SyberWorks LMS e-Learning Implementation Video Podcast Series
Episode 20: Interview with Julie Jensen of the Nautilus (Transcript)
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Announcer: SyberWorks podcast. Learn any time, any place.
Mary Kay: Welcome to the next edition of the SyberWorks LMS e-Learning Implementation podcast series, where we look at real world learning management system (LMS) implementations and e-learning program rollouts.
SyberWorks specializes in custom e-learning solutions, learning management systems and e-learning development for corporations, governments and non-profit institutions. My name is Mary Kay Lofurno and I am the Marketing Director here at SyberWorks and your host today.
In this edition we are talking with Julie Jensen, Director of Training and Organizational Development for Nautilus Inc., about their use of the SyberWorks hosted LMS to provide employee training.
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Mary Kay: And now let’s talk with Julie Jensen of Nautilus Inc. Good afternoon Julie, thanks for coming to talk with us today.
Julie Jensen: Good afternoon and thanks for inviting me to chat with you.
Mary Kay: You know, the name and the brand is pretty familiar, but why don't you go ahead and tell our audience about Nautilus.
Julie: We are a lean manufacturer of fitness equipment. We employ approximately 1,100 people globally. Our brands are very familiar names to many people. They include StairMaster, Universal, Schwinn Fitness, Bowflex and of course Nautilus. And Nautilus designs really a wide range of innovative products that are sold at a variety of markets and cater to a diverse fitness need of individuals.
Mary Kay: OK, that sounds great. Now what do you do for Nautilus, Julie?
Julie: I am the Director of Organizational Development and Training for Nautilus and I work at the world headquarters in Vancouver, Washington.
Mary Kay: OK great. All right, can you describe some of the business factors that drove your company to investigate and ultimately purchase a hosted learning management system as an e-learning solution for your organization?
Julie: Yes. As our training department really began to move away from supporting just an individual business unit and really expanding more into a comprehensive corporate training department, we really needed a system that could support a variety of needs of all of our departments.
So our greatest need of course was to be able to provide effective and convenient learning opportunities to a global workforce and a learning management system like SyberWorks really allows us to develop cost-effective e-learning programs that support that wide range of training initiatives.
Additionally, it really allows us to manage existing traditional classroom-based programs with the features like registration, reminder emails, electronic transcripts, and the like. And there are also some nice tools in SyberWorks that will be valuable tools for us when we get into career mapping and identifying job competencies for long range employee development. And the fact that it is hosted offsite, which really frees up our system bandwidth and the fact that we have continual access to technical assistance, which I assure you, we take full advantage of, it is really pretty much is a nice bow on top of an already neatly packaged system.
Mary Kay: That sounds great. Who works with the SyberWorks hosted LMS at your company?
Another goal is to make e-Learning an everyday experience for police officers, and SyberWorks’ police training and management system helps us achieve that goal.
Julie: Our training team does and that includes me and three training specialists. We all use SyberWorks as a user administrator and in addition, we have generous support and assistance from our HR IS team to ensure that we have configured our hierarchies and employee data in SyberWorks so that it is compatible with our other databases. And this really makes it easier for the HR IS team to provide us information we need to keep employee list current.
Mary Kay: OK. Well that sounds good. I understand that you are just at the beginning of implementing your training programs using the SyberWorks hosted LMS. Can you tell us a little more about the training that you will be offering for this system and why the training is important to your organization? I think that is important for the audience to kind of understand.
Julie: Sure. Learning management system really is new to my training team as well as the organization and our roll out is going to be pretty gradual, so it doesn't overwhelm people, ourselves included, our staff included. So we have two functions that we will be using it for initially. The first one is the simple registration process for existing in-house curriculum, such as our on-boarding program and our leadership development classes.
The second use is with a newly created on-the-job training program within two of our key departments, specifically our direct sales and customer care. What we have done is we have created curriculum to be instructed -- an on-the-job training curriculum, I am sorry -- to be instructed by managers and supervisors and we are using SyberWorks to conducts tests to measure knowledge and understanding of key job functions.
And eventually we will move to using SyberWorks for policy redesigns and to create e-learning modules to help us meet compliance requirements and deliver product knowledge information to our employees.
Mary Kay: What are some of the instructional design and planning process you are going through to develop your traditional training?
Julie: Well as I mentioned earlier, as far as instructional design is concerned, the e-learning design is a new skill for my team and they have been deeply rooted in traditional based instruction. So they have really spent the last six months immersing themselves in understanding how to effectively transfer traditional class material and live instruction skills into an e-learning format. And it has been a great development opportunity for them and they have really enjoyed the challenge of broadening their training skills, but we are still on a learning curve with it.
Mary Kay: Oh yeah, I completely understand. It is going to take a bit to get people transitioned over. So Julie tell us about your customer experience with SyberWorks.
Julie: Actually it has really been a positive one. We had a false start rolling out SyberWorks about a year ago and it came time to breathe new life into it when I came onboard and the team needed some more fresher training on a few of the basic functions.
So we had great support from customer support and training. They were very instrumental in providing cheat sheets, training, and tidbits to get the staff feeling more comfortable and confident using SyberWorks. And in addition to that I really appreciate how accessible the technical assistant folks are. They have been incredibly responsive.
Steve Pena is the one that we work with and he is patient and ready to help us figure out how to use this system, answer our questions, and if there's any functionality or visual format that we would like changed, unless it’s absolutely not possible to be done without rewriting the entire system, he is really quick to say, consider it done, we'll find a way to make it happen. And I just really appreciate that level of support and service.
Mary Kay: Well, that sounds great, Julie. I know you are a busy woman so I am going to let you go. Thanks for joining us today.
Julie: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.
Mary Kay: This is Mary Kay Laforno marketing director at SyberWorks. Thanks for listening to our interview with Julie Jensen of Nautilus Incorporated, from the SyberWorks LMS e-Learning Implimentation Podcast Series.
I’ll see you next month.
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Announcer: SyberWorks Podcast. Learn anytime, anyplace.