29 Organizations That Leverage Learning to Achieve Amazing Results

Summary

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Twenty-nine companies honored as ASTD BEST Awards winners in 2005 are among that small number of truly outstanding learning organizations. With their innovative approaches to workplace learning challenges and opportunities, some of these award winners will continue to shine and gain even more recognition in the years ahead. As a unique group of leaders, the Best Awards winners demonstrate the critical connection between employee learning and development and achieving business results. They create, support and champion learning opportunities for results and a deep learning culture within their organizations. The winning companies cover a broad range of industries, and each faced a unique challenge. How they responded to those challenges and opportunities, through effective employee learning and human development, stand as an example for any organization. A table of 29 ASTD Best Awards winners for 2005 is presented. The top 5 winners are: 1. Caterpillar Inc, 2. Hewlett-Packard, 3. EMC Corp, 4. ICICI Bank Ltd, and 5. IBM.

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29 Organizations That Leverage Learning to Achieve Amazing Results

There's good.

There's better.

The best are few and far between.

These 29 honored as BEST Award winners in 2005 are among that small number of truly outstanding learning organizations. The names of some of the winning organizations will be familiar to readers. They include several icons of the business world. But also among the 2005 BEST Award winners are a few organizations that may be unknown to the reader. We would suggest, however, with their innovative approaches to workplace learning challenges and opportunities, some of these award winners will continue to shine and, gain even more recognition in the years ahead.

"Already in its third year, the ASTD BEST Awards program has recognized 57 organizations from eight countries that achieve enterprise-wide success through learning, and the list continues to grow," noted Tony Bingham, president and CEO of ASTD.

"As a unique group of leaders, the BEST Awards winners demonstrate the critical connection between employee learning and development and achieving business results," Bingham added. "They create, support, and champion learning opportunities for results and a deep learning culture within their organizations. In short, they 'get it!'"

Here are the 29 BEST winners for 2005. They represent mostly large organizations, but that was not a criterion for success or selection. The winning companies cover a broad range of industries, and each faced a unique challenge. How they responded to those challenges and opportunities, through effective employee learning and human development, stand as an example for any organization.

The length of each profile was not determined by their rank, but rather a desire to showcase as many different kinds of stories in as many different industries as possible.

Profiles were written by Jennifer Salopek, with additional writing by Rex Davenport.

CATERPILLAR

Peoria, Illinois

Identify Needs, Meet Them

The challenge: Develop different leaders, not just more leaders.

The process of learning has undergone enormous change at Caterpillar in the past four years. The need to attain new business goals necessitated a whole new way of doing business and a revamped approach to learning that would enable the company's 80,000 employees to achieve success. Dave Vance, president of Caterpillar University, saw his own career change and, in the process, learned a lot about learning.

Vance holds a PhD in economics and had been working as an economist. When he was tapped to head the new corporate university, "I didn't know what I couldn't do. It all seemed doable at the time," he says. "This field is more complex than I realized; I didn't know how hard much of the work could be." The timing could have been better, too-the world was in the grips of a recession in 2001. "Naturally, many questions were raised about the value of corporate investment in learning. As an economist, however, I was comfortable with the concept. We tried to identify all the potential benefits of each effort. Where we had to make assumptions, we stated our reasons explicitly," Vance says.

To plan the structure of the corporate university, a continual learning team of eight was drawn from locations around the globe to spend six months in Peoria. The focus of the university for the first four years has been to identify and meet common global learning needs-those that would benefit the most employees, given limited resources. "We had 11 different change management models when we started," says Vance, whose mandate was to develop a solution and leverage it around the world. "To do that, we needed staff dedicated to each learning area, with deep knowledge."

Caterpillar University comprises six colleges: leadership, marketing and distribution, technology, business and business processes, Six Sigma, and product support. The deans of the colleges report to Vance, as well as the manager of technologyenabled learning, who is responsible for the company's LMS and knowledge network, and the manager of performance improvement, who is responsible for competencie...

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