When Less Training is More

Cut back on classroom training to create more on-the-job training

By Rebecca Aronauer

Reuters is the largest multimedia organization in the world, publishing eight million words a day. But its financial services division, at its peak, updates information 23,000 times per second. Half of the world's traders rely on Reuters data feeds, and most of the company's revenue comes from its financial services. The operators who handle orders and manage the installation of these feeds at the Customer Order Management Centers (COMC) are key to Reuters' success. And that's why Charles Jennings, the head of global learning at Reuters, has cut back on their training.

"The traditional training method is spent telling people a lot of information, most of which they lose," says Jennings, who is based in London. So instead of teaching the operators about the minutiae of the continually changing feeds, Reuters relies on basic training and desktop support to keep their operators up to date. "The whole company policy is less about training and more about learning [on the job]," he says.

The desktop help that the operators use is called support point, made by Panviva, based in Melbourne, Australia. A support point icon sits on the desktop of every Reuters operator and allows them to look up product and selling information on the fly. Reuters employees are also able to edit their training material without help from IT, Wiki-style, and the changes are stored on a protected Reuters server.

This approach to training, where employees are taught the basics but not required to memorize information that can be stored elsewhere, is a new trend in training, believes Ted Gannan, CEO of Panviva. "The information changes so fast that you don't want them to remember it, you want them to look it up again," he says. "Why train them in stuff they're going to forget?"

At Reuters, this approach took two weeks off training for COMC operators. "Before support point, the time to competence was very long," Jennings says. "We were spending several weeks in [training] and several more weeks where [operators] were relying on the experience of other people to do their job." Along with cutting down actual training time, support point accelerated the time to full productivity for operators and decreased the demand new hires put on their superiors.

"Our goal is to reduce the reliance on training by giving people moment-of-need support," Gannan says. And considering the cost of training, it's not a bad ambition.