Custom, Company-wide Leadership Development Initiative
Client
Career Education Corporation (CEC) is an educational
services company offering high-quality education to
a diverse, worldwide student population in a variety
of career-oriented disciplines. Committed to quality,
career-focused learning and enhancing lives through
education, CEC was founded in 1994 and has rapidly
grown into a global family of academic and learning
institutions that include Colorado Technical University,
American Intercontinental University, INSEEC, Sanford
Brown and Le Cordon Bleu.
Challenge
During the period of 2006-2007, CEC went through
a comprehensive restructuring of its upper
management team, resulting in turnover across the
senior executive team and a new company board.
The company retained few veteran managers at
any level, which caused leadership challenges across
the entire organization and a pressing need for an
effective management development solution. CEC
purchased off-the-shelf leadership courses, but they
were inadequate in addressing the unique needs of
this educational services provider.
Kathleen Long was hired as CEC’s Director of
Organizational Development. She was tasked with
rapidly finding a way to address the acute management
training needs of the entire business. “My greatest
challenges in developing the right solution were the
sense of urgency and our company’s extreme bias for
action,” said Long. “The management team wanted
results almost immediately, but there were deep
training needs and management issues at play.
I needed to show them the value of slowing down in
the short term so that the company could successfully
achieve its goals over the long term.”
Solution
After studying the vendor licensed management
training, Long determined it was no longer the
right path for CEC. “The off-the-shelf management
training, as can happen with packaged training
solutions, targeted a subset of critical management
competencies, but offered little for new or senior
managers,” said Long. “That meant large and
important groups of novice and senior managers at
CEC were getting little-to-no value from the training.”
Long presented her senior leaders with comparisons
that demonstrated how cost effective a custom training
solution could be. Afterwards, she was quickly given
the green light to move forward with development of
a targeted first-line management development program
that would strategically be enhanced to address the needs
of more senior managers. This flexibility to reuse content
and target other management audience needs would
provide the consistency that had been missing. Long
knew that to deliver the training solution rapidly, and to the utmost standards of excellence, she would need
to bring on expert design and development support.
She immediately contacted CARA, where one of
her former colleagues is now a Strategic Account
Executive. Within days, CARA vetted and presented
several experienced candidates for Long to interview.
Long met with the CARA consultants and selected
a Senior Instructional Design consultant to serve as
her thought partner, designer, developer and facilitator
over the course of the project.
“I went to CARA because of relationships. I knew
people within the company and trusted their expertise
and knowledge, which is why I didn’t have to look
anywhere else,” said Long. CARA delivered a candidate
whose design philosophy and approach closely
mirrored Long’s own vision. “From the start we had
a shared vision of the project and the approach we
needed to take in order to achieve our goal.”
With an eager group of managers enthusiastic to
experience high quality management development,
Long and CARA’s instructional designer began work.
In less than 90 days, they had custom designed and
developed all of the course content and a manual
registration system. In addition, they negotiated all
related training contracts—from venues and hotels
to coaching and trainers—and put a plan in place to
conduct 23—invitation only—management training
sessions that would address development needs
over an initial seven-month window.
“It was a remarkable development push, but at the end
of that three months we had built a training solution
tailored to CEC’s unique business and management
needs,” said Long. “And we saved the business money
by providing a far superior training solution.”
Results
The custom solution saved CEC more than $300,000 in
licensing fees, and overall training costs were reduced
by 46% per student. Meanwhile, participating managers
were thrilled with the program, giving rave reviews in
post training surveys. “It was a success at all levels,
from costs to execution, to the results we are seeing in
improvements in management performance at all levels
in the company,” said Long.
For CEC, CARA’s commitment to the utmost in
professional expertise and a partnership of shared
passion and excellence were essential to the success
of the program. “CARA’s breadth and depth of expertise
in custom learning and performance solutions sets them
apart,” said Long. “But it was the shared passion for
the solution, its quality and the results that made the
partnership a dynamic
Since making the management training program a part
of their standard training curriculum, CEC has asked
CARA back to support several additional initiatives
including an expansive eLearning curriculum build and
a large effort to assist in staffing training professionals. “We have even hired some of CARA’s staff over to our
full-time team, which is just one example of the high
value we place on the expertise, experience, talent
and partnership CARA delivers,” said Long.
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