Air Products Sharpens Its Performance Culture With An Assist From eCornell, A Total Learning Solutions Provider.
July 2004 - Air Products Sharpens Its Performance Culture With An Assist From eCornell, A Total Learning Solutions Provider.
Built On Innovation
Air Products is all about innovation. In 1940, the company pioneered the concept of producing gases right next to the facilities of large-scale gas users, thereby letting manufacturers make their products without having to wait for the arrival of cylinders of oxygen gas. In the decades since, Air Products has worked behind the scenes to power companies in the manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and technology industries. While Air Products' corporate headquarters is located in Allentown, PA, its 18,500 employees are located all over the world.
The company's expertise in the gas industry will become even more important in the twenty-first century as the global economy reconfigures in response to the dwindling supply of fossil fuels.
Behind every opportunity lies a challenge, and Air Products knows that the vast potential of the unfolding century can only be realized through an ongoing commitment to innovation and knowledge management. In that context, the company's partnership with eCornell is not an experimental luxury but a critical component of its present and future success.
Learning Challenges
"This is a company that invests significantly in learning," says Rebecca Bechtel, Air Products' Manager of HR Global Employee Development for the Americas. "We spent $38 million on training in 2002 for safety, IT, and functional skills as well as HR training. On the HR side, "however, "it was all classroom learning. Our challenge is that we need to provide consistent learning to our employees no matter where they reside, so we need a mix of learning options."
Air Products has 'downsized' its HR training function over the years through attrition and has as a result turned to external vendors as a resource for delivery of programs. But there was still an issue: to properly cover the breadth of managerial and HR training needs, Air Products had to turn to several vendors, which created administrative and quality-control headaches. Most importantly, there was a scalability problem. With thousands of employees around the globe, there's no way any individual teacher could address more than a tiny cross-section of targeted employees. Air Products continued to be confronted by the limitations of the physical classroom. In 2003, Air Products realized that e-learning could overcome these limitations. The challenge then became to find an appropriate vendor.
Learning Opportunities
Bechtel was wary of the first e-learning vendors who came knocking on Air Products' door. "Many of them wanted to sell us libraries of stuff," she recalls. "They had libraries of 500 programs. But we wanted targeted learning experiences that match up with our competencies. We also insist on quality of programming as well as delivery."
That's why Bechtel's interest was piqued when she first received a call from eCornell. "I know the reputation Cornell University has as a leader in education," says Bechtel, who wanted to see the company's online professional and executive development courses in action. She was impressed not only with the technology, but more importantly with the quality of teaching. "The quality of instructors is very high," Bechtel emphasizes. "You can interface with instructors online, and they have office hours when you can interact with them. There are also threaded online discussions in which other students or the instructor can discuss, expand, or collaborate on a topic." In essence, eCornell provides a solution that marries the best of classroom training with a robust set of e-learning features.
Air Products bought 100 seats from eCornell, expecting that number to be enough for the first year. Those seats were filled in a mere six months. This was remarkable given that Air Products hadn't made e-learning a mandate but was instead marketing it internally.
"eCornell's courses proved to be popular with Air Products' managers because they brought the best of the outside world into an environment that could profit from it. It's not that unusual for employees to begin and end their careers here," Bechtel explains. "Twenty, thirty, forty years. It's very beneficial in some ways, but there's not that much exposure to what other companies are doing. eCornell provides a way for our people to learn from others, to gain exposure to new thoughts and ideas, as well as to share their own experiences. It also gives our employees a way to gauge Air Products' culture against other company's cultures."
eCornell's faculty authors, online instructors, and e-learning courses, which facilitate interaction with peers in other industries, bring precisely that exposure to Air Products' managers and HR professionals. It's all the more important given that the company has a culture of very hard work, leaving little time for employees to pursue learning initiatives of their own, and dual responsibilities that can also get in the way of certain kinds of knowledge. "Most managers are also functional managers," Bechtel says. "They're involved in engineering, science, and so forth while leading people, and sometimes it's hard to strike a balance between the functional part and the leading part."
Striking that balance is a matter of corporate necessity. For Air Products' unquestionable technical skill to count in the marketplace, it has to be matched by equally enlightened management and HR functions. In the enterprise's eyes, leadership must accompany innovation, just as it was when founder Leonard P. Pool built his first generator in Detroit.
The Future
Having completed a strong proof of concept, Air Products is looking to extend the program with eCornell to operations in Asia (where it is already being piloted) and to other functional areas of the enterprise.
Air Products is also thoroughly evaluating the program and has sent out a survey pertaining to e-learning, and is currently designing metrics to measure its value. For Bechtel, there is no doubt that it has become a strategic priority at the company. "Learning is good," she concludes.
contact:
Ross Pearo, Director, Marketing
eCornell
840 Hanshaw Road
Ithaca NY 14850
607-330-3334
rpearo@ecornell.com
www.ecornell.com
