The 2008 Learning In Practice Awards

“It took at moment to sink in that we had won Gold, as the two Silver Award winners were announced first. After heading offstage, I did what I had committed to doing: sent a one word e-mail. It said, ‘Gold!’ According to two to three Symposium participants who came up to me later that evening, I was ‘filled with great energy’ up on stage. In fact, my energy was collective — it was Kathee, Joe, our internal support and our (internal) customers that were with me up there.”

– Brian Summerfield

LEARNING TEAM AWARD • GOLD • DIVISION 2

Sun Microsystems
Sun Learning Services

Just a few years ago, Sun Microsystems had a highly decentralized learning structure: More than a dozen legacy distributed learning functions supported a corporate university, sales training, management development and other elements, resulting in redundancy and a lack of an overarching vision.

However, all of these pieces were brought together into Sun Learning Services (SLS), a centralized learning organization, nearly three years ago. This move coincided with the arrival of Karie Willyerd, who was brought on as the company’s first enterprise-wide chief learning officer.

Sun has come a long way in a short time. This year, SLS took Gold in the Learning Team category of the Chief Learning Officer Magazine Learning In Practice Awards.

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