THE CHANGING FACE OF WORKPLACE TRAINING: E-LEARNING HELPING GOVERNMENT WORK SMARTER

Over the past 5 years, in the United States, the trend has been for government at the local, state, and national level to use online learning as a more cost-effective solution to workplace training. The increasing demand on and expectations for governments as well as the financial constraints in today’s economic climate further drive more cost effective workplace training approaches.

In addition to the economic benefits, other advantages such as convenience, standardization of content and self-service delivery have made e-learning highly desirable for government agency workforce training. In a knowledge and information society e-learning in the workplace has great potential to transform how and when employees learn as well as how to effectively transport learning to performance in the workplace. Studies conducted by both the U.S. Department of Education (2010) and the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (2003) demonstrated that online learning was also more likely to meet instructional objectives and lead to desired learning outcomes when compared to classroom delivery.

A case in point is in New York State where state government is a large and complex bureaucracy that employs over 159,000 workers in 69 different agencies that are highly diverse and located across a state with a blend of rural, suburban, and urban populations. A fundamental charge is for its employees to efficiently provide goods and services to over 19 million state citizens. Given these factors, conditions were prime to consider alternative methods to meet the training needs of employees across NYS agencies to produce a more consolidated, standard and modular course structure through an online learning strategy.

Historically, NY state agencies had assumed primary responsibility for the training and development of their own personnel, which had led to undesirable and uneven results. In an effort to change this insular approach, the State of New York’s Governor’s Office of Employee Relations (GOER), which has the responsibility of overseeing all training and development for New York State employees, reached out to the University at Albany’s Professional Development Program (PDP) at Rockefeller College as a resource to raise the bar and develop online learning courses that would be delivered to all 159,000 employees in a standard and consistent format and at a more professional level.

For over 35 years PDP has provided a comprehensive continuing professional education program for public sector employees in New York State. PDP has been a provider of training for the New York State workforce and had been one of the first to offer technology-delivered programming for state employees with documented success. GOER, therefore, requested that PDP develop a comprehensive proposal that would provide updated and just-in-time training and development on three initial courses: Equal Employment Opportunities, Sexual Harassment in the Workplace and Providing Reasonable Workplace Accommodations. These courses were to be the first in a series of 10 e-learning courses dealing with other work related and performance topics. As a sophisticated university-based training organization, PDP was well aware of the potential for technology to be the successful solution for offering this workforce education and training. This session will highlight the challenges in implementing such a program and provide recommendations for framing future online learning trainings.