OutStart, provider of the only proven, content-centric software product family for learning announced today that the United States Postal Service (USPS), America’s second-largest civilian employer with 750,000 employees, has selected OutStart Evolution to create, manage, and deliver learning and training content.
Evolution will be deployed in USPS’ Employee Development Department and will be used to make powerful learning opportunities available to employees in order to better service customers and improve the performance of the Postal Service as a whole. “The Postal Service’s transformation plan that was presented to Congress a few months ago talks about having the right people at the right place with the right skills at the right time,” said Bill Stefl, manager of employee development for the USPS.
The USPS will use Evolution to accelerate, standardize, and centralize the development of training content that can be reused and delivered across multiple channels, including the classroom, the Web, printed documents, CDs, PowerPoint slides, and even PDAs.
“We will use Evolution to centralize a content development process that has historically been handled with disparate systems resulting in very limited reuse of course materials,” said Stefl. “To get an understanding of the scale of our operation, and subsequently of our learning challenges, consider that we have learners in nearly every town in America, one of the largest fleets of delivery vehicles in the world, tremendous equipment and technology training requirements, and training facilities in 85 cities,” he continued. “Maintaining content developed with disparate tools is a logistical nightmare. Evolution will give us a central point to maintain content, and make personalized learning experiences available to our employees that are distributed in the field,” he said.
In order to make training more efficient and accelerate employee development opportunities that fuel career growth, the USPS will use Evolution for prescriptive learning. Rather than taking static courses, employees will have the opportunity to take assessment tests that identify specific gaps in the knowledge they need to be more proficient at work. The results of these assessments will be used to prescribe specific course content focused only on the content each individual needs to learn. Management will be able to easily view reports on what content learners have taken, in order to certify certain levels of proficiency throughout the employee base.
“The sheer size of our workforce makes 100% instructor-led training impractical and inefficient,” said Stefl. “OutStart’s other large scale installations gave us confidence that they are the right partner to handle our scalability needs and help us provide anytime, anywhere access to more effective training that requires fewer resources to develop and maintain,” he added.
“We’re thrilled to be working with the United States Postal Service to help them increase the performance of their individuals and entire organization,” said Massood Zarrabian. “We continue to be selected as a partner by the world’s largest and most prestigious organizations, and are proud to help the USPS capture its tremendous vision for a performance-based culture,” he said.
About OutStart
OutStart provides a proven, content-centric product family for corporations seeking to increase individual and organizational performance to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Our content-centric approach enables an organization to transform its unique business knowledge into practical learning assets, deliver those learning assets to the right person, the right way, at the right time, and capitalize on those assets throughout the extended enterprise to drive sustainable competitive advantage.
Approximately 5,000 customers, including 35% of the Fortune 500, use OutStart’s learning software to realize improvements in sales force and services productivity, call center efficiencies, customer and partner education and technology adoption. Founded in 1999, OutStart is headquartered in Boston, Mass. and has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dublin, Lake Mary, Fla., London, Los Angeles, New York City, Raleigh, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.outstart.com.
