From an industry journal titled “Chief Learning Officer,” comes a solid, in-depth piece by industry observer Daniel Margolis profiling Rogers Communications (News - Alert): “Tara Deakin and her team have driven down costs while boosting effectiveness and transforming the company’s employee development culture.”

For communications companies, Margolis notes, “service is job one. While they offer a range of products from telephone and TV packages to broadband access for individuals and companies, a telecom’s main workforce management thrust is training the people who provide these services.”

However, Margolis identifies one reason why companies sometimes fail at this: “Like other people-intensive businesses, a high rate of turnover comes with the territory.” He cites Jim Lovie, executive vice president of sales, service and distribution at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest communications companies, saying this is, in fact, “the biggest challenge” his company faces in approaching learning.

“If you look at the pure numbers of people we have to train on an annual basis and the volume of information [on which] we have to train people on a weekly, monthly, annual basis, depending on which part of the organization they reside in, that comes with a whole host of challenges because such a high percentage of the training is for sales and service people and turnover rates [there] are generally higher,” Lovie tells Margolis.

Tara Deakin is the vice president of learning and enablement at Rogers – yes, that’s actually her job title. She told Margolis that the company has a baseline of 43,000 people they train “at any given time, but that number is constantly in flux” As she says, “[We have] an annual attrition rate in our high-volume roles between 30 and 60 percent. So when you think of the actual learners we touch every year, it’s probably closer to 100,000.”