Success Story

VIA Metropolitan Transit is the mass transit provider in San Antonio TX, founded in 1978. VIA’s mission is to provide regional multimodal transportation options to members of the community, support economic vitality, and enhance the quality of life throughout their geographic region. VIA’s buses operate seven days a week and 21 hours a day. The fleet consists of 474 buses and 144 paratransit vehicles.

Changing Leadership and Shifting Culture

Over the past few years, VIA has undergone some cultural shifts which included some organizational structure changes. As the company has grown, new company divisions have formed, bringing in new company leaders.

This has been a change for employees, since many higher-level positions were filled through internal promotions in years past, due to strong succession planning. This has impacted employee morale and perspective of how promotions are handled.

Recognizing this as an opportunity to engage employees and have conversations around development, human resources began working on a new professional development program, My On-Demand Education (MODE).

It’s designed to help employees take advantage of development opportunities, improve their skills, support succession planning, and create an overall learning culture through utilization of the BizLibrary learning management system and content library.

“We want our employees to be prepared for internal promotions and BizLibrary has really helped us prepare our workforce for that.”

– Vanessa Chapa, Organizational Training & Development Administrator

To do this, the VIA team focused on overall employee engagement within the program. With training provided on focused topics, employees were also encouraged to search for their own desired topics to enhance their learning and make their development plan individualized.

Additionally, HR started meeting with leaders in various departments to create training specific to their departmental needs. In just one year, they collaborated with each department head to create a targeted training curriculum for employees.

Promoting Development Through Fun

As part of the initiative allowing employees to take ownership of their own development, the team created eight different promotional initiatives to implement throughout the year. Some of the promotions have included: New Year New Priorities, Train or Treat, March MODE Madness, Fiesta MODE, and Summer MODE.

All the campaigns were communicated and promoted via email with the goal to increase utilization and engagement in various soft skill areas as a refresher for employees. Some of the campaigns included incentives for participants.

The team utilized BizLibrary’s Featured Playlists to highlight recommended content to employees. This made the training easily accessible for employees and reportable for the system administrators.

Positive Feedback and Results

Since partnering with BizLibrary and implementing the MODE program, completed training has continued to increase. Content completions have increased more than 300% over the last year with employees completing two courses on average with each login to the LMS.

Additionally, department heads are now creating training curricula that are specific to their departmental needs, as well as assigning content to correct any discipline issues they are facing.

Employee feedback has been gathered to ensure the training provided was valuable. All collected feedback has been positive, with employees noting that they most like the diversity of the program.

“There’s so much great content in there, it’s not just one type of content, it’s a little bit on everything.”

– Vanessa Chapa