Cognitive Technologies

Competency Management Integration for LMS Clients

Goal

Improve the success of implementation of the competency management module across a variety of important LMS clients:  FedEx Ground, Bank of America, Underwriter's Lab, Minnesota Department of Transportation, SafeCo, and Hillenbrand Industries.

Challenges

• Clients often purchased learning management systems (LMS) with good intentions, but fail to investigate during the sales process exactly what they would need to do to use the competency module
• Clients had already invested funds in competency model development and were not interested in adopting a new model

• Failure to use the LMS' competency module makes it impossible to link competencies to training and track the development of new competencies or skills

Solution

Cognitive's approach was to:

• Provide organizational learning and competency management specialists to review the client's existing competency/skill files and compare their structure and organization to the file structure within the competency management module
• Determine ‘goodness of fit' between the client's competency structure and the LMS competency module and craft several organizing alternatives that would enable the client to integrate the key components of their competency model with the LMS module structure.
• Conduct a strategy session with the client's competency/skill stakeholders during which we gained agreement on the goals of the project and its links to business strategy, determined the critical success factors that must be achieved, and defined the skill content and metrics the client wanted to make sure they were tracking.
• Conduct a multi-day workshop with key project team members to provide knowledge on competency model structure, functionality, and critical success factors, as well as to share best practices for model integration, change management, and implementation
• Conduct an interactive working group session to try out the various approaches available to accommodate client competencies. 

 Cognitive Value Added

Cognitive Technologies provided the expertise and credibility the LMS vendor lacked but required in order to help their clients:

• Understand what they had purchased and how the competency module worked
• Adapt the structure of the client model while keeping its intent in order to integrate it successfully with Saba's competency module
• Transfer best practices for development and mapping of competency models to the LMS
• Integrate the LMS competency management system into organizational culture
• Gain full value from their LMS purchase.