Since our founding in 1962, employee development has been a top priority for Shiel Sexton. Throughout our history we have worked to provide our teams with the tools, resources and support they need to deliver on the Expect More promise. Although, as we’ve grown as a company and technology has continued to change at such a rapid pace, we’ve found that delivering the latest and greatest in training, resources and support more challenging than ever before. The question became how were we going to address those challenges?
No matter the challenge, we remained committed to taking our Employee Development program to the next level, so we decided to fight fire with fire. That’s right, our answer was adding more technology, more growth, more change. Our corporate learning journey began in 2019 when we invested in an online learning management system (LMS) and added an in-house Organizational Development Partner to the team. Our mission – to provide the training, tools, technologies and resources to enable our employees to perform their jobs at the highest level.
Led by Amanda Page our in-house organizational development partner, our learning development team added 149 courses in 2019, 162 new courses in 2020, and in January of this year released an additional 166 courses. We now have a total of 477 courses online and available to all Shiel Sexton employees. The academy includes courses we’ve developed inhouse specific to industry safety and internal processes and procedures, as well as procured content on topics such as software training, diversity and inclusion, leadership, conflict resolution and collaboration all curated by leading content creators in their respective areas of expertise.
We just completed our first full year offering the Academy and our employees are exceeding our expectations in active usage and engagement. By the end of 2020 we recorded an employee engagement rate of 84% with over 300 active users in the academy.
Amanda tells us she has a lot more in store for us as we continue to build out the Academy, “Employee Development is a great place right now. Lots of new content coming from 180Skills – essential and technical skills, safety, Lean, Six Sigma, along with a wide range of topics across 365+ courses we’ll use to continue building out in conjunction with our formal career development plans.
We have a year of practice under our belt on the LMS and more and more employee-owners are asking questions and engaging with the types of content they’d like to see. We’re all learning together and the more we keep in contact the more gains we’ll have. I’m looking forward to this year – from new course content, to mentoring, development plans, and new leaderboard swag – I think we’ll see a lot of positives in 2021.”
We’re only eighteen short months into our online learning journey and with engagement and adoption at such high levels we’re in a great spot moving into 2021!