Creating an internal training program for your company doesn’t have to generate huge overhead or resource demand. Joan Busch, Senior Director of Talent Development, explains how UnitedHealth Group created their own program with surprising results: building an “internal vendor” team that provided design support to company departments in need. This team not only understood the particular challenges of the group’s learning platform, LMS, goals, and objectives; but they also had a strong awareness of the company’s culture.
Transcript
Joan Busch: The challenge that we were addressing was that United Health Group, like many businesses, have training departments that support a specific part of the business, and they’re not resourced to support everyone. They’re kind of a cost center. United Health Group looked at that and said, “You know, we actually have a lot of groups that don’t have instructional design support and need that instructional design support.” And if they don’t have it, what do they do?
People who were outsourcing were not instructional designers, so they didn’t really know how our learning management system worked. We really looked at creating a team, almost like an internal vendor for instructional design. So there’s a lot of added value in working with a team internally who really understands our goals, and strategies, and our culture. For smaller companies that are maybe interested in doing something like this they could be self sustaining and charge back for their services. Our team is only 11 people, so there’s not this overhead to the team that they report into. We have actually done some work to for external vendors. It’s kind of interesting that a vendor would be coming to us to create training for them.