18
Lead Interview
thinking H
Blue sky
Kenny Henderson is the head of talent development operations for Sky, an organisation that employs 16,000 people. Having spent 17 years in Sky and 10 in L&D, he leads a team that has transformed the company’s e-learning systems through a revolutionary ‘Get up to speed’ programme and ‘Development Studio’, helping to deliver much faster, more accessible and effective e-learning
ow is the L&D department structured? We have a central L&D function that supports leadership
development, management development and core business skills. This falls under the Director of Talent in HR. We then have operational training teams right across the organisation that will deal with the technical and specialist training for individual directorates such as supply chain and contact centre.
What are you currently focusing on? We reached 10 million customers at the end last year and we’re refreshing our leadership programmes and development curriculum to ensure they support the business going foward in the next five years. We’re also looking at learning technology and how that can support development.
Do you embrace all the latest technologies? I think we’ve been at the forefront of e-learning for the last three years – last year we delivered somewhere in the region of 130,000 sets of online learning to direct employees and direct partners.
learningmagazine.co.uk Is it effective?
Yes, it is effective in terms of procedural compliance and knowledge-based training – but I don’t see it as the only answer. It does have its limitations when it comes to behavioural based training, but it can support this type of training as part of an overall blended solution.
What have been the biggest challenges with e-learning?
When we introduced e-learning to Sky it was part of a major change programme and we had to make some assumptions on how it would work – with that we created some barriers in terms of people’s perception of online learning. For example, we made people sit for longer than they should to complete it, which affected their view of the process. Having said that, we have had some great success in the last couple of years. We were invited by the sales director at the time to talk about reducing the amount of time sales call centre staff spent in the classroom learning about products. The idea was to create a pre-learning portal – now known as ‘Get up to speed’, which allowed people to learn more about Sky, our products, our services and our customers in a really fun and engaging way.
What is ‘Get up to speed’ and ‘Development Studio’? ‘Get up to speed’ is our pre-learning portal covering products and services. With ‘Get up to speed’ we
wanted to increase speed to competency. We put a lot into training over a three or four week induction period, so it was very difficult for new recruits to absorb the information effectively, therefore we created an online portal. The idea is people joining the contact centres get a link to the centre with a unique password. Here they can see a video banner and some of the behind-the-scenes footage. We build engagement really early on as the first thing people see when they log in is a countdown clock, counting down the time till they join Sky. Employees can complete a series of product- based learning courses and they can build a points tally, which puts them onto a scoreboard against their peers and other people joining the company.
All of this is consolidated by a ‘perfect match’, which is essentially a game where you get to speak to your customers and get to sell them the products and services. You listen to the customers and what the customers tell you, you find out about their lifestyle, and then you start to match products and services to the customer. We’ve had some really good feedback from that. Also, there are a number of blogs – we set them up so we can already see people working in the contact centres. They can watch some video footage to see what it’s like to work in the contact centres.
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