Situation
As a leading submarine builder for the U.S. Navy for over a century, the company is experiencing a significant increase in demand. With large contracts on the horizon and an aging workforce—30% of which is approaching retirement—the company expects to hire 15,000 employees, effectively doubling its workforce by 2030.
Previously, the organization relied on informal knowledge sharing by word of mouth and on-the-job training, promoting from within. However, with the anticipated doubling of its workforce by 2023, there was a pressing need to implement formal training programs. These programs aimed to improve the quality of new hires by strengthening pipeline programs, increasing training capacity, proactively managing skill development, and reducing the time to proficiency.
Challenge
The company has 5,000 employees aged 53 to 68 nearing retirement and required to transfer their knowledge to new hires. Its new workforce will span several generations, each with unique learning needs and varying levels of work experience and educational backgrounds. As a result, the organization needed to develop a comprehensive program that enables its younger workforce to learn effectively and efficiently, supporting the company’s long-term viability. Additionally, the organization aimed to instill the importance of their role in the company’s mission.
In response to the increased demand, GP Strategies helped the client revolutionize its learning organization to support workforce readiness by 2023, ensuring faster proficiency and positive business outcomes through concise, innovative, and accessible training.
Transforming and preparing an entire workforce with state-of-the-art learning and staffing solutions.
Solution
The client collaborated with GP Strategies to transform its learning organization, developing training that captured the knowledge of retiring employees and effectively transferred it to new hires while supporting a growing pipeline of recruits.
GP Strategies began by conducting a Learning Organization Strategy assessment to define the client’s current state and desired future state, resulting in a clear roadmap for transformation. From 2016 to 2018, GP Strategies supported the execution of a new learning operating model, created a skills inventory and prioritization, and developed robust curriculum processes.
In 2019, GP Strategies developed a three-year, $42 million partnership plan to expand and implement the learning strategy across the entire organization. This initiative aimed to reduce the time to proficiency, increase the learning capacity to meet the ramp-up in hiring, and proactively manage skill development.
The learning strategy and measurement guide future strategic initiatives and are used for everything from cohort-based training to enterprise-wide training reviews. GP Strategies also created comprehensive curriculum maps to ensure the most effective path to workforce readiness, outlining the progression across various roles, minimizing redundancy, and developing an effective onboarding strategy for speed to proficiency.
To align business goals effectively, the client established a robust, hybrid workforce-development team using GP Strategies’ variable staffing model. This approach allowed the client to adjust staffing levels without overcommitting to full-time personnel while accessing GP Strategies’ learning experts, a wealth of experience, off-the-shelf content, and vetted technologies. This ultimately resulted in reduced delivery times and costs while enhancing proficiency.
In addition, the client gained access to GP Strategies’ Innovation Kitchen, designed to conceive and test new ideas, methods, processes, and technologies while assessing outcomes. By leveraging GP Strategies’ off-the-shelf content and technical expertise through GPiLEARN+, the company achieved faster and more cost-effective development than industry standards. GPiLEARN+ offers content on various topics such as supervision, nuclear power, OSHA compliance, safety, manufacturing, analysis, and more. This content is customizable or can be used as-is in learning solutions.
Results
The client has seen significant bottom-line results, including increased performance that translates to labor savings, reduced attrition, lower rejection rates, and decreased training costs following the transformation of the learning organization and the adoption of proven instructional design processes and strategies:
- A $70,000 investment in a welding program is estimated to yield cost savings of $2.4 million per year.
- A new employee onboarding course reduced attrition from 19% to 7%, saving $1.7 million in 2019.
- Weld rejection rates decreased from 28% to 4%.
- The rollout of training for Detail Planning resulted in a 91% increase in output, amounting to labor savings of $2.07 million in just one year.
- An investment of $167,000 in skill development is projected to yield an estimated $1.5 million in cost savings across three years.
Beyond the survey metrics, leadership at the organization is very pleased with their partnership with GP Strategies:
The value of the partnership with GP Strategies is immeasurable. And the progress of our learning transformation is remarkable. We could not have achieved these results without the expertise of GP Strategies. Thank you for being with us on this journey—we couldn’t do it without you!
