LTEN 2022

As the learning leader, your team takes care of everyone else in the organization, from salespeople to field reimbursement managers to clinical educators. But who takes care of your team? How can you ensure they are equipped with the right capabilities that they need to support their learners?

Learning professionals often leverage competency models for customer-facing roles to identify key capabilities and inform the build out of new hire training programs, however competency models are not often used for their own L&D team. By identifying and outlining expectations on key capabilities, competency models lay the groundwork for development in any kind of role — L&D professionals included.

When AbbVie Canada wanted to elevate and formalize the expectations of its Learning Partner team, it used a new competency model as the catalyst. The new model defined expectations for the Learning Partner role across eight competencies, covering the role’s broad range of capabilities while still capturing the team’s culture and reflecting the different levels of experience that individuals in the role may have.

Once the Competency Model was built, AbbVie Canada brought it into action by building several tools to help managers and learning partners optimally apply the model toward development. These included a competency ‘Experience Map’, a Learning Pathway, a Developmental Journey Overview and Leader Guide. These tools inform team members and their managers of representative experiences on how to perform in the role and attain readiness for the next role. In addition to facilitating development, these tools also play a role in AbbVie Canada Learning’s recruiting and hiring practices.

By attending this workshop you will recognize the benefits of introducing a competency model for learning professionals and determine if a competency model is right for your learning team. You will hear how AbbVie Canada partnered with Bull City Blue and created, implemented, and built on their own model. This collaborative project was nominated in 2021 and earned Industry Partner LTEN 2021 Finalist status—come to the workshop to get an update on how this has impacted the L&D Team at AbbVie Canada.

In this session we will explore a challenge that training organizations face on a recurring basis—the need to redesign New Hire Training (NHT) to better align it with the changing needs of the sales organization. Portfolios change, organizational structures change, marketplace challenges change and budgets change—but training organizations will always be expected to produce new hires who can succeed from day one in the field.

The session will focus on key aspects of NHT redesign including:

Scale: Determining how broad the redesign effort will be. Will we include a “deep dive” into curriculum and content? Or will we focus more on the logistical and administrative aspects of NHT?

Research: Identifying the best research methods for gaining insights into your NHT’s current state and identifying and categorizing opportunities for your desired future state. Will we conduct interviews or working sessions? How wide a net should we cast? Will we include learner perspectives—or focus on managers’ observations? Will attitude and awareness research be valuable?

Prioritization: Applying a framework to determine which opportunities will produce the greatest value for both the sales organization and the training organization. What principles will guide our decision making? How will we evaluate one opportunity relative to another?

Socialization: Defining your vision for the ideal future state of NHT and “selling it” to your stakeholders. How much rigor will be required to garner stakeholder approval? How detailed does our workload analysis have to be if we are requesting new resources?

The session will introduce core NHT-redesign concepts in a fun and engaging way but will be underpinned by a case study based on Sunovion’s 2021 redesign of NHT.