When I started as manager of Training and Development at Penton, I flew around the country offering live instruction to employees. It was great to interact with those I could reach. But it wasn’t feasible to go to every office.
An information services company, Penton is focused on providing millions of professionals with workflow solutions, insightful content, marketing services, and networking to help them solve their most critical business challenges.
To support these initiatives, we needed a scalable training solution that could reach all employees simultaneously and conveniently. We needed software, creative, and business skills instruction that could supplement our live training, support our evolving digital content creation efforts, and provide content relevant to a wide range of company departments on demand.
We decided to pursue an online training program. In order for it to succeed, I needed the content to be relevant, cutting edge, and high quality. In other words, it needed to be so good that employees would keep coming back for more.
We considered nearly a dozen providers and chose lynda.com, compelled by its wide range of courses and expert instructors. Many of the topics that our staff needed to learn, from social media marketing to video production to Web design, were suddenly available to learn at each team member’s pace.
Success Stories
The reception here at Penton has been great—so much so, that I sometimes forget what it was like before we had an online training resource. And as we continue to grow our 65 tradeshows and conferences, 20 paid data products, 86 print publications, and 145 digital properties, online training is helping to fuel our success.
Take, for example, a story relayed to me by a senior art director based in in Missouri. She and her team use InDesign to create interactive PDFs. She said online training has provided “lots of new information on creating interactive buttons, adding video, etcetera. We learned so much, and are hoping to incorporate more interactive PDFs into our projects.”
One of our graphic designers in Boulder, CO, shared a similar experience. “As a digital designer working in a constantly evolving industry, I think it is important to continue to challenge yourself and keep up with the progressing technology. . . I have been focusing my efforts on building my skill set in Adobe After Effects. This aligns with my goal to become the in-house expert for any presentations or motion graphics projects.”
Goals like that, and access to tools that can help goals be achieved, keep employees motivated. To that end, lynda.com is now a part of our annual employee review process. Employees meet with their managers and discuss the training they need to get ahead, be successful, and be effective. If the training aligns with an employee’s goals and HR has a manager’s approval, we give that employee a lynda.com license.
A Penton ad design supervisor in St. Charles, IL, benefited from an Excel course, noting that it boosted his knowledge “and in some instances acted as a just-in-time refresher.”
That last point is an important one. Because online training is available to Penton staff on demand, and because lynda.com provides searchable, time-coded transcripts, employees can enter keywords and use the service like a virtual help desk.
The benefits of this are twofold:
- Online training provides a great supplement to our live training. Staff who return to their desks and later think, “I learned that, but I don’t quite remember it,” can easily look it up.
- Access to online training eases the burden on our IT and training staff, who are freed up to focus on larger projects. In my case, it has allowed me to think more about big training needs and to focus, for example, on developing training content that supports highly customized systems and applications we’ve built in-house.
Perhaps my favorite user story comes from one of our digital content managers, based in Chicago. She said she had “a wonderful experience” learning from a course that teaches how to create an iPad Web app.
“Never in a million years did I think I could build out a mobile app in just one day,” she says. “But I did.”
As the manager of Training and Development for Penton, Mary Clare Healy reports to the VP of HR and is responsible for conducting needs assessments across the organization to identify training opportunities, best vehicles for delivery, and appropriate tools and resources. Some critical components of her role include finding the right training provider solutions, coaching, platform training, and facilitation, as well as design and development of courses and curriculum. Much of Healy’s job revolves around improving performance, processes, and people through training and development.
