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Aon Service Corporation: Leveraging the LMS
September 06, 2007
By Lorri Freifeld
The backbone of Aon Service Corporation's training efforts is a learning management system (LMS) that helps the $8.95 billion company provide continuing education to thousands of licensed insurance brokers and supply mandated compliance training. "Our LMS—from Cornerstone OnDemand—is deployed to 17,700 employees (U.S. and Canada)," says Manola Del Grande, eLearning senior manager, HR-IS, at Chicago-based Aon Service Corporation. "We also host two other portals, one in the UK that serves approximately 6,000 employees and an international portal that serves 6,500 employees for compliance training only."
Aon offers a blend of training options, including instructor-led training (ILT), Webinars, and online courses, all of which are provided through its LMS. A three-person staff manages the LMS, and Aon has ILT administrators for individual business units. Early Career Development (ECD) and Compliance has been one of Aon's most effective training programs to date, says Del Grande, who has been in the training field for 10 years. "We rolled out compliance rapidly and effectively to a large population and are now 100 percent compliant. The ECD program has been effective in creating the same learning experience for all participants in the program. In addition, utilizing this program in the LMS allowed managers, as well as track champions, to participate and monitor progress." A large percentage of this blended program is on-the-job training, and Aon used external training learning objects to input these activities. The workflow in the LMS routes the approval to the participant's manager, who approves the activity before the employee can mark it complete, explains Del Grande, who notes there is "absolute" corporate buy-in for the company's training program. "After the initial rollout by Aon's consulting division, Aon corporate jumped on board to deploy the LMS throughout the organization."
Del Grande says one challenge has always been to train large numbers of brokers on Errors & Omissions Insurance (E&O) for continuing education hours with limited resources. "In response, we constructed a Webcast and leveraged ILT administrators in many states to conduct a full-day E&O Webcast for CE hours." Previous sessions included 39 office locations with 628 participants, 35 locations with 504 participants, and 26 locations with 435 participants.
How are employees responding to increased technology-based training? "The early career interns who are more accustomed to technology are most open to technology-based training, but brokers and most of the population prefer hands-on and ILT. They are getting used to it, though," Del Grande says. "Our brokers, in particular, are inexperienced with technology training. To combat this, we don't offer them another option."
Going forward, Del Grande says Aon is exploring additional features in its LMS it hasn't turned on yet. "With the new LMS User Interface that was released this summer, we are remarketing the LMS with a new look, features, and content offerings. We're also looking at content explosion (to include learning activities outside of online courses or ILT) to support our leadership model."
Del Grande also sees a need to train the extended enterprise—"our partners and outsourced employees in other countries, for example." Aon has 45,000 employees total, spread throughout 120 countries. "There are some restrictions with data privacy issues in the UK, so that is a separate portal with limited access," Del Grande notes. "We recently added our employees from Canada into our LMS (about 3,000) and now offer the LMS in Canadian French. With the flexibility of configuring the LMS, we can create a unique view for each country or division. In addition, we translated our compliance courses to French Canadian. We also are looking into adding Brazil onto the LMS and adding Brazilian Portuguese language."
Not surprisingly, tops on Del Grande's "wish list" is "a global LMS, plus more robust rapid content authoring capabilities and more content management/a more powerful knowledge repository."
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