Pilkington goes online to get the skills to shine

Citation

(2006), "Pilkington goes online to get the skills to shine", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 38 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2006.03738fab.003

Pilkington goes online to get the skills to shine

Pilkington, the global manufacturer of glass and glazing products, has awarded online-learning provider SkillSoft a three-year contract worth nearly £380,000 to supply management, business, health and safety, information-technology and desktop-skills training to its 24,000 employees.

The decision reflects Pilkington’s commitment to developing its employees and, says SkillSoft, will enable the company to provide a cost-effective and consistent global approach to learning.

As a lean manufacturer operating in a highly competitive market, Pilkington believes that its continuing success will hinge on the business and management skills of its people as well as on their technical expertise. To help to achieve its learning and development objectives, Pilkington has purchased SkillSoft’s entire management, business and information-technology curricula, together with selected health and safety courses. To meet the needs of Pilkington’s multinational operations, the content will be available in Spanish, Polish, Russian, French, German, Italian and Mandarin. The e-learning will be deployed via SkillSoft’s learning-management system, SkillPort, and will be accessible to employees over the internet.

Commenting on the deal, Roy Prescott, group learning and development manager for Pilkington, said: “Having experienced some service and deployment issues with a previous e-learning provider, we stipulated that SkillSoft must run a pilot for a six-month period prior to committing ourselves to signing a contract. The result was that we had more than 500 new registered users and in excess of 700 completed programmes within that period.

“As a result of our experience with SkillSoft to date, we had no hesitation in signing the three-year deal. We are now in the process of rolling out technical courses to our global information-technology personnel and will also be offering a number of SkillSoft’s health and safety courses to all employees. SkillSoft’s course-customization toolkit and dialogue tools have also been acquired for future use. These will provide us with the facility to create and deploy our own in-house content in multiple languages via a robust virtual-classroom environment.”

Meanwhile, SkillSoft has launched two online portals, named KnowledgeCentres, to provide employees with easy access to a wide variety of data related to leadership and project management. Each portal contains content to address the information needs of employees undertaking a specific task. By the end of 2006, these initial two KnowledgeCentres will be extended to 14, each covering a key business or technology area.

One early adopter of the project-management KnowledgeCentre is Deloitte, the global consulting giant, with more than 100,000 employees worldwide. Commenting on the portal, Candy Haynes, director of learning consulting at Deloitte, said: “Project management is an essential skill for us as an organization. Through the KnowledgeCentre approach, we are able to provide a wealth of learning assets in a very intuitive and efficient form to our consultants who may have varying learning needs. By empowering them, we can provide a higher level of service to our clients around the world.”

“Employees are playing an increasingly strategic role in supporting key business objectives, but they constantly need to keep up to speed with new developments, so effective training is critical,” said Kevin Young, vice-president of SkillSoft Corporation and general manager of SkillSoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “However, time for learning is minimal so it has to be as effective and relevant as possible to meet the requirements of individual employees. KnowledgeCentres have been created specifically to meet these diverse organization and job-specific objectives and to enable individuals to meet their daily on-demand information needs.”

Elliott Masie, founder and president of the Masie Center, an international e-lab and think tank dedicated to exploring the intersection of learning and technology, added: “A major challenge that learning professionals are struggling with today is how to place the great abundance of content that is available to them into context for the needs of many different learners. The simple concept of courses on a learning-management system is no longer sufficient to address this challenge. Today, the issue is much more about how to bring the learning into the flow of daily work and support the unplanned learning needs of fast-moving organizations.”

KnowledgeCentres represent one of five elements making up SkillSoft’s new Enterprise Learning Connection system. The other elements cover blended learning, content development, competency mapping and virtual classrooms.