Success Story

Training Around Fluctuating Work Demands

One of the strategic goals for Consumers Credit Union is to maximize performance with creative solutions, to increase revenue and operational efficiency. This is one of the main areas of focus for the training and development team, with the full support of senior leaders.

However, in today’s environment, Consumers Credit Union faces several challenges in making that training approachable, convenient, and cost effective – while also keeping it engaging and effective.

The strain on employees in their roles can be incredibly hard to predict due to the variance in member flow. Being able to allow flexibility for employees to access training when there is down time or freedom in their schedule was a major obstacle for Consumers.

They chose to partner with BizLibrary in 2014, when they discovered that the BizLibrary program provided a perfect solution by giving employees access to training on demand because of the large stock of microlearning videos.

“The training is easy to work into a busy day and relevant to each employee’s individual professional development.”

– Kristen Davidson, VP of Organizational Development

Aligning Training to Business Goals

Much of the success Consumers Credit Union has seen can be attributed to the way they approach training. Before starting a new training initiative, Kristen and her team review their objectives to ensure that training is always aligned to Consumers’ greater business goals. Consumers recognizes that programs need to be directly associated with business goals and business strategy to receive the proper buy-in and follow through from training participants.

The way they measure the success of each training program varies based on the specific initiative, which means that Consumers has no blanket method for measuring their program’s success. This has allowed Consumers Credit Union to truly remain focused on the end goal and ensure that they are all working toward a common purpose.

For example, training and development works to support sales production. When the organization has a big initiative around a sales push or a new product development push, they look at the goal first, and then work backwards. That means that whatever metric Consumers is pushing towards then becomes the goal for training.

This allows for every department involved to truly own the initiative and holds everyone accountable for its success and failure. This approach has helped to make training and development a strategic part of the organization, rather than operating as a separate department with its own goals and metrics.

Proven Savings and Results

Partnering with BizLibrary has helped elevate Consumer Credit Union’s already developed training program even further.

“BizLibrary has helped us solve a lot of the challenges with our internal leadership program, simply from the ease of use. Being able to go out and create curricula, and being able to track somebody’s progress and internal growth as it relates to their performance evaluations is really important to us; partnering with BizLibrary has helped us to be able to do that.”

– Kristen Davidson

Since partnering with BizLibrary and using a combination of on-demand videos, book studies, and classroom courses, Consumers Credit Union has seen remarkable results.

Their employee survey results show an increasing number of employees being “highly satisfied,” and that satisfaction is paralleled in their member satisfaction surveys, as well. In fact, the industry average for overall satisfaction with credit union training in 2016 was a 3.64 out of 5.

By utilizing BizLibrary as their go-to training platform, the 2016 Consumers Credit Union results not only surpassed their 2015 metrics but blew away the industry standard as they achieved a satisfaction rating of a 4.22 out of 5.

In addition to the satisfaction ratings, they have seen saved capital from the training program, as well. They have recently reduced the cost of onboarding a group of 10 new hires from $3000 to $1000 per new hire due to the online platform.

Additionally, they assign BizLibrary content as pre-learning to many classroom sessions, which has helped to cut the training time for many classes and helped improve retention, preparedness, and training costs.

Consumers utilizes BizLibrary content as assigned pre-work for the “Delivering Powerful Presentations” class. By having a prerequisite of custom content housed on BizLibrary and BizLibrary video content, they were able to cut the in-class time in half. This saves the organization $1,200 each time they hold the class. In total, BizLibrary helped save $14,400 each year for this one class, alone.