Verizon: Calling on Learning Success

Field-service personnel are responsible for timely implementation of new products, rapid response to service requests and high-quality development of infrastructure. Field-service employees need a tremendously wide and deep level of training. The field-service technical-training curriculum is extensive, covering various topics from truck driving to pole climbing to complex installation procedures.

Management employees need a great deal of application and systems training to keep up with the ever-changing needs of the enterprise. New and continually improved systems and processes are a way of life at Verizon, and timely training is an integral part of these changes.

Historically, training content was developed using a wide array of tools and was “force fitted” into the corporate LMS. As a result, most online courses were not in a standard format. This posed severe resource penalties during times of integration and modification. An average of 80 labor hours was required to integrate every single course that was either newly created or recently modified. This was not acceptable since the resource requirements exceeded existing resources. Verizon can have up to 40 courses in development at any given time.

The need to republish these non-compliant courses into a single format became critical as their numbers increased, and the need to keep them updated was apparent. As a result, Verizon decided to standardize on the SCORM specification in order to reduce the time and effort required to integrate courses with the LMS.

Verizon chose the OutStart Evolution LCMS for the creation and management of its online course library. Eli Munzer, chief learning strategist at Verizon, said, “Evolution enables our developers to export courses as SCORM-compliant learning objects that can be easily deployed to our custom-developed LMS.” Verizon is now converting a fairly large library of content using Evolution. The initial content conversion ROI currently exceeds 1,000 percent when compared to average industry course-conversion pricing. This initial ROI does not yet include reuse or integration savings.

Evolution was selected because it not only provides full support for SCORM, but it is also flexible enough to allow the development staff to make decisions about specific learning object nomenclature on their own. Evolution also enables Verizon to leverage previously authored materials (e.g., Microsoft Word documents) by importing them into the LCMS as content objects. They can then be enhanced with assessments and delivered as an online course.