By Martha Gold
Leave the trinkets and t-shirts for conferences, says Paul Dickerson, e-learning manager
at PNC Bank. When it comes to getting employees to the computer for training, a wellresearched and well-planned communication marketing strategy and course listing is a much
more powerful lure.
Which is why e-learning at PNC’s Regional Community Bank, a division of a large,
diversified financial-services company called PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., which is
based in Pittsburgh, is in the process of implementing an application that shows employees the
skills and classes they need to excel at their current position as well as engaging in career
planning activities. It is a competence manager application and it is part of the bank’s learning
management system, a Pathlore product. Each job in the bank will eventually have a competency
model that includes all of the classes and courses that teach the skills required for the position.
“Workforce readiness is a strategic part of training and part of the bank’s business
strategy,” says Dickerson. “Employees can look up their required skills and classes with their
manager, find out the skills they need, and sign up for the classes that teach those skills. It also
helps target training dollars. If there are competency gaps in certain areas, or if the business unit
or individuals want certain competencies, we know to target those areas. It helps us know what
to offer.”
Out of the 24,000 employees at PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., 13,000 employees
use the bank’s LMS – 11,000 from the Regional Community Bank (RCB) and 2,000 from PNC’s
mutual fund processing company, PFPC. The RCB and PFPC are among the financial
institution’s five different lines of business.
The competence manager application is part of an overall strategic view designed to
leverage technology and improve training delivery and design. The bank began this effort four
years ago when it was looking for ways to remake itself from a stagnating, albeit profitable,
business into a growing, thriving entity. As part of that initiative the CEO brought together a
group of executives to find ways to leverage more ownership and pride among the workforce.
The executive team came up with a “leadership initiative,” which sought to make all
employees act more like leaders, give them more empowerment and make them more receptive
to customers’ needs. To make this happen, the bank decided to invest heavily in upgrading
technology throughout the RCB, especially within the distribution system. A significant portion
of the investment was to go towards a customer relations management system.
“So as to better serve the customers,” says Dickerson. “The vision was, ‘10,000 aligned
leaders.’
Genesis Project
The technology improvement project was dubbed the “Genesis Project,” and it was
carried out in four phases: the last phase was rolled out this year. Each phase involved substantial
investment into training and other improvements to enable workers to carry out their new roles.
“We needed to figure out a way to provide skills and knowledge for the technology
conversion, but we couldn’t pull people out of production to have it done,” says Robert
Leininger, director of HR. At the time Leininger was Director of Training for the RCB.
The thinking was that the group needed to leverage technology and that it might involve a
LMS.
At the time, transactions were processed through a mainframe network, which was about
to be replaced with networked PCs and a browser-based CRM system that would connect 740
branches to the Internet. With the extension of browser-based technology to the branches,
Leininger saw an opportunity to get training involved with the Genesis initiative. At the time, elearning was limited to discrete departments and was not available to all employees. Leininger
proposed running connections from an LMS to all of the branch offices, thus extending elearning to the employees who have the most frequent contact with customers.
“He saw a synergy in making one vision a reality by providing online training,
registration, tracking, and measurement to the organization,” says Dickerson. “The combination
of these events extended online learning to all of the RCB.”
Course curriculum
The RCB currently has 58 online courses that were created by or for PNC to support
specific initiatives.
“We offer desktop learning such as Microsoft Word from our branch network
distribution,” says Michael Hellman, the database system manager for the company’s e-learning
unit. “We do a lot of product training as well as training to teach employees about new
government regulations and do a lot of process training.”
For example, the bank has created a blended program for its new employee orientation
program. It begins with an online course that introduces them to the organization’s e-knowledge
network and orients them to the bank. Employees then go back to their branch office take a series
of prerequisite computer-based training courses that prepare them for instructor-led courses.
For supervisors and managers the company has a leadership college that hosts a library of
online classes and materials, all available through the LMS.
“It has materials that it will send by request, hosts discussion workshops on the material
and offers access to learning objects,” says Hellman. “The learning objects are available to
everyone through a leadership development link, for people interested in advancing.”
LMS Selection
Rather than add another e-learning program on to train branch employees the bank chose
to centralize training into one system. This required purchasing a LMS that would work with the
company’s registration and tracking system to monitor registrations and course completions as
well as disperse courseware. As it turned out, Pathlore had just merged with the company that
designed PNC’s registration and tracking system, Silton Bookman Systems, when the bank
began its search.
“This way we didn’t have to change our tracking and registration software, which was
always set on top of our HR system,” says Dickerson. [The Silton-Bookman merger] wasn’t a
deciding factor, but it put a checkmark in the ‘pluses’ column.”
With the LMS slated to serve nearly all of the bank’s 11,000 employees, Leininger and
his team enlisted help for the selection process from different departments to ensure that they
selected a system that worked with the bank’s infrastructure and got a good deal. Among the
participants on the LMS selection team were people from the IT department, who guided the
group on the technical compatibility of different models. The purchasing and the legal
departments helped with contract negotiations, finance worked out a budget, and marketing came
up with a campaign to lure customers to the LMS.
The next step was to put out a search for the best candidates. The company sent out 21
RFPs and from those responses they invited 11 companies to come and give presentations at the
bank. From the 11 presentations the selection committee chose four finalists. Committee
members visited each finalist at their individual facilities and then invited them back to the bank
to go over the RFPs page by page.
“It was helpful as we found out during those meetings that some of the things we thought
came with the package turned out to be extras,” says Dickerson.
The bank eventually settled on Pathlore, a decision that was based in large part on the
company’s final presentation, said Dickerson.
“They came in very well prepared and very anxious for our business, whereas the other
candidates came in various degrees of preparedness,” he says.
Operation System Roll Out
The RCB has grouped its operations into four territories: Cincinnati/Louisville, Northern
New Jersey, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia/South Jersey. With new systems to implement at more
than 700 locations, the bank chose to roll out the new technology one territory at a time. The
bank developed a combined online and instructor-led course for the new technology that
employees, as many as 6,000 or more at a time, would take once the system was installed. To
ease employees into the new system, the new hardware was installed next to the old hardware,
and the old and new systems were run simultaneously.
“They took the first course for navigating through the new Genesis software online,” says
Dickerson. “After that the employees had a day of training at a class in a computer room.”
Following the classroom instruction, the employees were tested using an online
simulation of what they had learned in the previous classes. It took six months to implement the
LMS and about nine months to roll out the first phase of the Genesis software, a process that was
not without its glitches. For example, Dickerson’s team discovered that despite their scrupulous
care in addressing all of the technical aspects of the implementation, some of their pre-LMS
courses on CDs didn’t work in the new system.
“We should have had a better understanding of our network environment,” says
Dickerson. “In doing so, we could have designed to it without compromising what we wanted to
achieve instructionally. You just can’t put it out and assume that it’s going to function.”
Another technical challenge Dickerson’s team faced was getting media-rich content to
the branches over bandwidth that is already crowded with the CRM and the teller transactions’
applications. Without broadband, the bank had to be very careful and creative regarding the
use of audio and graphics.
“We’ve done hybrid solutions,” says Hellman. “We’ve put the graphics and media on a
CD and run the course through the LMS. The LMS calls to the CD to bring up the graphics and
media without slowing things down.”
After getting the LMS system up and running in the last quarter of 2001, Dickerson’s
team flung open the doors to their new virtual training shop and waited for the customers to pour
in. This was when his team discovered that the old saying “if you build it, they will come”
doesn’t apply when it comes to getting employees to switch over from instructor-led to learning
online. Dickerson said his group had been so engrossed with the technical aspects of the project
that they neglected to sufficiently market it and found that many employees weren’t aware of the
new system. So Dickerson and his team enlisted other managers to help spread the word.
“The managers have been very receptive about working with us,” says Hellman. “We
started out by identifying pilot audiences. Luckily we have a hierarchy of regional and sector
managers and we got them involved by giving them presentations when they came to the
headquarters for meetings.”
In addition the RCB Design Team built programs that guided employees when accessing
the LMS for the first time and designed an introduction to the system that was added to the
bank’s orientation training program. Now about 40 percent of training at the bank takes place
online. The bank aims to bring that number up to 50-60 percent at some point and it is looking
into ways of extending online learning by adding kiosk stations where employees leave a work
area to get education during a break or scheduled training time. It is currently offering this
service in treasury management for people who don’t have PCs.
“We’re looking to make the right mix (e-learning and instructor-led) as opposed to
attaining a number for the sake of a number,” says Dickerson.
Future plans
With its system up and running, the bank is planning its next phase of improvements that
include building up its courseware library, adding more synchronous courses, and expanding the
LMS’s skills-tracking component to the entire bank. The bank also hopes to expand training
beyond the bank, making it accessible to employees outside of the office and to customers.
However, security concerns have curbed efforts thus far.
“Our biggest challenge as a financial institution is our firewall and risk issues,” says
Hellman. “Although we could deliver outside of the business, we need special security access
and an application for employees to be able to launch our e-learning from home.”
Those improvements will have to wait as the bank is in the process of upgrading to the
newest version of Pathlore’s LMS, a process it expects to complete later this year. Among the
improvements the upgrade offers is that it will enable the bank to run more off-the-shelf courses.
So far the only department at the bank that has begun using off-the-shelf content is the IT
department, which bought some desktop and IT related courseware from SkillSoft (formerly
SmartForce).
“Once we’ve done that we’ll have more ability to run more content from external vendors
as the upgraded version of the LMS is more adaptable to third party software,” says Hellman.
“It will be great to have more flexibility.”