Customer & Community

Training & Professional Development

As the industry continues to evolve, our critical focus is to ensure that our workforce has the right skills, knowledge, and capabilities to work in a safe manner while meeting the needs of our customers. To achieve this goal, we provide continuous state-of-the-art training and development to our employees in a wide variety of areas.

The company offers robust training programs in gas, electric, customer operations and central operations. These programs ensure employee skills, knowledge, and operational performance are maintained at the highest levels. We are focused on preparing our employees to work safely, effectively, efficiently, and in a way that is compliant with our policies, procedures, and regulatory expectations. To that end, our Learning Center fosters a work culture centered on safety, operational excellence, and the customer experience by continually making improvements to our learning experiences.

With safety as our key business priority, we partner with our operating organizations to strengthen our focus on a zero-harm culture, which includes several digital learning modules. Our Operational Excellence guiding principles are integrated into our training curriculum and highlight the need to respect the complexity, power, and unforgiving nature of our energy systems and encourage all to manage them safely. This effort includes a focus on Human Performance Improvement tools, safety precursors, and programs such as, “Are You Doing Enough for Safety?”

Our purposeful field visit program uses real-life events to assess potential gaps or requirements in related training. These visits are also opportunities to gain insight from employees on safety improvements and current work practices, and provide real-time constructive feedback. The training effectiveness committee serves as the liaison between our operating areas and training teams to achieve, improve and maintain high quality and consistency in training. Ongoing meetings with subject matter experts from various areas allow a collective review of training activities, including curriculum, new policies and procedures, annual goals, career path and tests to ensure consistency, relevancy, and effectiveness in training offerings.

Our digital learning vision and strategy is to transform learning through innovation. We are using the digital space to improve curriculum, provide employee access to training outside of the classroom and enhance the employee learning. A multi-year program supports integrating digital technologies into our training platforms and allows us to train and develop highly competent employees. Our digital content includes e-books, technical training videos, micro-learning, and virtual- and augmented-reality modules. More than 55 digital tools were created in 2019 and this will continue for 2020 and beyond. School safety and electric service box inspection videos are just a few examples of videos created in 2019 to help teach and refresh important tasks and behaviors. We continue to add training simulators and equipment, such as the flange assembly demonstration unit, the substation area station simulator and the STAR human performance communications simulator all designed to enhance the training experience of our employees.

We pay significant attention to the development of our future leaders. Guided by competencies geared toward leadership effectiveness, emerging leaders are provided with a broad array of training options that prepare them to meet current responsibilities and future challenges. Development efforts include more than 450 course offerings in leadership and professional development, career planning, performance management, and mini-workshops—all designed to improve the ability of managers to lead employees effectively, handle problems creatively, and lead teams to elevated performance. More than 10,000 employees attended these programs and continue to benefit from an array of tools, assessments and resources that assist with the professional development. We continued the enhancement of our mentoring programs, introducing mentoring circles to our corporate mentoring program and “pop up” mentoring workshops for all employees. These efforts support our culture of continuous learning and development and encourage meaningful discussions about our company, our culture, and our future.

The company’s training and development strategy fosters a highly engaged workforce that produces strong performance. It also supports a high retention environment where we get to keep our best employees and enhances the company’s reputation and profile, making the company more attractive to potential new recruits.