Bloomfield Company Develops Web-Based Training for National Grid USA

Contact: Travis Piper (585) 657-6379
Travis@creativeapproachesinc.com

East Bloomfield, New York: Creative Approaches, Inc. of East Bloomfield, New York recently completed designing and developing a Web-based training program for National Grid USA. The training is for hundreds of National Grid employees scattered throughout the Northeast. These individuals need to learn how to use several templates for creating departmental Web sites that will be integrated into the company-wide National Grid web site. The templates provide a common “look” and standards for each created web page so the placement of navigation controls and key information will be consistent throughout the entire organization’s site.

Web-based training (WBT) is being used more and more by companies that need to train employees at numerous locations. “Companies used to think nothing of either sending a trainer into the field to teach classes, or of sending the employees to a central location for training” says Travis Piper, President of Creative Approaches. “Yet today, with companies watching their travel budgets and with many individuals reluctant to fly, firms are looking at ways to conduct training without anyone having to travel at all. The savings in travel alone can often outweigh the cost of developing the WBT.”

“Web-based training is extremely cost-effective and efficient,” according to Piper. It typically takes one-half the time of comparable classroom training and there is no doubt that the employee can perform the task being taught because they have to do the actual task as part of the training. “It’s not like you can sit in class and let someone else do all the work and answer all the questions”, says Piper. “You are the only student and the instructor calls on you to answer and do everything.”

The course teaching the National Grid templates introduces each template one-by-one, explains its use, then shows the user how to obtain it, how to fill it out and how to upload it to the company site. Finally the user performs the steps just demonstrated in a realistic simulation of the actual task. “The program was designed and developed for optimal maintainability and performance within the National Grid environment” according to Piper. “Now, the person responsible for the training, instead of having to spend a couple of hours with someone on the phone, can email them a link to the Web-based training, they simply click and they start the program.” Creative Approaches also developed an online tracking and reporting mechanism for National Grid that allows an administrator to register and monitor the progress of all employees taking the training. “We even built the tracking mechanism so it can handle additional courses in the future,” said Piper.

National Grid USA is one of the ten largest utilities (by number of customers) in the country and has the largest combined electricity transmission and distribution network in the New England/New York region. National Grid companies in the U.S. include Niagara Mohawk, Massachusetts Electric, and New England Power Company, among others. Since each new company has its own culture and procedures, National Grid needs to let all of the members of the new family of companies know what every other member does as part of unifying the new National Grid family.

Today more and more companies are making use of their company-wide Intranets to make training available to employees when they need it via their workstations or laptops.

Creative Approaches has been developing custom computer-based training programs for over twenty years.

According to Piper, using technology to deliver well-designed training can save today’s changing organizations substantial sums of money. In 1978, when Piper was Project Leader of the Computer-Based-Training department at Xerox Corporation, the company was planning to add a new wing of classrooms to the firm’s training center at Leesburg. With the launch of mainframe-based training for all personnel in Administration, construction of the new wing was cancelled since those employees no longer needed to travel to Leesburg for training. Instead, they took their training at their desks at local Xerox field offices around the country. The field offices that insured their personnel were trained had the best customer service ratings in the company. Offices that did not use the training were highly visible to senior management due to available reporting. “In today’s world,” says Piper, the Internet is the mainframe and the opportunities for savings are even greater – and the training is no longer just green text on a black background.”