The Washington Post Company
Streamlining the Process: Consolidating Classroom and Online Training Management at The Washington Post
Several years ago The Washington Post Company partnered with Element K to facilitate delivery of mandatory online compliance training. All Washington Post Company affiliates, including The Washington Post newspaper, Kaplan, Newsweek, and Washington Post Digital, received access to Element K’s learning management system (LMS), KnowledgeHub™, and various online learning tools. Each affiliate managed learning according to its own internal processes, and many used a blend of online and instructor-led training (ILT) to educate employees.
The Washington Post was among those offering a blended approach. From executives to reporters in the field and even the maintenance teams, online and classroom learning was available to everyone. However, for many years the company’s Organizational Development team experienced significant challenges keeping track of enrollment and course completion.
| | "The time savings for my team have been invaluable. KnowledgeHub is a major asset.”
- Peter Joseph, HR Manager for Organizational Development at The Washington Post |
“Only the online training was being tracked accurately. We still didn’t have a user-friendly means for managing enrollment and ongoing records for our ILT courses,” said Peter Joseph, HR Manager for Organizational Development at The Washington Post.
Joseph’s four-member team found it difficult to provide legacy ILT completion records for employees seeking business or management certifications. “We frequently received calls from people needing transcripts from ILT courses they took years ago. In many cases, the records did not exist, so keeping and maintaining accurate records of all training became a major objective,” noted Joseph. Employees used an online database to register for classes, but the Organizational Development team still had to create course rosters, update course lists, and keep track of no-shows or latecomers – all by hand. With over 2,500 learners in the organization, the manual workload was extremely time consuming. “We needed a way to streamline and automate the registration process for ILT classes, and provide accurate transcripts of all online and classroom activity to learners.”
The Post was already using KnowledgeHub as a tool for distributing online learning, and communicating training information. Since the organization was quite familiar with using it, Joseph recognized the LMS as a possible solution for managing all learning at The Washington Post. After receiving guidance from Element K, Joseph’s team launched the Post Learning Center – a customized presentation of KnowledgeHub that reflected the newspaper’s brand. The revamped site integrated both online and ILT registrations, replacing the old online database and the manual work that went along with it.
“When we rolled out the Post Learning Center, we sent employees a series of emails about the switch, and distributed a tri-fold brochure explaining the new processes for registering, canceling and checking registration, and for checking training records,” said Joseph. “Not only was the new system intuitive to the general population of users, it also helped us establish a brand for our internal learning. People found it very convenient to finally have consolidated processes for all classroom and online learning.”
The initial rollout of the new functionality provided a system for tracking classroom course completion and built efficiency into the ILT registration process. There was one small gap, however. The Organizational Development team still could not provide historic paper transcript information to employees. Directly on the heels of the rollout, Joseph’s team worked with Element K to implement several new features. “Element K was extremely responsive to our additional needs. KnowledgeHub now provides a very flexible means for managing ILT registrations, as well as adding historical course completion information. Our learner transcripts are now as up to date as possible and fully accessible via the system,” noted Joseph.
Employees at The Washington Post can now view their training records any time and check dates and times of upcoming courses in one convenient location. Rather than calling, faxing, or emailing to join a class, registration is now a simple online process, with no manual work on the administration side. “We rarely get phone calls from people needing to attend a course at the last minute or looking for transcripts any more – everything is available at the Post Learning Center and records are more accurate than ever. My team can now focus on more strategic tasks,” said Joseph.
The Post’s organizational development team is in the midst of executing a series of major initiatives – including a company-wide competency model, a behavior-based selection and hiring process, a new employee orientation program, and a performance management process. Joseph’s team is developing custom courses for each initiative and plans to add additional e-learning to augment core training topics. The LMS upgrades came at exactly the right time, providing a streamlined process for managing training-related administrative tasks. Returning to The Post’s original objectives, Joseph said: “Element K quickly enabled us to not only provide a more appealing and streamlined user experience, but to remove long-standing process snags, and implement our new processes with ease. The time savings for my team have been invaluable. KnowledgeHub is a major asset.”
