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Case Study

Published June 2009

Xerox Weaves Learning Into the Fabric of Work

  

  Bill Perry

To integrate learning into the work of its 57,000 employees, document services company Xerox leveraged its learning content management system to collaborate in developing real-time learning.

Xerox sees a brighter future for the way people learn. That future is not so much about what a workforce learns, although that is important.

Rather, it is about shifting the place and manner in which individuals gain know-how. The company’s ambition stems from a desire to improve productivity for its direct workforce, as well as its business partners selling and servicing Xerox products.

Xerox has a vision to tightly weave learning into the everyday fabric of work so that the two are virtually indistinguishable from one another.

A Custom Learning Experience
“In the future, we see an individual receiving custom learning solutions based on his or her experience versus today’s one-size-fits-all learning solutions,” said Steven Rath Morgan, manager of learning content services for Xerox. “We want to leverage the best of push-and-pull learning and fundamentally integrate learning with work.”

To deliver on its vision, Xerox Global Learning Services had to first focus on what happens behind the scenes to design this kind of learning experience for more than 57,000 Xerox employees, plus global business partners. According to Rath Morgan, creating a great learning experience takes two things. First, developing valuable content takes a lot of creativity and collaboration. And second, once experts create a course, a company must anticipate that people will want to tap into it in different ways.

To illustrate Rath Morgan’s second point, if a sales professional takes a 30-minute online course about Xerox’s latest product launch, it is not realistic to think that that same salesperson will skim through the whole course a second time if he or she wants to revisit a few key points.

“Well-designed learning should support getting the content you need,” said Rath Morgan. “We want to deliver resources in a variety of ways and make it possible for our people to access what they need while they are doing their jobs. Ideally, learning shouldn’t be an interruption in the flow of your work.”

Let’s assume a consultant is creating a proposal to convince a customer to add Xerox’s newest printers to a global network. To highlight some of the product’s competitive advantages, she looks to her notes for background. She finds a few facts. But she needs to learn more, specifically about the product’s network capabilities. In Xerox’s new learning world, the consultant is able to search resources and courses and launch a networked cluster of targeted content from her desktop that gives her what she needs.

“Creating learning solutions that fit an individual’s exact need takes the right learning technology,” said Rath Morgan. “You might be able to use a search engine and a learning management system to find a reference manual or deliver a rigidly fixed course to an employee, but those tools alone won’t adapt the content and resources to the learner’s specific need.”

The Fulcrum for Leveraging Learning
So along with relying on its internally developed learning management system, Xerox put in place a global collaborative development platform that is underpinned by a learning content management system from OutStart. Put in place 18 months ago, the LCMS gives Xerox’s internal and third-party content developers a way to collaborate in real time to produce learning.