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, driver and customer field 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, and embodies continuous improvement. Our Learning Center fosters a work culture centered on safety, operational excellence, and enhancing 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 (HPI) tools, safety precursors, and programs such as, “Are You Doing Enough for Safety?”

Our purposeful field visit program continues to support our efforts to enhance the learning experience, using insight from live events to assess potential gaps and training requirements and providing opportunities for real-time constructive feedback. The training effectiveness committee serves as the liaison between our operating areas and training teams to achieve, improve, and maintain 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 continue our multi-year program, leveraging the digital space to improve curriculum content and provide employee access to training outside of the classroom. Our enhanced digital portfolio includes e-books, technical training videos, micro-learning, and virtual/augmented-reality modules. In 2020 Learning and Inclusion transitioned much of our curriculum to the virtual learning space, creating over 140 virtual instructor-led classes in technical and leadership development skills. Key to our business success is our focus on safety. With that in mind, we also converted critical safety, compliance, and certification courses to a virtual format, including the Emergency Response refresher, First Aid, Scaffold Awareness. In addition, we developed COVID-specific training tools, such as the Field Sensitivity during COVID video and the Workplace Re-entry Micro Learning to support our employees.

Overall, 179 digital tools (includes the virtual classes) were created in 2020. Work continued on thirteen recommendations for improvement (charters) developed as a result of a formal assessment conducted on the state of training. Formalizing training processes, developing curriculum maps, and creating a governance structure are just a few of the recommendations we will be working on to achieve our goal of transforming learning through innovation. Work will continue on these as we move forward into 2021. We expect these efforts to continue into the future.

With the transition to a remote working environment, we proactively addressed the needs of our leaders by creating a series of short, focused virtual courses on Navigating the New Norm. This series provided tips, tools, and techniques for leaders of remote and hybrid teams to foster communication, productivity, and synergy. To support our workforce, we also introduced Change Management training in 2020 to assist employees at all levels in managing change, using tips and techniques to ensure awareness, continuous communication, and inclusion during change.

We continue to offer a robust curriculum for our future leaders geared toward leadership effectiveness, with a broad array of training options that prepare them to meet current responsibilities and future challenges. Development efforts continue as we design new offerings in leadership and professional development, career planning, conflict management, performance management—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. 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 enhance the company’s reputation and profile, making the company more attractive to potential new recruits.