Barclaycard
With a national remit for learning and development (L&D), Susan Coulson, head of learning and development at Barclaycard, leads a team of around 40 trainers who are responsible for designing and delivering the full gamut of L&D across the organisation.
“Any learning department needs to be very commercially focused these days,” she says. “We live in a commoditised world, where the quality of your people is the key differentiating factor. It’s vital that we accelerate that difference in the training team, because developing them enhances their capability to enhance the skills of the entire workforce.”
Susan initiated a departmental restructuring in July 2006. “Quality assurance and consistency were big issues for us,” explains Susan. “Before the restructuring we weren’t really leveraging the sharing of best practice across the L&D teams because they all tended to operate in isolation from one another. This meant that there was a lot of duplication, no consistency of approach and no benchmark in terms of delivery skills standards.”
When Susan and her team first embarked on the restructuring, a colleague in another part of Barclays told her how The Training Foundation’s TAP Learning System had transformed the quality and consistency of the Retail Banking division's training delivery. She decided to follow the same successful path.
After all trainers had attended the course there was a 32% uplift in their assessment scores. “That is an amazing bottom line achievement” enthuses Susan “and one that has not only translated into a consistent approach to performance development, but also into a far stronger quality of training delivery. When people walk away from our courses now we’re confident that they’ve fully grasped the knowledge and skills they need to change the way they work for the better.”
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