Business issues

Over the past two to three years, AmeriCredit started to consider making ambitious changes to its employee development. Because consumer automobile loans are the core of AmeriCredit’s business, the downturn in the economy was a particular concern. Management believed that strong leadership was essential to address this  changing and volatile environment. As a result, AmeriCredit created a new role focused on coaching, development, and leadership skills, and the company dedicated itself to establishing these competencies in all AmeriCredit leaders.

From the 37th floor of his Fort Worth, Texas, office building overlooking the Dallas skyline, John Shearer worked with the learning and performance team to develop plans for building leadership and coaching skills across the company. The team included e-learning technical specialists, instructional designers, trainers, and leadership coaches. With dozens of years of cumulative experience in training consulting, the team worked to support a move of many of the company’s front-line supervisors from an emphasis on process and approvals to an effective coaching and leadership focus.

The team laid out a plan for using an LMS that would be flexible enough to manage both online and offline modes of learning. The e-learning topics would be designed into small modules of 15 minutes or less. To accommodate busy schedules, facilitator-led sessions where scheduled as two- to three-hour learning labs, rather than long classes.

The team’s guiding principles to get the highest return from learning were

• invest in learning styles
• extend beyond the classroom
• move at the pace of business
• associate with great partners
• involve and equip leaders
• develop and build to a strategy
• preserve learner and sponsor currency.

The team would focus a great deal of effort on the first principle, uncovering learning styles, such as whether a person learns in a structured or an unstructured way and whether that style is more analytical or action-oriented. “We call this investment insurance for our training,” said Shearer. “By identifying each individual employee’s learning style, we can then design stylized training to reach every employee as they learn best.” According to Shearer, lots of organizations understand the importance of learning styles and informally try to address them, but AmeriCredit has developed a systematic approach for accommodating different learning styles. “The fact that we have repeatable processes, puts us beyond thinking about learning styles to being intentional and deliberate about addressing them in systematic way,” he added.

Another requirement was the ability for training courses to accommodate a low-bandwidth, low-cost environment. The company’s branch network had a 128Kb  frame relay, resulting in the equivalent of a 56k speed for its learners, who share the connection with four to eight other users. Combined with the fact that they wanted learners to be able to access the courses from home, AmeriCredit listed low-bandwidth performance as a critical requirement.

Solution

AmeriCredit had already selected Docent‘s learning management system because its open design would allow for the most configuration and help tie AmeriCredit’s business goals to its learning processes by tracking learning metrics and providing a feedback loop to management. “With Docent and our tracking, we have the ability to measure more than sponsors can possibly request and to track more questions than learners can possibly fill out,” said Shearer. “We are careful to focus our feedback to the metrics that really matter,” he added.

AmeriCredit then brought on I-Opt from Professional Communications, Inc., which helped with learning style discovery on a broad scale basis by automating the process. The result was predictive reporting on how the learning experience would work for each learner.

Simultaneously, Shearer and his team searched for e-learning courseware that would fit AmeriCredit’s quality and training requirements. Most important, courses needed to integrate well with the selected learning management system from Docent. The e-learning team came from a consulting background and was very discriminating. They looked at dozens of suppliers and observed that most e-learning caters to only one kind of learning style: structured and analytical. In addition, the vast majority of e-learning suppliers didn’t meet AmeriCredit’s standards for production quality.

After reviewing dozens of e-learning providers, the AmeriCredit team singled out Ninth House for its production quality, instructional design, and business skills content. Managers within AmeriCredit use various Ninth House^® management training courses, including Situational Leadership^® II, Optimizing Team Performance, High Impact Hiring, and Resolving Interpersonal Issues, and Ninth House’s just-in-time Instant Advice^® performance management coaching tool. AmeriCredit supplemented Ninth House’s leadership and management skills courses with internally developed courses on technical skills, human resources issues, AmeriCredit-specific change management, and sales coaching.

In addition, Ninth House met AmeriCredit’s need for a low-bandwidth solution with NetCD^® discs that deliver high-quality full-screen video to the desktop without needing a broadband connection or slowing down the company network.

AmeriCredit partnered closely with technology partners, Docent and Ninth House, to quickly integrate the content with the LMS, producing a widely successful LMS launch that now enables learners to conveniently access key training from one centralized location customized for the company. “Our integration of Ninth House’s business skills training content with our Docent LMS was by far the single easiest thing we have done on the platform to date,” says Shearer.

Results

A common complaint of most e-learning solutions is that they fail to engage learners. Additionally, reports show that most courses experience drop-out rates as high as 70 percent. The response to the leadership initiative has been phenomenal, though. With Ninth House, learners seemed engaged and motivated, leading to course completion rates that were well above average. With AmeriCredit’s tight management of training through its LMS and its personalized learning styles approach, they ensure that high-quality learning is being applied on the job.

AmeriCredit found that the technical implementation was smooth and successful. “Ninth House partnered with us in every sense of the word to make sure the software would integrate into our Docent platform,” says Shearer. “They really stepped forward and showed a vested interest in our training’s success.”

The one change the AmeriCredit training team would make, however, would be to focus less on the technical deployment of courses. “Once we saw our learners’ reactions, we felt as though e-learning material was so valuable that we didn’t want to ‘just’ release it,” noted Shearer. Instead, it was important to put in place-specific, targeted, and measurable objectives to ensure optimal success for the course. AmeriCredit now views strategic deployment key to success.

Next steps 

In order to get the best results, AmeriCredit has tied the Ninth House courses into its 360 assessment process. It’s one of several tools that leaders can use to tailor their personal development plans. Shearer noted, “We were able to tie each of the Ninth House courses to our eight leadership competencies. The courses give us trusted development suggestions for each leader to pursue.”

In addition, AmeriCredit will focus on launching one course at a time, starting with Optimizing Team Performance. To supplement the e-learning courses, the company plans to use facilitator-led sessions, extended learning guides, and internally developed coaching guides. The coaching guides target the learner by giving them practical steps to take to encourage the behavior change; the goal is to give employees the opportunity to test practical application of their new skills.

“We see learning as a change process,” added Shearer. “We have to get leaders and partners to commit before, during and after in order to truly manage the process for success.”

Published: March 2004