Fidelity’s training department saves $350,000 on one program with WebEx Training Center.
Fidelity Information Services, a division of Fidelity National Financial, with clients in more than 50 countries and territories, provides application software, information processing management, outsourcing services, and professional IT consulting to the financial services and mortgage industries. Its services include core banking applications, retail and consumer lending and servicing solutions, commercial lending, and mortgage lending and servicing solutions. Fidelity Information Services has over 4000 employees located around the globe.
The Challenge
Fidelity’s training group was charged with providing employee training to over 5000 Fidelity staff members worldwide. When the company reduced the employee training staff from 26 to just 5 trainers, implementing an online learning solution became a matter of survival. According to Keith Resseau, Manager of Learning Technology and a three-time Training Top 100 award winner, “We had to meet the needs of our business partners in a cost-effective way—flying people around just wasn’t feasible anymore.” As an early adopter of virtual classroom delivery, Resseau understood that a distance learning solution was a critical component they needed to build into their system if they wished to avoid flying every employee into their central office. Resseau endeavored to create a ‘home-grown’ Learning Management System (LMS) that leveraged a blended learning environment with a solid online training capability.
The Solution
Fidelity had used a variety of online training solutions in the past, but Resseau adopted a solution currently in use by Fidelity for corporate communications: WebEx. “Incorporating WebEx Training Center, we designed a very sophisticated LMS that operates in conjunction with our Learning Content Management System (LCMS)” says Resseau. “Think of this as a giant 3-ring binder that holds all the tools we wanted to train with—web pages, flash content, quizzes, hyperlinks, applications. We not only needed a solution that provided both the flexibility to easily use all these training tools, but also the bandwidth to deliver them.” WebEx served the training department’s needs.
Critical to the success of the team’s LMS was corporate support. To demonstrate how online training could meet their training needs, Resseau took the bull by the horns and started producing WebEx demos for various managers in the company to showcase the solution’s capabilities. Resseau also took care to gain support among the training staff, most of whom had little experience with online training. They were given lots of time to practice and develop their own Training Center presentations and experiment with the product’s powerful tools. This allowed the trainers to become very comfortable with the online classroom and to be very creative with Training Center capabilities. “By the time our staff was ready to begin running employee and partner trainings,” says Resseau, “they were very proficient with the delivery method and in designing interesting content that was compelling and held the interest of the student.” Fidelity also took great care to prepare their potential students for success. Resseau’s team began offering orientation trainings to allow their customers to see how WebEx worked, ask questions, try things out, and get comfortable before they even had their first training. This allowed the students to ask as many questions as they needed to without it being disruptive to an actual training session.
The Benefits
The power of the WebEx solution has brought Fidelity’s training capabilities to an entirely new level. “We began to think about how this technology let us enhance how we presented,” says Resseau. “We didn’t just want slide after slide of PowerPoint. We knew that if we wanted to keep our students engaged, we had to use the same tactics we would if we were teaching a live class.” The training team began to incorporate video, graphics, and photos, and to build-in collaboration and interaction using Training Center breakout sessions, hands-on labs, polling, and discussion capabilities. Fidelity’s classes are now delivered in a cost-effective, blended style in which instructors lead classes but students interact with each other, break out into separate discussion groups, follow hyperlinks to other Web resources as needed, or review archived WebEx trainings on demand, from an easily accessible online solution.
