TRAINING PROGRAM FOR AN EY DEPARTMENT

As part of the initiatives for the roll-out of the new EY UK&I Customer Strategy’s Go to Market methodology, Cristina was tasked with the request to create a Learning & Development (L&D) plan. The objective was to prepare the EY employees of that department to best shape, sell and deliver Customer Strategy engagements, as well as to learn about the newly-defined methodology.
The Go To Market new method had in fact to be introduced to all employees in order to create more consistency in the way EY pitched, planned and implemented Customer Strategy engagements of the same type to its various clients.

To do this, Cristina identified which courses were necessary to enable the Customer Strategy employees to progress in relevant skills, learning also how to best shape, sell and deliver engagements in this specific consulting capability, with the ultimate objective of increasing sales and client satisfaction.

Cristina's first step was to research the training plans used in the past for the Customer Strategy advisory employees, according to a matrix made of the number of years the consultants had spent in the business, and the skills they were expected to develop, to create a progressive learning roadmap.
After this she interviewed senior colleagues in that department to gather their insights about what skills they saw most in demand to deliver Customer Strategy engagements, and where they identified skill gaps in their employees, according to their role.

As a next step, Cristina identified which relevant courses were available in the EY Learning & Development platform, both as online training, than as future offer ready to be booked on specific dates, or as archived course material already defined as they had been delivered in the past. She also liaised with the Customer Strategy leadership to source additional training decks created in the previous years by EY employees, to up-skill their colleagues, also according to their identified Customer Strategy’s business demand and skill gaps trends.

In this way, Cristina could map out what available trainings were meeting the Learning & Development requirements for that department, specifically to the seniority level and skills demand, and what were the training course gaps.
She therefore included in the training program also new courses that she suggested should be created, starting with those for enabling the Learning and Development of the new Go to Market Methodology, to be created in two different formats in order to target the time availability of different firms' audiences.

Finally, Cristina prepared also an L&D roll-out plan for the training program.



CREATION AND DELIVERY OF L&D WORKSHOPS

Cristina was asked to run a communication-training workshop to share with a secondment team the recommendations that EY Global had identified as best practice in written business style and structure. The in-person workshop that she defined and delivered engaged the team in interactive exercises to become familiar with the EY Global’ guidelines for business communication, especially on emails and slide decks content and storyboarding for pitches, clients' workshops and other presentations. She also shared with the team several enabling tools for creating engaging slides and she put together a presentation about various personal communication styles, which fostered a dialogue among the workshop participants who shared their experience with the various communication styles and their impact on clients' satisfaction.

The written feedback was that Cristina engaged well with the training participants, from associate to director level, and that her interactive exercises and presentations for the team were very well received and
generated interesting discussion around the subject. She was also told in writing that her workshop was considered extremely valuable to improve the quality of the secondment team’s work in the future.



ONLINE DELIVERY OF TRAINING MODULES

In this assignment Cristina had to deliver over Skype some Learning & Development modules about Quality and Risk Management, with supporting slides and speakers notes to facilitate the training for newly-promoted managers working at Ernst & Young.

During this training delivery Cristina identified some possible points of improvement on the slide deck content used for the training and in the way the modules were delivered. Therefore, she proposed to the secondment team who created the training several edits and some alternative delivery formats.


CREATION OF GUIDES FOR CHANGE PROJECTS

Cristina had ownership and responsibility for developing a training guide for a Change project, which had to be adopted by more than 25 teams working on high value Advisory projects in the UK and Ireland. The feedback was that the training guide she produced for the UK&I business-wide process improvement project was excellent and was going to be a key enabler for the Change transition phase, in addition to the in-person change management training.