Case Study

Published April 2009

Virginia Leads the Way in Training

Bill Perry

By putting knowledge transfer front and center, the Commonwealth of Virginia is leading the nation’s states in training and development.

Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine’s motto for his administration is “Virginia Leading the Way.” And the governor’s rallying cry seems to be netting results, especially when it comes to educating state workers.

In a report by The Pew Center on the States titled “Government Performance Project: Grading the States,” Virginia was the only state in the United States to receive an “A” for its training and development initiatives in 2008.

According to Governing magazine, “Virginia … put together a knowledge transfer system that … agencies could share. Each has software that allows it to map the specific skills and knowledge that are needed for various jobs and then tailor training programs to those specifications.”

The Pew report card evaluated each state government’s performance in serving the public, and Virginia’s overall score for how it handled money, people, infrastructure and information was an “A-.” Getting top marks for its training and development programs, which are a subset of its people score, didn’t happen overnight for Virginia, though. The process began more than five years ago.

Envisioning a Change
In 2003, government training professionals from across Virginia met to discuss ways to put all of the Commonwealth’s learning and training into one system. Before that time, each government agency had its own system for procuring, delivering and supporting training.

With more than 230 government agencies across Virginia, some officials saw the drawbacks to relying on independent systems for managing learning. Virginia was paying higher costs for training because agencies didn’t coordinate the way they purchased content or software. In one case, two Virginia government agencies were unknowingly paying full price for the same training system.

With each agency procuring and managing training independently, employees rarely shared resources. And when an initiative was handed down by the governor, many agencies would duplicate training efforts without knowing it.

“When you have hundreds of thousands of employees, all of these challenges grow in complexity,” said Belchior Mira, chief information technology officer for the Virginia Department of Human Resource Management. “It’s not enough to just automate the purchase and delivery of learning in a coordinated way; although that can spell savings. Virginia’s goal was to create a singular approach to sharing knowledge and developing employees’ careers.”

In the spring of 2004, eight Virginia government agencies came together with the intent to purchase technology for managing and developing know-how. The eight agencies formed a group whose representatives gathered requirements through surveys and focus groups aimed at potential users of the system. Other members of the group analyzed the findings and researched available solutions.

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