It may not be Harvard, but Subway University is reaching more countries (86) and educating more young people (28,000) each year than any Ivy League school could ever dream of. The sandwich staffers learn everything from customer service and food preparation to store security and using the register. In fact, Bonnie
Zownir, director of worldwide training for Subway, says the quick-service chain offers hundreds of courses online through SkillSoft, a Nashua, N.H., provider of on-demand e-learning and performance support solutions for global enterprises, government, education and small to medium-sized businesses.

About two-thirds of Subway locations have somebody taking courses at any given time. A new hire comes into the store and takes courses without need of franchisee supervision. “After the students have taken a course, it’s much faster to get that employee up to speed on the ‘hands on’ because they’ve already seen the course material and they understand the topic in advance,” Zownir says.

“Just from the reports that we’re getting, people are ready to work on the line in front of customers or behind the scenes much faster than they used to be.”

Franchisees have classes, too. The owners take courses on paper work, management reports, hiring, interviewing, retention and sexual harassment. Subway also is adding courses on various state and national laws that the company believes are pertinent to the job.

These courses “definitely are not replacing the operations manual,” Zownir says. “However, we use that as the basis of our courses because everything in our courses has to agree with what’s in our operations manual.”

Subway can offer courses in multiple languages, and the university is open 24/7. “We find that there’s a lot of usage after we leave and before we come in the next day,” Zownir says. “It’s good to be reaching everybody when it’s convenient for them.”

Before SkillSoft’s solution, Subway was training franchise owners in a Milford, Conn., classroom. “They were quite proud of the fact that they’d run 5,000 people through that facility in a year,” says Scott Fillenworth, vice president for SkillSoft. “We said, ‘Well, when we’re done with you, you’re going to be running 100 times, 200 times, 300 times more people through your training programs.’ And in fact, now they’re at a run rate of about a half million people a year who are taking and completing training courses.”

Perhaps it was this kind of case study that made SkillSoft a Wall Street darling during the first quarter of 2008. The company reported 2008 fiscal revenue of $281.2 million, a 25 percent increase over the same period in 2007, and net income of $60 million.

Strategic mergers
Despite a softening economy, SkillSoft hopes to boost revenue to between $328 million and $336 million this year because training over the Internet is less expensive than flying a corporate training crew to every store opening.

“Generally, leveraging technology as a way to reach your workforce really isn’t anything new,” Fillenworth says. “I think now with the Internet and with continually increasing bandwidth, it’s giving our customers and our business a chance to become more effective with the kinds of programs we can deliver to a geographically dispersed workforce.”

SkillSoft is also benefiting from strategic mergers. It acquired Smart Force in 2002 and last year closed the acquisition of NETg, the company’s biggest competitor in the marketplace.

“If you think about the two businesses, they were very, very similar,” Fillenworth says. “We’ve been able to really squeeze a lot of the duplicative expenses out of the [new] model. We’re benefiting quite greatly from the acquisition of customers and revenue stream from our overall business performance perspective.”

Today, retailers and restaurateurs with 20 or more stores almost have to incorporate e-learning solutions into their training programs. The old-fashioned ways of teaching employees burn fuel, budget dollars and are just “impractical,” Fillenworth says. “With Subway, they’re able to reduce the mean time to proficiency for new hires by upwards of 50 percent.”

Hannaford Bros. Supermarket uses SkillSoft to train its employees and to create a more strategic relationship with them. Target uses a SkillSoft computer-based training solution inside its stores.

“You’ve got these businesses that have a large number of workers in broad geographic places, and those people are the primary reason why a consumer comes back,” Fillenworth says. “Certainly, what keeps customers coming back are product, convenience and price, but it’s also the experience, and those [employees] are so important to the experience.”

In August 2003, AXA Financial’s executive management committee identified leadership as a competitive advantage that would differentiate the company in the marketplace. The learning and development team sought to develop leadership talent in a way that would be meaningful to the organization.

According to the company’s case study, SkillSoft created a leadership development framework that identified core competencies and defined behavioral characteristics for management job roles. The team linked a variety of learning resources, including SkillSoft e-learning, to each core competency at each job level.

SkillSoft e-learning usage at AXA Financial grew from 308 participants in January 2004 to 1,349 users in June 2005. In a company case study, Chance Brown, assistant vice president of human resources, attributes this growth to aligning e-learning courseware with the firm’s leadership development strategy.

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