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Case Study of Dell: Employee Training and Development

Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Computer Corporation, in a recent annual report, summarized where the CEO stands on the role that learning plays in his company. He said it was people who produced results in any business, laying emphasis on how building a talented workforce remained Dell’s greatest priority as well as its greatest challenge. This challenge contained two primary issues. The first being training, developing and retaining their existing employees so they continue capitalizing on the career opportunities Dell’s growth provides them. The second being to actually successfully recruit employees at all levels to support Dell.

The CEO said the company progressed pertaining to both issues in the previous fiscal year, adding Dell would continue to keep it a critical area of focus. Dell filled more than half of its executive-level positions with promotions from within the organization, hiring the remaining externally. Dell also modified its core training and development programs to improve employee effectiveness as well as, for the second successive year, compensation programs.

Michael Dell said hyper-growth companies that lack long-established practices have better chances of adapting with the ever-changing environment, while laying emphasis on the fact that enough structure had to be in place to ensure that growth would not go out of control. He said hyper growth needs to be dealt with in a particular manner regarding learning and leadership development.

Dell Learning was established to meet Dell`s needs pertaining to human resources. Although training had always been an integral part of Dell, in 1995, it realized the need for greater emphasis on ensuring the employees were sufficiently skilled to keep up with the firm`s hyper growth. Dell Learning, following the expansion in 1995, was also assigned a series of objectives:

• Bringing learning in line with Dell`s key business
• Making learning directly and openly available
• Creating a clarity around competencies required to maintain Dell’s hyper growth
• Providing consistency through a global curriculum

Naturally, as a response to hyper growth, Dell had to structure three fourths of its training program to target new employees, products and basic job skills. A centralized corporate team was established for training development and administration. Training managers were appointed to:

• Develop business based educational plans
• Hold business leaders responsible for execution of plan
• Ensure that sufficient resources exist to execute the plan
• Report on the plan’s impact

In addition to providing strategic direction, the corporate team includes fulfillment teams that serve Dell’s different businesses on demand. One team produces learning tools for training sales and technical audiences on Dell’s products and services. Another, ‘Education Services’, manages classrooms, registration, scheduling, tracking, and other logistics. A third group consists of highly experienced instructional designers who oversee development projects requested by the businesses. Essentially, the training organization operates as a federation. There are three parts: Corporate Training, Regional (HR) Training, and Regional (Non-HR) Training, held together by the senior management team and a series of Dell Learning councils.

The corporate group comprises six major elements:

• Corporate and Regional Operations – global education planning, financial management and reporting, and process and infrastructure.
• Dell Learning Services – instructional design services and consulting.
• Dell Learning Technology Services – enables rapid distribution of new learning technologies.
• Education Services – handles event management, vendor management, registration, facilities, and a wide range of administrative services.
• The New Product Training Group — provides core training materials for sales and technological support.
• The Program Management Office – develops strategies and aligns them with global curricula to support strategic initiatives. The specific areas of focus shift from year to year based on business needs.

The Corporate Group reports to Human Resources, a few groups, do however, report to marketing or customer service organizations even though they still take part in management meetings, operations reviews, and global strategy sessions.

This organizational structure is, in part, a response to Dell’s hyper growth status. The company’s training charter was revised around the time Dell University was reassessed and thereby renamed Dell Learning to include:

• Education should be business-issue based
• Education should be as cost-effective and time-effective as possible
• Business managers should be in charge of managing their own training investments
• Education must be flexible and able to scale
• All training should be competency based
• All learning should be just enough, just-in-time
• Learners should be in control
• Learning solutions have limited shelf life and should be treated accordingly
• Learning occurs everywhere, so our obligation is to leverage it across the organization
• The education function must create access to the intellectual capital of Dell

The establishment of such a charter as well as the nature of the computer business have forced Dell to take an aggressive take towards technology-enabled learning. In order to put learners in control, it was essential that learning solutions be available to them all the time, as well as them being able to control what they learn and when. Low-tech solutions made that possible, however, classroom learning never could. Technology has made learning omnipresent and a natural part of work.

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An Introduction to Human Resource Management

Student resources, case study: learning and development at choc co..

Online Case Study: Learning and Development at Choc Co.

Choc Co. is one of the world's largest confectionery businesses with significant market share in many of the world's biggest confectionery markets, including many emerging markets. It has a long and proud tradition, stretching back more than 150 years, including a long history of developing its employees, which has remained part of its ethos during its progress to becoming a global company.

Despite very positive sales figures over the last 12months, Choc Co. has prioritised streamlining the business to make it more competitive and has placed a strong emphasis on reducing cost over the next 18 months. Despite being keen to preserve its longstanding reputation as a firm that is committed to developing all its employees, in respect of learning and development, this ‘streamlining’ activity has focused on:

• ensuring a clear return on investment in training activities
• changing the way that learning programmes are delivered and being more creative in developing approaches to learning
• connecting training activities to the strategic needs of the firm.

The most important driver of the assessment of its training provision at Choc Co. is change. Whilst performing well in the marketplace, senior management continue to express discontent with levels of productivity and employee performance. Moreover, senior management has determined that the company needs to become more flexible and adaptable to respond to change in its market context, for example by an ability to adapt organisational structures to meet new business needs or through the introduction of technological innovation. However, as a traditionally minded employer, and with low levels of employee turnover at shopfloor level, Choc co. appears to have instilled in its workers a mindset of stability and steady progress, which is at odds with competition in a rapidly changing global economy. Therefore, Choc Co. wants to move towards a system of continuous improvement by creating a culture whereby workers are empowered to implement small incremental changes, rather than have substantial change imposed on them from time to time.

Identifying training needs

Traditionally, training needs analysis at Choc Co. has been ‘gap-led’. In other words, training tends to be focused where Choc Co. identifies a gap in capability – for example, where the introduction of new technology requires worker skill to be updated, company policy is changed or a key worker leaves the firm, requiring training to be provided to their replacement. Typically this gap-led identification of need is conducted at a local level, with little reference made to the wider national or international workforce.

Whilst workers can put themselves forward for training courses, including those provided by local education providers, there is no formal channel for doing this and access to such training often comes down to personal relationships and the constraints imposed by departmental budgets. The culture at Choc Co. is very much one in which training needs are typically identified  for  workers rather than  by  workers.

Delivery of training

Currently, the company runs a number of large training events each year designed to update manufacturing staff on everything from health and safety changes, business strategy and company performance to the adoption of new production technology. This is sometimes coupled with skills training for these workers as and when appropriate. This has traditionally been done at the specialist training centre at their largest production facility, which doubles as the company’s headquarters. This practice partly stems from a time when the company only operated two production facilities in the country. It now operates across six geographically dispersed locations. Workers tend to view these training events as a bit of a waste of time, particularly when they are delivered by consultants with little real understanding of working processes at Choc Co. It is not unknown for workers to claim that the training they receive is outdated and tells them nothing that they don’t already know.

The head of training and development, responding to a call to cut costs from the HR director, is now of the opinion, however, that such long training programmes, often of up to three or four days, are no longer the most cost-effective and efficient means by which to develop the staff. Such training has the dual problem of requiring regular investment and repeat sessions to cover workers on different shifts or at different plants, as well as leading to undesirable downtime of certain aspects of production. In particular, the head of L&D is keen to reduce a reliance on external training providers to design and deliver interventions to different workforce groups, from senior management to shopfloor workers.

Moreover, the company has historically not evaluated the impact of these events. In the new era of cost-cutting and added value, however, the company is keen to ensure that the impact of all training interventions, however big or small, is measured.

Employee development programmes

A major investment in L&D at Choc Co. is in its manufacturing apprenticeship scheme and graduate development programme, both of which are widely viewed as models of good practice in the industry and beyond. These programmes are, however, under significant scrutiny by senior management to better understand the extent to which this investment provides value to the firm. One particular area under review is the turnover of employees who complete these programmes and then leave to work at other firms.

Ray Barbie, the head of learning and development at Choc Co. recently attended a seminar at a local university on ‘the changing nature of workplace HRD’. He was slightly alarmed to find out that much of the company’s practice was seen as outdated. In particular, he was interested in examining how some more contemporary approaches and techniques in HRD could help the company both reduce costs and better performance through continuous improvement.

• What changes would you recommend that Choc Co. make to their current learning and development provision in order to reduce costs and improve performance?
• Discuss how e-learning, competency frameworks and improved knowledge-sharing at Choc Co. might help to cut costs and make the HRD activity at Choc Co. more strategic.
• How might the firm seek to ensure a return on investment for its learning and development activity?