By Chris Schneider, Director of Employee Development
If you look at our Five-Year Plan, you’ll notice that significant growth is in our forecast. As we continue to expand, training continues to be an important focus when it comes to retaining, attracting, and growing our workforce. We recently saw the beginning of our training vision begin to materialize as the Learning Management System (LMS), also known as RuppertLEARNS, launched in our maintenance division. RuppertLEARNS will now host all of our training tools and content, and will provide record keeping abilities.
The first phase of the rollout plan for RuppertLEARNS was completed in November when each maintenance branch participated in an in-person training event. In 2017, additional rollout phases of RuppertLEARNS will give access to the landscape construction division, the fleet and shop teams, and our corporate staff. All groups will have the ability to use tools such as online learning, learning content management, event registration, just-in-time training, on-demand skill reports and more. The employee development team will continue to explore additional tools and learning aides as the organization gets up to speed with this new technology.
RuppertLEARNS will be a tool to leverage quality information and proven instructional methods for our diverse and geographically wide-spread audience. The initial phases of the rollout will be for managers and office staff. In the summer of 2017, our employee development team will look to launch an additional phase that will include crewmen. This rollout will be paired with updated bilingual operational training content and the ability to view the entire system in Spanish or English.
Benefits of this system should be immediately obvious and include the ability to access training from mobile devices in the office or on the job site. This brings huge opportunities for on-the-job learning, refresher training and better use of down time or a passenger’s travel time. In addition, all record keeping will be automatic and electronic, which will eliminate paper and pencil processes. RuppertLEARNS also guarantees consistent content and training messages across all branches and lines of business. Perhaps most important of all, people will be empowered to learn at their own pace and have the ability to learn outside of their scheduled training.
This technology has been tested by user groups composed of employees at all levels and found to be extremely user-friendly. The system is intuitive and learning modules are built by combining short, consistent messages with a multimedia delivery. The employee development team has even worked with IT to incorporate RuppertLEARNS into the Single Sign On (SSO) system, eliminating the need to remember an additional password. RuppertLEARNS will help to keep us consistent, efficient, proactive, and competitive.
As you use the system, if you have any thoughts, comments, or ideas about the available content or how we can improve your user experience, please contact the employee development team at training@ruppertcompanies.com. It is our goal to help you achieve your goals and your feedback will help us to continuously improve our training efforts to better serve you!