Deloitte Consulting: Educating a Global Team

As executives with a strong interest in the delivery of learning, you don't have to be told that education is big business. Whether your business is manufacturing or marketing, there are undeniable advantages to leading a well-trained team.

But for some businesses, offering education is more than a wise decision. Some enterprises simply must lead by example. As a major force in business-to-business consulting, Deloitte Consulting is one of those enterprises.

"We train everybody globally every year," said Nick Van Dam, chief learning officer for Deloitte Consulting, in charge of the development efforts for 15,000 employees in 34 countries. "Everybody will go through training, basically. It's an exciting challenge, actually."

That total commitment to workforce development is no accident. Working with a budget of close to $40 million, Van Dam oversees the delivery of all types of education, from new-employee orientation to skills training to Friday workshops focusing on issues like leadership development, change management and risk management.

Changing its name in 2003 to Braxton, Deloitte Consulting is in the intellectual capital business by definition, sharing the expertise of its employees with other companies as needed. That requires, Van Dam said, an ongoing need to identify knowledge, best practices, ideas and experience. That mission includes emphasizing individual knowledge and sharing common ideas, values and processes.

"That is kind of our challenge from a business perspective," Van Dam said.

As recently as 1999, Deloitte offered about 95 percent of its educational initiatives via the classroom. That pendulum has swung wide, to where now about 85 percent of Deloitte training is online. Blended solutions and classroom still exist, but most training takes place electronically.

That, Van Dam said, was a simple matter of cost analysis. A goal of 40 hours per associate for training simply meant too much time for costly travel, and way too much time away from client sites.

"We came to the conclusion that this was not something we could continue to do," Van Dam said.

Van Dam joined Deloitte Consulting in 1995. Since becoming chief learning officer in 2000, he's boasted 100 percent participation in training programs and achieved a 45 percent reduction in learning costs, while at the same time building an e-learning infrastructure and tripling the number of per-practitioner learning hours. Van Dam also oversaw some reorganizations the new technology allowed, like reducing the number of project-management courses available to associates globally from about 70 to about five.