "I can give our leadership a dashboard and a steering wheel as opposed to just a dashboard," he says. "Because we control the learning, and we control the budgets, and we can actually make strategic choices about what gets done and what doesn't get done." Colin Crickmore, a senior executive at Accenture, says his firm and Unilever are actively pursuing additional crossover of learning and technology, so more can be done with the "exploitation of technology." Unilever now has an online real-time Business Challenge Game that simulates business scenarios for company leaders. There's also a mobile app for learning passports. And a global collaborative site for new recruits just out of college is in development. Unilever and Accenture are also starting to use learning analytics to get "some visibility and control of what is going on," Crickmore says. "Analytics can show that learning is contributing to the business in a tangible way that line managers will understand, because there's euros and dollars attached to it."