EMD Serono Makes Tech Training Trendy
June 03, 2008
By Sarah Boehle
When Michael Laffin and Christina Bertsch joined the learning and organizational development team at EMD Serono in 2005, one of the first moves they made was to take a hard look at the company's IT training. While the Rockland, Mass., bio-pharmaceutical company offered employees several courses on a wide variety of software applications at that time, employee interest in the training was lukewarm, at best.
Based on feedback from several business units, Laffin and Bertsch knew that employees needed the training. So why, they wondered, were enrollment levels low to nonexistent?
After some digging around, they found out.
First, there was a problem with consistency. At the time, tech training at EMD Serono wasn't centralized and there was no formal, regularly scheduled curriculum in place. If a particular department or business unit thought it needed a certain type of training, it would simply find a vendor on an ad-hoc basis to run a course.
Second, there was no comprehensive marketing or communications effort supporting the training. As a result, employees often weren't aware of what programs were available or when they were being offered.
Third, many employees said they had only limited time to participate in training, needed training to occur at a convenient location and time, and wanted quick, targeted training to cover specific skill gaps—such as how to build a pivot table in Excel, create a PowerPoint template or build a table in Word—instead of lengthy, generic overviews of various software applications.
Fourth, even though the company offered a wide variety of IT-related WBTs that employees could take at their leisure, employees said that they far preferred instructor-led training to e-learning.
In response, a new program called "Desktop Coach" was launched. The program, which features a designated day of technology training company-wide on the third Friday of every month, includes multiple 60- to 90-minute instructor-led workshops on a variety of topics and tasks specific to the desktop applications EMD Serono employees use each day. It also features two additional coaching time slots for employees or work teams looking for personalized training on frequently used documents and upcoming deliverables.
Training recently spoke with Laffin, EMD Serono’s director of learning and organizational development, and Bertsch, the company's associate director of learning and organizational development, about the program's impact, as well as their tips for success.
Training: What results has Desktop Coach delivered?
Laffin: Desktop Coach was immediately successful and generated a flood of positive feedback. In fact, the response was so positive that the concept was recently expanded, and we now offer virtual classroom training featuring live, one-on-one desktop coaching for our 300 field employees. We also expanded the model to include our professional development and competency curricula. The bulk of our curriculum still comprises standard one- to two- day workshops, but over time, we've added shorter, focused professional development workshops to the program that follow the Desktop Coach model—with each workshop offering learners one to two targeted tips or a few key takeaways.
 Bertsch: We also know Desktop Coach is a success based on enrollment. Over 300 employees are trained over the course of the year through the program. We also track feedback on evaluations that learners fill out at the end of every class, and those scores indicate that our employees firmly believe the training they receive helps them in their jobs. It's not difficult to understand why. The training is immediately applicable. They can come in, learn to build a pivot table in Excel or insert an animation into a slide, then go back to their desk and put those skills to use right away.
Laffin: Desktop Coach also helps with productivity. Think about how much time is burned up by employees sitting at their desks and using the MS paperclip help guy or rooting around elsewhere for answers to teach themselves applications they don't know. Before, employees might not have been comfortable admitting a gap in their IT skills. With Desktop Coach, all they have to do is set up an appointment, take a document and go down the hall to a coach, learn what they need to know, and produce results immediately.
Training: What tips or best practices can you share with other readers who might be interested in implementing something similar?
 Laffin:
• Establish a consistent delivery schedule. We set aside the third Friday of every month for Desktop Coach. Training always takes place at the same time and in the same location. As a result, employees always know when and where to get support for tech training.
• Build a brand. When we launched the program, we worked with our communications group to create a formal marketing and communications plan that used multiple vehicles, both traditional and non-traditional, to raise awareness and interest. As a result, Desktop Coach has become its own brand under the umbrella of LEAD Academy (Learning, Education, Advancement, Development), which is our corporate university.
• Keep your topics fresh. At minimum, we review Desktop Coach content once a year and conduct a formal needs analysis to determine what to include in the curriculum. But the beauty of the Desktop Coach model is the fact that it also allows us to react on the fly. If a new technology hits the company in August, for example, the model allows us to add training around EMD Serono-specific applications at any time. This means Desktop Coach topics always remain fresh and relevant.
• Build a strong relationship with IT. To pull a program like this off, you absolutely need the strong support of your IT partners. If you try to train employees on technology, you need to be able to rely on these partners to ensure that your platforms and technology are sound and in good working order. If your training systems aren't working well, the credibility of your tech training will go out the window.
• Create a scalable model. Companies often don't think that they can afford to offer one-on-one training because they perceive the cost per head to be so high. The model this program is built on, however, allows us to do just that, and to do so with a very high ROI. It's a frequently run program with high levels of participation, immediate application and very low costs. It only costs us about $40 per learner, which represents a very, very small percentage of our overall learning program budget.
Bertsch:
• Do your research. There are three things that we do throughout the year to determine which Desktop Coach topics are needed. First, during the course of each year, we run approximately 100 classroom-based events—ranging from 90-minute workshops to two-day courses. After each course, attendees fill out a Level I measurement survey. One of the questions on that survey relates to unmet needs. We have three to four years' worth of data from these evaluations, and we are still small enough as an organization that we are able to review these after each program to uncover unmet needs. Also, once a year, we run multiple-level focus groups to determine what is working, what's not working, and what's needed from a training and development perspective. Finally, we routinely conduct one-on-one interviews with our senior management team to get their perspective regarding employee development needs.
• If you outsource, talk to your vendor regularly. Desktop Coach is a very different model, so if you outsource, it's important to find a vendor that is flexible and open to doing something different. We use an outside vendor, Navis Learning, to develop and teach our Desktop Coach courses. Members of the Navis team sit down with us every single month to go over what's needed based on questions asked in class, participation levels and the like.
EMD Serono Inc. is the U.S. pharmaceutical division of Merck KGaA, which is based in Darmstadt, Germany. The company’s U.S. headquarters are in Rockland, Mass. In 2008, it placed 112th on Training magazine's Top 125 list, an annual ranking of organizations that excel at human capital development.
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