Showing posts with label Modern HR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Modern HR. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2016

Learning Plans - The Swiss Army Knife of Oracle Learning Cloud

Jim manages the Learning & Development team of a large automobile component manufacturing company with a 10,000+ workforce. They have manufacturing plants across 5 locations in Asia, with sales and service offices spread across 20 countries. One of the critical KPIs of the L&D function is to administer multiple mandatory courses with varying eligibility and completion rules. One of his biggest challenges is to deliver Health and Safety compliance certification to over 3,000 employees and contractors working in the manufacturing plants. All these workers have to certify themselves after viewing 3 eLearning courses every 6 months and all new workers have to complete this within the first week of their assignment to the plants. While this is monitored on a weekly basis by site HRs, Jim keeps a constant tab of any non-compliance using their global LMS.

So, if you were to implement Oracle Learning Cloud (Taleo Learn) for Jim, how would you handle this requirement?

Enter Learning Plans


Learning Plans is the swiss army knife of Taleo Learn. Brandish it to deliver any type of program/curriculum based learning. Think of Learning Plan as a container that can pack different types of learning items for specific purposes.
Learning Plans - The Swiss Army Knife of Oracle Learning Cloud

 Let's take the case of Jim to illustrate this. His new hire health and safety training involves a set of 3 eLearning courses that need to be completed within a week of being assigned to the employees. Learning Plan is a way of packaging these 3 courses in one set, setting the required deadline, reminders, notifications and assigning it to required employees. For new employees in sales, Jim has a much larger Learning Plan that involves the new hires attending class room based orientations and field assignments. A Learning Plan can effectively combine multiple types of learning items like eLearning, Class room based training, tests and assessments, offline learning etc.

Auto-Enrollment through Groups

One key element of the Learning Plan functionality is the ability to auto-enroll employees into Learning Plans using dynamic groups. So, Jim can define rules to auto-enroll all manufacturing new hires into the Health and Safety Learning Plan, while to move all Sales new hires into the Sales Learning plan. While reducing the administrative overhead is a benefit brought in by this auto-enrollment feature, a more strategic advantage is the ability to push employees into specific Learning Plans based on their attributes. For eg. let's say you have a Future Manager learning path where high potential employees are enrolled into. Once you identify an employee as eligible for this program in Learn (will need a custom field to indicate this), he/she can be automatically enrolled into the Future Manager Learning Plan.

Well, but remember that Jim also has to assign this plan every six months to his manufacturing employees? How do we do that?

Enter Recurring Learning Plans.....Learning Plans reloaded!
In v16A of the product, Oracle has introduced an enhancement to the Learning Plan feature. Now you can define Learning Plans as "Recurring"
Recurring Learning Plans can be defined to handle recurring learning needs
This feature gives you the ability to recur a Learning plan within a specific interval (defined in days or months) as well as sent reminders before the Learning Plan is to expire. This key enhancement is exactly what customers like that of Jim in industries with heavy compliance requirements will be looking for.

All in all, Learning Plans is an extremely powerful feature that can be creatively used to meet a number of functional use cases. I am sure you will have lot of fun exploring this feature further.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Project Workacation - Why your next project location has to be a resort town!


Code, Pray, Love - Working away in Bali
Few years ago, I was reading a Quora post which asked whether being homeless is a good idea while bootstrapping to cut costs. I was intrigued by the top voted response (and the question as well) which recommended working in a low cost country, quoting his own example of working in Sa Pa in Vietnam. I thought this would be a fleeting idea, until I came across articles talking Bali becoming a startup hub!


Hubud is one of the first such co-working environments providing state of the art facilities in the beautiful island of Bali. Check out one of their teaser videos below:


This article profiles four other such startup co-working locations in Bali.

While most of these places have targeted startups, it got me thinking why such a work arrangement cannot be provided or explored for traditional corporate employees. Recent advances in telecommuting and collaboration technologies, shift of enterprise systems to cloud computing and an overall shift in work-life policies of organizations (in part driven by the millenial bug that seems to be affecting everything in HR policy these days!) makes this proposition a very attractive and practical one.
ROWE has been one of the most powerful ideas in work-life organization of late and studies have shown that employees are placing a higher premium on work-life balance and meaning. Considering all these factors, I believe that this idea of a workacation can be a strong element of employee engagement and attraction in the future, especially in the professional services industry. My proposition is to allow employees to work specific number of weeks in a year in specific co-working locations in vacation spots. Like Hubud, these co-working locations will be fully equipped for work, including internet connectivity, video conferencing facilities etc.

On the other side of the coin is the business potential to build such workacation locations in low cost countries. Brings to my mind, my own little picturesque town in southern India which is home to the famous backwaters of Kerala. May be some enterprising soul reading this piece will latch on to this idea and build such working pods in affordable vacation spots.

Backwaters of Kumarakom, Kerala, India

Hopefully, sometime in the future I will be blogging from one of these locations!!