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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

© University of Phoenix 2010 Align Learning With Changing Business Goals Page 1

As business goals change, employees need to learn new information and skills to stay current. Karen

Kocher articulates the process of integrating learning and assessing talent.

ID: 50V101227002003228 Align Learning With Changing Business Goals

SOURCE

2004-2010, 50 Lessons Ltd.

CATEGORY

Business and Economics

SUB-CATEGORY

Human Resource Management

SPEAKER

Karen Kocher

SPEAKER TITLE

Chief Learning Officer

ORGANIZATION

CIGNA Corporation

TAGS

Health Care

For our learning organization at CIGNA, one of the best business connections that we’ve

had over the past couple of years is with our sales organization. That’s been a good thing,

from the standpoint that it’s relatively easy to measure, but we’ve been working to integrate

our sales organization. Up until about eighteen months or two years ago, we had four or

five different sales organizations that sold all of our various services. So for example, at

CIGNA we have healthcare, and you can sell somebody a healthcare product or a

healthcare service. We also have group life and disability, et cetera.

We’ve actually now gotten to a point of integrating the sales groups and asking the sales

professionals to be able to sell anything from the portfolio. But that meant that what we had

to do on the learning side was to get each and every one of these sales people to be truly

knowledgeable and skilled; knowledgeable about the products and services; skilled in

regards to selling to each of these types of customers, because the healthcare customer is

an employer customer; the life and disability customer is, in many cases, an individual. And

then you get into some of the other areas of products and services, which are yet, maybe

small businesses versus national accounts. So we had to get them to be really good at not

only talking about the right product and service, depending on the situation, but then also

talking about it in a way that the customer would value.

We had a lot of salespeople that were really anxious to learn other products and services,

and get out there and work with other customers and maybe brokers they had never

worked with. Then we had quite a few who couldn’t understand why they needed to do this.

They had proven themselves in the old world, and they just wanted to keep working in the

old world. So we used it as an opportunity to not only educate a lot of people, but then

really go in and sift some of the talent.

People always ask, how do you really get to the bottom of what people need to move up

and which people need to move on? We found that to be one of those classic situations

where we were faced with both. We worked with the leadership to help make some of

those decisions.