| Background
The Financial University is an important co-venture between the various financial and planning functions within a multi-national organisation in the oil & gas sector. As Byron Grote, Chief Financial Officer said “It's the realisation of our aspiration to have an embedded Financial University with global reach, enabling world class capability both in the Financial Functions and in the broader organisation.” The Challenge
In the past, each functional area was responsible for providing the training and development of its own staff. This resulted in a series of ad-hoc systems and imperatives unique to each function. Within the organisation, staff development and training is becoming more formalised and more focused on delivering the capabilities that each function requires. This has led individual business units to identify the competencies they have and those they still need to acquire, in order for them to deliver their organisational capability. By creating a virtual University, this project is designed to provide a 'one stop shop’ for all finance and planning’s employees’ training needs, with a specific focus on their technical and professional competencies. The system is not just a way of advertising training courses. Key to the Financial University is a desire to ensure that their staff have the right competencies to fulfil their roles and that people can see how to progress onwards and upwards, expanding their competencies and at the same time ensuring that the company has the capabilities it requires. The Implementation
Addept were chosen to handle the development of this highly visible portal because of their success in developing the Learning and Development Portal for another division elsewhere within the organisation.
Rather than develop a new system to replace all the existing learning and development sites within Finance, the Financial University is a portal which links all the existing systems together. It provides a unified front-end to a diverse range of courses and material and adds an element of rigour through the establishment of progression maps and competency models. The Solution
Each Function has a faculty page. This contains the Functions' Technical and Professional competencies, and the associated training options that have been designed to develop these competencies. The training options include internal and external face-to-face training courses, on-line and CD based e-learning and books. The subject matter is equally diverse, ranging from “Financial Foundations” through “Systematic Financial Modelling” to “Energy Risk Management”. Whilst each faculty has its own training calendar, the portal also brings together the complete training calendar for all the Faculties within the Financial University. Key to the success of the portal is the ability for administrators to be able to update their own information. To allow this, a Content Authoring sub-system was developed which provided an easy to use mechanism for non-technical people to add formatted text and images on to the site in a controlled way. Complete new courses can be defined and new schedules implemented without recourse to technical support. Progression maps can be updated or even created on the fly. User authentication, for everyone accessing the system, is provided through a link with the organisation’s instance of Addept Connect. This enables the system to automatically detect that a user has administration privileges for the respective parts of the site. Only administrators then see the administration menu options, and only administrators for a specific faculty can update the information about that faculty and its courses. As well as creating courses with descriptions and a course calendar for each faculty, administrators can create progression maps which chart the varying levels of competency which the course addresses. Four levels of competency are handled in each progression map. Having identified the appropriate training, an individual can book the course directly from the portal. As the portal provides a central focus for a wide variety of different courses operated by different people, depending on the course booked this may be a link to a separate web based bookings site or the automatic generation of an email to a course administrator. There is also a link to the Group's Core, Foundation and Leadership competencies to ensure that employees can assess their overall competency level, and plan their future training needs, in one place. The portal supports a “News Engine” which delivers specific items of news on the site, a “Voting Engine” to poll employees’ opinions on particular topics, and both an FAQ page and feedback form. All of these functions help to raise participation in the site and educate people about relevant issues. The Benefits
For the end users, this new portal makes it easier to determine the training they need, easier to find it and easier to book it. Compared with many of the preceding systems it is far more intuitive to navigate and provides far better and clearer information. For the company, it provides a focal point for staff development within all the Financial Functions. It provides a global, comprehensive and uniform mechanism for staff development and training which strengthens the organisational capability of the Finance function. The Financial University gives staff the opportunity to develop their skills, so they can deliver increased value to their internal customers, and collectively they can become recognised externally as truly world class in their respective domains. | 
