Situation
Our client, a primary submarine builder for the U.S. Navy for over 100 years, is seeing significant increase in demand. Due to these large contracts and an aging workforce—30% of the experienced workforce is approaching retirement— they expect to hire 15,000 employees, doubling their workforce in the next decade.
Previously, the organization passed on knowledge by word of mouth or by putting people in on-the-job training (OJT) environments. The company also promoted from within. Now that its operations workforce is going to double in size by 2030, the company must rely on formal training programs that improve quality of hires by strengthening pipeline programs, increase capacity of training, manage skill development proactively, and reduce time to proficiency
Challenge
At the beginning of this effort, the company had 5,000 employees between the ages of 53 and 68 who would soon retire and needed to participate in knowledge transfer with new hires. Their new employees are expected to span several generations, all with their own unique learning needs. In addition, these new hires will have varying levels of work experience and educational backgrounds. Therefore, the organization needed to develop a robust program that would also enable its young future workforce to learn effectively and efficiently to support the company’s long-term viability. Through all of this, the organization also wanted to impress upon its workforce the importance of their role in the company’s mission.
In response to significant increase in demand, GP Strategies helped the client to revolutionize its learning organization to support its 2023 workforce readiness, speed to proficiency, and positive business impact by delivering concise, innovative, and accessible training for all the organization’s employees.
Transform and prepare your entire workforce with state-of-the-art learning and staffing solutions.
Solution
The client and GP Strategies partnered to transform the learning organization and develop training that would capture the knowledge of a retiring workforce, transfer knowledge to new employees, and support a growing pipeline of new recruits throughout the organization.
First, the organizations developed a Learning Organization Strategy assessment that defined the client’s current state and its desired future state as well as outlined a road map for transformation. In addition, from 2016 to 2018, the two organizations executed on the recommendations to create a new learning operating model, a skills inventory and prioritization, and robust curriculum-development processes.
In 2019—as a response to recognizing the impact and ROI associated with the new learning output—the client and GP Strategies developed a three-year $42-million partnership plan to expand and execute the learning strategy across the entire enterprise with the continued goal of reducing time to proficiency, increasing capacity of learning to meet ramp-up in hiring, and proactively managing skill development.
Learning strategy and measurement guide yearly strategic initiatives and are consulted for everything from cohort-based training initiatives to enterprise-wide training reviews. A full team of learning administration and help desk professionals load, test, deliver, schedule, and administer the training. To ensure the most effective and efficient path to workforce readiness, the client and GP Strategies have also created comprehensive, carefully crafted curriculum maps. The curriculum maps outline the progression across a role, minimizing redundancy, and ensure the most effective onboarding strategy for speed to proficiency.
Both organizations also determined that the most effective way for the client to focus on business goals was to create a robust and hybrid workforce-development team using GP Strategies variable staffing. This model allows the client to scale and shrink without carrying too many full-time personnel and provides the ability to tap into known GP Strategies learning experts, a wealth of experience, OTS content, and vetted technologies, ultimately reducing time to delivery and cost while increasing proficiency.
Further, the client has access to GP Strategies’ Innovation Kitchen, whose sole purpose is to conceive new ideas; test out new methods, processes, and technologies; and assess outcomes. They also realize faster and less-expensive development than industry standards by leveraging GP Strategies’ OTS content and technical expertise through GPiLEARN+, a modern learning experience for the technical workforce. It includes content about supervision, nuclear power, OSHA, safety, compliance, manufacturing, analysis, and much more. The content can be customized or used as is in learning solutions.
Results
Already, the client is seeing bottom-line results—increased performance that translates to labor savings, reduced attrition, lowered rejection rates, and reduced training costs since the learning organization transformation and adoption of proven instructional design processes and strategies.
Beyond the survey metrics, leadership at the organization is very pleased with their partnership with GP Strategies:
The value of the partnership with GP Strategies is immeasurable. And the progress of our learning transformation is remarkable. We could not have achieved these results without the expertise of GP Strategies. Thank you for being with us on this journey—we couldn’t do it without you!”
