National House-Building Council introduces online academy
Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 6
Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in HR
Pete BennettChief Executive of Learning Resources International (LRI).
At a time when people are more concerned than ever with getting a return on investment sooner rather than later, it is encouraging to find organizations that are prepared to take a more long-term view of their learning and development strategies. This was very much the case with the National House-Building Council (NHBC). In fact, Mac MacDonald, NHBC’s learning and development projects manager, described the organization’s decision to implement an online academy at this time a “no-brainer.” He explains:“We needed to achieve some tactical changes to our learning and development strategy and we felt this was the best way to achieve them.”
A new approach to training and development
NHBC is the standard-setting body and leading warranty and insurance provider for all new and newly-converted homes in the UK. With a remit to raise standards across the house-building industry, continuing professional development (CPD)and ongoing training for its own staff are critical to its operation. It employs more than 1,100 people, including surveyors, engineers, energy assessors and health and safety professionals, as well as training, registration and claims staff. It also has 280 building inspectors working across the country who carry out around one million inspections on new homes at key stages of construction each year.
One of the main drivers for the online academy was to move away from the previous silo approach to learning and development to something more coherent,co-ordinated and easier to manage. NHBC also wanted to introduce a level of e-learning, which it felt would offer a cost-effective training option and provide employees with access to a wide range of courses. A key part of the plan was to move the emphasis of learning from managers suggesting individuals to go on a course to a far more consultative approach, which sees the individual take more control and responsibility for their personal and professional development.“Rather than just deliver and transfer learning, we wanted to be more of a conduit for employees to get to the learning,” says MacDonald.
Core to this was the central repository to store and record everything relating to learning and development to enable the organization to extract meaningful data that could be used across its people management strategies. While MacDonald intended to incorporate e-learning courses in areas such as management and leadership and a range of soft skills, he also wanted the academy to allow individuals to book face-to-face courses and workshops in specialist areas. In short, NHBC wanted to bring cohesion and control to every element of its learning and development so mandatory, elective, compliance training and everything else had to become part of the corporate academy.
Introducing the Development Zone
The core academy model is used by a number of organizations in the private and public sectors, including large and small councils such as the London Borough of Islington and Cheltenham Borough Council, as well as corporations such as Travis Perkins Group, Aviva and TDG. The core model controls, supports,delivers and manages every aspect of the learning and development provision. This includes course event management, courseware delivery and tracking, team and individual learning statements and learning logs, approvals and survey and assessment processes and certification generation. An integral part is the extensive suite of UK online learning courses (some 250 to 300 hours) and course authoring capabilities.
Called the Development Zone, NHBC’s academy is a 90 per cent vanilla system. That said, a number of tweaks and changes had to be made before the system met NHBC’s needs. One of the challenges with a technology-based project of this level is ensuring system specification matches client requirements. A supplier will always say our system does X but the client doesn’t really know whether X exactly meets their needs at the beginning and may need it to do X, Y and Z.
NHBC appointed a full-time project manager to lead the project team, which also included learning and development, HR and administrative staff. The learning and development team was heavily involved in the testing of the system during implementation. It was only with this close collaboration and regular contact with Learning Resources International (LRI), that they were able to implement the system within a short timescale (ten weeks) and on budget.
One of the other major challenges was the scale of the project because NHBC wanted to input the training history details of all of its employees so at launch it was as up-to-date as possible. “At launch we wanted to be able to say: ‘this is what you’ve told us about what’s gone before,it’s over to you’,” says MacDonald. As well as formal training courses, the academy allows employees to record informal learning such as going to a conference or even peer-to-peer learning.
Ongoing promotion and development
NHBC is still at the stage where it is driving usage of the online academy and this has been helped by the fact that many of its employees, such as engineers, surveyors and building inspectors, are self-starters when it comes to learning and development because of mandatory CPD demands. MacDonald accepts,however, it may take longer for some areas to adapt, not least because of the cultural change required. He says: “We’re starting a journey of getting the business to understand the new system and transferring to the concept behind it. We need to shift the perception that learning is not just about going on a course and that it can also mean doing some reading or accessing a piece of learning online.”
NHBC hopes to make this shift by undertaking an internal marketing campaign to raise awareness of the Development Zone and to highlight that there is structure for staff learning and development as opposed to randomly accessing learning. Crucially, to be a success, those involved must be aware and informed of their target audience. Engineers, for instance, are more technically oriented and are meticulous about processes so you have to think about how you present to them and be aware of their intellectual capacity.
Now the online academy is up and running, MacDonald says NHBC plans to add to its functionality by integrating LRI’s appraisal and performance management modules in the next six to nine months. He says it will enable managers to assess members of staff against competencies and where a skills shortfall is identified direct them towards a piece of learning to plug the gap. “We’ll start to embed the information we capture across many facets of our people management strategies,” he says. “This is part of a long-term strategy and we know we’ll get payback.”
Lessons to be learned
MacDonald offers the following advice for implementing an online academy:“Remember the devil is in the detail – be very attentive to the small things, no matter how wonderful the system is, you can loose credibility very quickly if small niggles or mis-matches to user expectations creep in. We had some feedback emails from people letting us know that we had an apostrophe in the wrong place rather than what a great leap forward it was.
“Always confirm requirements versus specification – be very clear about what you expect the system to do and how it will do it. We had some areas that met the brief but how it did it needed to be changed to ensure the user would be happy.
“Assume it will always take longer than you think it will – make sure you give enough time to the whole project, especially user acceptance testing and training. These are the areas that will get ‘eaten into’once the project starts to slip, so make sure you have contingency at the outset.”
About the author
Pete Bennett, Chief Executive, Learning Resources International (LRI), has a strong background in organizational training, learning and development and self-development. He set up LRI in 1996, having been a learning and development consultant for ten years prior to that. LRI is one of the UK’s leading blended learning providers. It acts in a consultancy capacity and is not just a software provider. Pete Bennett can be contacted at: pete.bennett@lri.co.uk
