The Department of Labor chose to implement a learning management system enterprise-wide.
by Site Staff
July 3, 2008
The Department of Labor (DOL) fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions, advancing their opportunities for profitable employment and protecting their retirement and health care benefits. DOL also helps employers find workers, strengthens free collective bargaining and tracks changes in employment, prices and other national economic measurements.
With approximately 17,000 employees, DOL administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws that cover many workplace activities for 10 million employers and 125 million workers. While each DOL employee across its 26 separate agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Labor Statistics and Women’s Bureau, is required to participate in common-needs training — general training for all DOL staff — employees also are required to complete specific courses unique to their agencies’ missions.
As a result, DOL was challenged with managing disparate areas of content administration, inconsistent content management and delivery, and multiple training types in various formats.
DOL chose to implement a learning management system (LMS) enterprise-wide, with a primary goal of consolidating all of its legacy learning and training systems into a single program, called LearningLink.
Within DOL, the training department owns the overall LMS system and manages content for common training. Via LearningLink, the training department is able to provide all employees across DOL with access to common-needs training, regardless of their specific agency affiliations. And at the agency level, each has its own LearningLink domain to deliver and track agency-specific training.
With this system in place, DOL has the means to access and track both common-needs and agency-specific training. A single login for all training provides DOL employees with a consistent user experience, making it possible to administer, access, manage, track, store and report on the data from both training tracks on a single platform. Additionally, employees are empowered to manage their own training compliance.
“All new employees are required to take computer-security awareness training,” said Michael Gerwitz, project manager of the Department of Labor’s e-training systems. “Every employee has the flexibility to manage courses outside of mandatory training through the system. Plateau automates and simplifies those processes, which saves a lot of time for learning administrators.”
Additionally, to manage the spectrum of training content DOL employees access through LearningLink, DOL selected Plateau’s iContent solution. Previously, DOL’s content had been managed through a legacy content management system or stored on DOL’s intranet. Administration was spread across the organization, resulting in inconsistent content delivery and management.
All course content for DOL employees, whether mandatory or optional, now is stored on this system and made available to employees via LearningLink. This enables DOL to deliver content through a variety of formats. DOL courses are presented using static HTML, dynamic HTML with Flash interactions, Word documents and other media.
The centralized content system has yielded measurable savings for DOL by eliminating server-resource costs and improving productivity. Learning administrators and executives can focus on implementing key strategic learning initiatives instead of managing the day-to-day processes associated with content administration.