Jeanette Graebener: Engineering an Inventory of Minds at SAIC

In most enterprise learning and training situations, the cost of educating employees is an issue, but not one that will affect SAIC’s employee-owners. “We have a budget that I receive each year that takes care of courses that we offer internally, and the corporation pays for the e-learning and the virtual library. There is no cost back to any employee for that, and when we bring in vendors and courses that aren’t in our normal schedules, there’s a cost share associated with that. We pick up some of the costs, we charge back to the business units. We don’t have any kind of system where our employees pay us for their training.”

Not only don’t SAIC employees pay for their training, that training is partially tailored to their individual learning styles. “Those of us that are professionals in the field understand that there are many different learning styles, so we try in our blended approach to offer training and development in all of the above,” Graebener said. “For example, we’re going to do a company-wide Project Management Professional certification program. Because of cost value, different learning styles, we’re offering three different tracks. One’s e-learning with facilitated discussions, one’s instructor-led, the full-blown, go to class, sit in the class for eight hours with pre- and post-assessments, and the third track is for people who think they already know it and need a quick refresher course and go take the exam. We try to offer as many things as we can in different learning methodologies.”