wilzed

After reading articles by Johnson (2001) {see reference below} and Guerra and Heffernan (2004), I have noticed that there has been a significant change in the Training and Development approach at New York company Paychex.

Johnson (2001) states that the Training and Development program at Paychex, was fundamentally based on classroom face-to-face training. Most if not all of the training activities at Paychex involved “the basic Socratic method with an instructor, close mentoring and things that involved personal contact…’ (Johnson 2001, para.1). Online Learning at Paychex was considered as a poor alternative to training.

However, looking at the Guerra and Heffernan (2004) article, Paychex Training and Development made a dramatic change in its approach. The only thing mentioned in this article about Paychex Training and Development programs was Online Learning. The article discussed how the Guerra Scale could be used to measure the interactivity of Online Training Courses. The Guerra Scale “describes an increasingly interactive user experience using a one-to ten scale, in which ‘one’ involves the common experience of simply reading text on a screen and ‘ten’ represents a virtual reality scenario” (Guerran and Heffernan 2004, para.3).

One can only speculate the drivers of such a change.

Here below, are some of the possible drivers of the change that I came up with:

• It may have been too expensive to continually have classroom training at the Paychex University. The cost of the training could have been the time lost by having employees at the University instead of being at work. Another possible cost would be having to pay the trainees wages when they’re in training, as well as the covering staff’s wages; and also the Travel costs of trainees.
• Speed to Market may have been too slow. The occurance of changes in Paychex business environment may have increased, requiring a quicker training completion rate from staff to keep up with the changes.
• What was learnt in the classroom environment at Paychex may not have transferred successfully to the trainees working environment.

Reference:

Johnson, H. 2001, Case Study – Paychex, TrainingMag.com, December 2001.

~ by wilz on 6 April, 2006.