Century 21: Bringing Learning Home

Tim Sosbe - 8/22/02

Managing training at a large corporation like Century 21 is no small challenge. With about 88,000 agents and 4,400 brokers dispersed across 30 countries, the paperwork alone stacks up like a mortgage application. But a mission is a mission, and at Century

While Selix does oversee limited staff development, his primary portfolio is training the agents and brokers in the field. As independent professionals, Selix can't force training on them, but he still manages to reach about 20 percent of those agents who voluntarily take advantage of the educational offerings to help grow their businesses.

What's more, about 65 percent of new agents rush to take part in the Click2Learn-powered training, as do a large number of the brokers. Educational programs target both new and experienced real estate professionals. Selix also reaches internal staff through new-hire training and a 14-week program that involves job rotation, computer-based training and online education to teach them the business from all angles.

"I can do that with internal staff because I own them," Selix said. "It's very hard to get that time commitment from folks in the field because they're independent contractors."

Working with Click2Learn's Aspen Learning Management System (LMS), however, Selix is seeing more free-lance involvement in educational offerings. The program helps Century 21 offer learning initiatives in a variety of formats, from Web-based to old-fashioned classroom instruction.

"Our view of blended learning is way different than most people's," Selix said. "It actually uses on-site live and on-site asynchronous as well as online live and online asynchronous. We blend them all together, and that's worked out real well for us. As a rule, we try to do 80 percent of our agent training online and 20 percent on site. For brokers, we try to do exactly the opposite, 80 percent on-site and 20 percent online."

Click2Learn's Aspen LMS allows Selix and staff to manage the intersection of learning and performance, no matter which modality is involved. In fact, in many cases Selix can track an agent or broker through different delivery methods. Other learning partners like Centra provide the backbone for some training.

"We wanted to be able to deliver instructor-led training to our agents, because we think that really provides a lot of opportunity for conceptual and problem-solving skill transfer. So we said we're going to use online lecture using the Centra products to do 12 two-hour sessions, and we're going to spread those over three weeks," Selix said.