Étude de cas
Secteur
Government
Siège de l'entreprise
Pima County, Arizona, USA
Nombre d'employés
200 (IT)
Innovative Approach to Learning Saves Time and Tax Dollars in Pima County
Résultats commerciaux obtenus grâce à Udemy
Détails de l'étude de cas
Think of local government and you might not immediately think of efficiency and innovation. But Pima County, Arizona isn’t your typical local government. Deputy IT Director Mark Hayes and Network Operation Center Manager Diego Arriola oversee training for Pima County’s 200-person IT organization. What do IT professionals at local government do? They support 8,000 employees in dozens of departments — everything from the library system to wastewater management facilities. And this requires the ability to quickly adapt to change and pick up new technical skills.
Support employees’ immediate need for technical upskilling — and their future career goals
Mark’s primary goal is to help the IT professionals in his department update their skills. “We’re trying to increase our technical capacity. We’re adopting a lot of new technology and we’re trying to modernize.”
The way Mark sees it, learning goes beyond picking up technical skills. “We want people to do more than just write code or solve a problem with the desktop software. We want people to look around them and be aware of their circumstances and situations and think outside the box when solving problems.
Upskilling his team doesn’t just serve the needs of Pima County, though. According to Mark, the investment is also beneficial to their careers. “We have a culture of learning and development here,” he says. Mark believes focusing on learning opportunities in the government setting is critical. “Nobody’s going to get rich working here. So we have to have other reasons for employees to want to stay.”
Pima County had tried a few approaches to learning in the past. They had a vendor they weren’t satisfied with, so they let their contract expire. Mark knew he needed a learning solution that would support the IT department’s various needs: technical upskilling, critical thinking, and broader professional development.
Deputy IT Director
Amplify the team’s impact with a learning partner everyone already trusted
When Pima County employees had the option to choose their own learning solution, one name kept coming up again and again: Udemy. It was such a popular choice among Pima County employees that it made the decision to get Udemy Business easy. “It was a no-brainer,” says Mark.
When they started looking more closely at Udemy, Diego was impressed with the course content and ease of navigation. “There are so many courses that are only available on Udemy. And we liked the fact that there are multiple courses available for the different technologies and soft skills we’re looking at.”
Respond to the urgent training needs during a pandemic
2020 brought a sudden and unexpected change for Pima County (and the rest of the world). “Until the pandemic, we were 100% onsite workers,” says Mark. “We suddenly had thousands of people working from home and no real effective way for them to work and communicate.”
They chose Microsoft Teams to promote collaboration in the newly remote environment. But this posed a challenge: How do you help a large, distributed team adopt a new technology? And how do you quickly train the IT helpdesk staff so they can troubleshoot for other employees?
Diego’s first step was to look at Udemy Business content. “We found a few Udemy courses and combined them into one course that was 5 hours long. If we’d done it with Microsoft training and research on our own, it would have taken 40–80 hours.”
Looking back on this experience, Mark is amazed they were able to pull it off. “We were able to pivot and effectively transition a few thousand people to work from home. I honestly don’t know how we could have done it without Udemy.”
Deputy IT Director
Reduce onboarding time 77% for new hires with Learning Paths
Training new hires in the IT department has traditionally been a time-consuming activity at Pima County. It took about two to three months to fully onboard a new hire and involved a lot of one-on-one time with their manager and peers.
Diego uses Learning Paths in Udemy to build customized onboarding for new team members. “I combine documentation, Udemy course content, and other materials. Now there’s one location where everything is stored.”
Diego says that Udemy has completely transformed the new hire onboarding process. “Now it only takes two or three weeks to get new hires fully up to speed. This is a 77% reduction in the time new hires spend onboarding.” Plus, new hires engage with the learning path content on their own. This means their managers and peers can focus on core business activities while new employees take self-guided onboarding modules.
Employees can still have a tailored experience since Learning Paths are easy to update and customize for each role. “Every time we onboard somebody new, we can modify it — it reduces time needed from others training someone new that comes in.”
The impact of reducing onboarding is clear, says Mark. “The outcome of faster onboarding is that we save time and money, which means we’re not spending people’s tax dollars needlessly.”
Help employees meet their goals with learning
Looking to the future, Mark wants to further integrate learning into the culture for all employees at Pima County. He sees an opportunity for managers and employees to work together to create learning plans. “I’m trying to transfer this culture of learning into a more accessible and more managed process. I hope to see more people stop and take the time to do a self-inventory and think about their goals and objectives and how to reach them.”
Network Operation Center Manager
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