How Training as a Service Empowers ADT Managers
ADT Commercial took ESA’s new Training as a Service (TaaS) program for a test drive and plans to continue using it for developing employees and empowering managers.
ESA’s TaaS is the industry’s only customizable, in-house employee onboarding and staff development program. Beginning in October of 2019, ESA collaborated with ADT to understand their training needs and develop a custom-fit TaaS solution for the company.
According to Zack Morris, commercial careers program manager at ADT, the company had big goals for developing their workforce in a way that satisfied everyone. The company’s key focuses were certification, customization and quality of content.
“One of the names that stood out to us very quickly was ESA for its place in the industry and name recognition, as well as the quality of the content,” says Morris.
"We wanted to make sure that not only were the certifications available, but that the content was exactly the way we wanted it to be. ESA fit perfectly into what we were looking for,” says Morris.
Customized Training for Staff Development
Specifically, ADT Commercial wanted to revamp its internal training platform by centering it on a certification model. The team decided to use TaaS to build a path for employees to a CCTV certification from ESA. The association’s training experts went to work customizing the service for ADT’s specific goals, and by the start of the new year were ironing out final details in preparation of a test run.
ADT Commercial launched a beta test of the program among some of its field employees in mid-February. As of late March 2020, about 85% of the test group had already finished the certification path.
“By focusing around a certification-based model, we could showcase the great working knowledge that our field team has, as well as track and provide some context for how people are advancing and showcase that as part of their career progress,” says Morris. “We feel like it was a really solid test and now we’re going to be rolling this out as part of our training catalog for our legacy employees in the next couple weeks or so.”
Empowering Managers with Advanced Reporting
During the test, tracking and course completion data from the TaaS program impressed the ADT Commercial team and empowered their managers to keep up with employees and provide support or nudges as needed.
“We’ve been able to create some really detailed tracking, going down to whether the learner accessed the training, not necessarily just completion,” says Morris. “This has been able to drive field level reporting so that a manager can very quickly say ‘Hey, you’ve had this assigned to you since back in February, why haven’t you accessed this class in the certification yet?’ The data we have access to provides us the ability to tell a good story and make sure the managers are empowered with the data they need to be successful.”
High-Quality Content
According to Morris, the TaaS program they adopted from ESA aligns with one of the company’s core values: its people are the difference. The ADT Commercial team put the highest scrutiny on the training it sought, so that employees were getting the best investment for every company dollar spent.
“It has been exciting to work with ADT Commercial on this project as they have validated the vision of the TaaS Task Force, who developed the program with ESA. The core element of this program — which ADT Commercial recognized quickly — is to provide growth and recognition paths for technical employees, which allows companies to build upon their greatest asset, their people,” says Michelle Yungblut, ESA’s chief knowledge officer.
“As we look to invest in those people further, making sure that we have a training provider that provided us with the certification, the breadth of training and the quality of training that was there through an organization like ESA really was an exciting opportunity for us on both sides. The flexibility that ESA had to listen to our vision, listen to how we wanted to do it and adapt has been phenomenal,” says Morris.
The Training as a Service program is now open to all members of ESA as an exclusive member benefit. The newly opened Tier 1 of TaaS is designed for employees with zero to six months of relevant work experience and is customizable to fit the needs of your company. Visit esaweb.org/taas for more information.
