The Bridge Between an Older Workforce and the New Generation
The Hague (NL), June 2008 - Danny de Vos, eLearning Project Manager at Kadaster, a Dutch Land Registrary Office, explains how her organization handles knowledge transfer from an aging workforce planning retirement to the next generation of employees. Kadaster collects information about registered properties in the Netherlands, records them in public registers and cadastral maps, and makes this information available to the public.
What challenges does Kadaster face?
Danny de Vos: One of the corporate challenges that Kadaster is facing is the reality of an aging workforce. If you take for example land surveying, which is our primary process, you would find that the majority of our surveyors are over 50 years of age and will be retiring in the next five years. If we didn't have a knowledge transfer strategy in place, their knowledge would disappear as they retired, which would result in a major loss for the organization.
Another corporate challenge we are facing at Kadaster is organisational change. Kadaster is currently tasked with reducing our workforce from 2,200 to 1,500 people, while trying to maintain a staff of new, young workers and temporary employees.
With a mandate to offer up-to-date, accurate, consistent information and high quality knowledge and learning interventions, the above corporate challenges represent a significant demand for our learning and development organization.
To meet these needs, our knowledge transfer strategy includes tasks such as continuously updating our courses and adapting or extending our systems to better serve the customers' demands. The learning and development team also needs to be able to react quickly and have the ability to modify courses in a short amount of time. This requires knowing where information is stored and who owns that piece of content.
As part of our knowledge transfer strategy we also provide learners with clear learning objectives as well as letting them know what they can expect to achieve during training. For the temporary employees it is important to offer just-in-time and just-enough training, which is attractive and usable.
A third part of the strategy is to ensure that the course schedules are more flexible, providing options for both scheduling times and locations. We believe that when learners can choose for themselves when they want to follow a course, it will positively affect the end result (e.g. higher pass rates).
How does Kadaster bridge the knowledge gap?
Danny de Vos: In order to execute on our knowledge transfer strategy, we needed to introduce e-learning into the organisation. Since we had very little experience in developing e-learning courses, a user-friendly system was a requirement. Secondly, the system had to meet all our technical requirements and allow us to develop, manage, reuse and disseminate learning materials and manage the workflow in-house. We also wanted the ability to make didactical choices within a course in order to develop an attractive, interactive programme. And finally, we wanted run assessments and pull reports from the system on scores and the use of the system itself.
After thorough investigation we chose Eedo's ForceTen Learning Content Management System (LCMS). ForceTen enabled us to do everything we required. We now develop all our courses, documentation and assessments in-house and disseminate these through the LCMS integrated portal to our employees. We are also able to easily pull management reports and monitor results.
To support your knowledge transfer strategy, you choose to use an LCMS. How do you use it?
Danny de Vos: An example of how we use the Eedo ForceTen Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is our surveyor training course, Terrestrial Gathering and Reconstruction. For this course we use a blended learning approach. This approach works well as our surveyors are not accustomed to working on computers, having worked primarily in the field for most of their careers.
The blended learning approach was a great fit for our surveyors who were able to pick up the online portions very easily having also been provided with classroom sessions. Using this approach provided our surveyors with an excellent opportunity to work online, which is important for future developments that necessitate computer use. Feedback from the learners has been very positive!
We are also planning to use Eedo's ForceTen LCMS to create, disseminate and track surveys. As well as use digital portfolio to collect, manage and approve data related to the learner's knowledge and certification to enable more efficient learning via specific learning paths.
Can you tell us more about the benefits Kadaster has seen to date?
Danny de Vos: At Kadaster the ForceTen LCMS allows us to manage the entire e-learning process from creation to delivery to reporting. We train subject matter experts (SMEs), who use custom templates, to work on our e-learning programs in-house. Within the last one-and-a-half years, Kadaster has developed nine courses - more than we thought was possible. The ForceTen LCMS has exceeded our expectations for the system.
