“The relationship began in 2013 to fill a skills gap in Java design, and has since expanded to include a range of technical training offerings. At its core is a process to decide exactly what training VMware needs.”
Training is like the Cinderella of the business world. It’s often ignored, neglected, and under-appreciated until something goes wrong. Even organizations that believe in its ability to promote workforce and business growth have wicked stepmother moments. Only it’s not glass slippers and trips to the ball that are lost, it’s budget and opportunities to retain key talent, boost performance and nurture innovation.
“VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, has turned its workforce into an active army of business-training subject matter experts. This helps the company to minimize those lost opportunities, forge a strong relationship with its talent, and ensure the business thrives.
The company works with technical training provider DevelopIntelligence to close the loop between those in-house experts and the training that will make them – and the business – better. The relationship began in 2013 to fill a skills gap in Java design, and has since expanded to include a range of technical training offerings. At its core is a process to decide exactly what training VMware needs.
To do that the company conducts an organization-wide needs assessment each year to determine what courses to cover in the company’s training curriculum. That means all engineers have a chance to express interest in technologies that might become training – if they align with business needs.
Take the Pulse of Your Company Regularly
DevelopIntelligence runs technical training classes at VMware’s HQ in Palo Alto, CA, Boston, MA, Austin, TX and a number of remote campuses around the world, such as Sofia, Bulgaria, and Shanghai and Beijing in China. It also runs virtual classes, although the company still prefers instructor-led classes to capitalize on the interactivity and peer learning that occurs in in-person labs.
By connecting talent to the training ideation and implementation process, VMware can not only stay abreast of industry developments, but it can also increase business capability and innovation – essentially what products and services it can offer its customers. Whether the company is training on Amazon Web Services, container management, Java or holding regularly scheduled Docker classes, these offerings likely originated from its developer population, comprised of some 20,000 individuals globally.
VMware polls its population every few months, but each year it conducts a large-scale needs assessment to ask technical talent questions like, “what technologies do you need in the next 3-6 months to work on upcoming projects, or for you to do your job?”
“If I’m an engineer, and I know that we’re starting to adopt technology X so we can build project A, then I know that I need training,” said Carmel Ulbrick, Director of Customer Success, DevelopIntelligence. “That’s something I would list in the needs assessment as an immediate need for me and my team.”
By analyzing assessment data, VMware is able to identify what technologies have exhausted their usefulness, and which ones are coming down the pipeline and might be valuable for the business. Communicating closely with the company to stay on top of feature updates and other relevant developments, DevelopIntelligence can help stagger training offerings to fulfill immediate needs, and identify appropriate future training engagements.
Ulbrick said staying abreast of developments also helps her to wrap her mind around what course content should look like. That way she’s got instructors lined up and ready to go in advance of VMware’s requests to deliver specific classes.
Multiple Locations
DevelopIntelligence runs technical training classes at VMware’s HQ in Palo Alto, CA, Boston, MA, Austin, TX and a number of remote campuses around the world, such as Sofia, Bulgaria, and Shanghai and Beijing in China.
Ongoing Assessments
By analyzing assessment data, VMware is able to identify what technologies have exhausted their usefulness, and which ones are coming down the pipeline and might be valuable for the business.
Every Few Months
VMware polls its population every few months, but each year it conducts a large-scale needs assessment to ask technical talent questions like, “what technologies do you need in the next 3-6 months to work on upcoming projects, or for you to do your job?”
The Importance of Learning On-the-job
More companies likely should follow VMware’s example, and poll their workforces regularly to assess what technologies will help them do their jobs better. Then tailor training offerings to what employees see on the job every day. This learning strategy has marked business benefits as well as implications from a talent management perspective.
“It communicates to the engineer population that they have a say and that the company values their input,” Ulbrick explained. “At the end of the day business needs will always trump whatever the population suggests if there’s misalignment, but we’ve found that most of the time developers and engineers are keen to expand their knowledge of relevant technologies. They’re often the best people to ask what’s hot, what’s coming up, what should we start looking to incorporate into our training?”
However, the key to this strategy’s success is that before these training suggestions come to life in the company’s curriculum, they are carefully vetted to ensure business alignment. For instance, a hot technology or something industry trends suggest is special might appear in the annual assessment. If that technology has nothing to do with the company’s product or service offerings, however, VMware won’t provide training.
“The important thing is keep what’s coming up in the realm of consumable,” said Bob Mosher, CEO, APPLY Synergies, a learning consultancy. “It has to be balanced. Coming up could be 10 years from now, something on the horizon, but where is the reality check? Where do you draw the line?” The ability to discern what technology is merely popular and what technology should receive training because it has business implications is an off shoot of an organization’s foundational perspective on learning. VMware has established that training is a key factor in its enterprise growth, but like all companies it is conscious of spend.
For instance, in 2016 following its acquisition by Dell, the company slashed its training budget significantly. “We had half as much money to work with,” Ulbrick said. “We as a training vendor had to get a bit more clever about how we spent that money, and ensure that every dollar they spent was not wasted.”
Ultimately, Ulbrick said DevelopIntelligence was able to communicate training’s value by paying closer attention to registration numbers and evaluation results, often reading every single word a student wrote in the open comments section. The company also coached its instructors to provide more nuanced training so they could quickly build rapport with students, and get to the heart of what they need, what their pain points were. Then it shared that information with VMware in ROI terms that made sense.
“When we measure training, we look at it a number of different ways,” she explained. “One example, the speed a single team is able to push updates. How quickly are they able to move through their sprint? How many bugs do they find in their code? If we can provide training that increases productivity, reduces the time to productivity and reduces the number of bugs, that saves time. Time is money.”
DevelopIntelligence also pays close attention to manager feedback. For example, if managers say “after my team went through this training, we saw significant improvement,” the company’s learning leaders couple that intangible evidence with hard numbers, enabling them to tell a powerful story illustrating how training saves time, and in enterprise software, time equals money.
Leverage Talent for Business Expertise
The learning leader’s role can be critical in an organization’s ability to understand the value training has on the business. VMware has added another dimension of support by regularly polling its talent to determine training options – with business alignment as the ultimate way to vet efficacy.
“It’s like going up to somebody and saying in your next car, do you want better cup holders? Well, yeah. Since you’re asking, better cup holders would be great,” Mosher explained. “Do I need better cup holders? Maybe not. The danger is whenever you ask people what more do they want, everyone wants everything including stuff that’s not necessarily good for them.”
VMware’s ability to vet requests against business needs and outcomes, however, ensures that it doesn’t waste time and money on what Mosher calls “pie in the sky stuff and things that aren’t really helpful.” By using its workforce as an industry barometer and mining technical talent for training suggestions, it’s indirectly leveraging their business expertise to ensure that training promotes the business and filters into the workflow in ways that produce optimum results. That gives them an edge over the learning leader alone.
Learning subject matter experts are not new learners. “Without input from the technicians working in the field, it’s not unusual for disparities to occur between the courses they produce and a new learner’s ability to retain or transfer that learning on the job,” Mosher said. “That’s why developers and engineers who are keen to expand their relevant knowledge are the best people to ask what’s hot, what’s coming up and what to incorporate into training.”
All in all, the talent and the learning leaders work together as a very effective team. Training is an integral part of VMware’s ability to stay innovative, and with this team constantly evaluating its best options, business success and customer satisfaction are not just fairytales.
Business Outcome
To retain key talent, boost performance and nurture innovation, VMware regularly turns 20,000 technical professionals from its global workforce into an active army of business-training subject matter experts. By analyzing data from this population, the company can more easily identify what technologies have exhausted their usefulness, which ones are safe bets for the future and which ones have the most value for the business. As a result it can minimize lost business opportunities, forge a strong relationship with its talent, and promote continuous improvements along the employee and business life cycles.
