Company Takes the Right Course in Training and Education

As business leaders focus on top-line growth, they’re starting to understand how and why the training and education of their employees must be part of the strategy.

Companies that are succeeding in an increasingly competitive, global environment have found that a better-trained workforce improves performance, and investing in employee learning and development is critical to achieving their goals. Increasingly, they rely on workplace learning and performance professionals to develop highly skilled employees, according to the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD).

However, today’s training professionals are increasingly challenged with not only content and course development, but also in areas that are outside of their core competencies—content management, logistics, obsolescence of materials and time constraints. Fortunately, many organizations employ a training and education partner that can facilitate the production and maintenance of training materials.

According to ASTD, many companies have experienced increases in learning efficiency by selecting outsourcing partners who compliment their internal strengths. These partners enable this by providing learning professionals with valuable time to do what they do best—develop timely, comprehensive content for their courses.

Production Pains with Learning Materials
An excellent example can be found at one of North America’s leading international truckload carriers. This company, which runs over 2,800 tractors and 7,600 trailers, is the largest transporter of truckload freight between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Since its inception, the carrier has handled more than 2 million truckload crossings between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

During a typical year, the company provides its nearly 4,000 employees and drivers with printed materials that number in the thousands. These materials include driver orientation manuals, accident kits, certification cards, new hire kits and benefits manuals. To produce these materials, the company worked with a local print and reprographics company. What they quickly realized was that not only was quality and version control lacking—the print shop reproduced the manuals by photocopying the previous version—but they also experienced long lead times. In addition, there was very little consistency in the design of the manuals, as each department within the company was responsible for various sections of the manuals, each of which were formatted differently.

A Training and Education Partnership
To address these points of pain for the company, the Standard Register (SR) team presented them with a design template for its driver orientation manual and outlined the advantages of on-demand printing and kitting services. SR went the extra mile and designed one complete manual for the company to examine.

Upon a thorough review of the sample manual, the company liked what it saw and immediately contracted with Standard Register for its complete training and education manual production, design and kitting services. Now on the second major update to the company’s driver orientation manual, SR has provided them with greatly enhanced finished products that have significantly heightened the company’s professional image among current and prospective employees. SR has also made it easy for the company to make changes, since the manual is now in a digital design format, and has helped them keep track of policy versions for both ISO (International Organization for Standardization) compliance as well as internal auditing and employee management purposes.

According to learning professionals at this international truckload carrier, there were two key factors that played a role in their decision to partner with Standard Register: faster turnaround times with higher quality and SR’s ability to provide complete design services. The company plans to expand its relationship in order to take further advantage of SR’s broad industry expertise and production capabilities.

If you’d like more information on how you can enhance your company’s learning services by working with a proven training and education partner, contact Standard Register today.