Transition (1992-1994)

Transition Years: 1992 - 1994

NEAC plaque 1992

Online became a Novell Authorized Education Center. This marked our entry into the technology training market and our transition from our dependence on end-user applications training. Today technology training accounts for about half of our training business.

In the preceding years we had added management structure with a training manager, training sponsors (middle managers), a courseware development manager, project sponsors (middle managers) and a sales manager. Eventually, as these individuals retired or moved on to other jobs or different positions within the company, we didn’t replace the positions. Nineteen ninety-two marked the peak of our experiment with traditional hierarchical structures.

1993 Baltimore

This year we opened our Baltimore office, representing the high water mark in our geographic expansion. In addition to Baltimore, we now had training sites in New Jersey (Princeton and Somerset), Pennsylvania (Malvern and Philadelphia), and Delaware (Wilmington and Newark). Seven locations in all! Unfortunately, as larger companies increased their PC training demand, they established in-house classroom facilities. Although Online held many classes at corporate facilities, our own classrooms were under utilized. As a result, over the next five years, we worked to consolidate our sites into two "mega" training locations—Philadelphia and Wilmington. This approach seemed more in sync with our market.

Princeton Team 1994

We experimented with various team structures. (The Princeton account team, pictured right, was one of our first experiments.) Although most of these initial team concepts were not adopted by the company at that time, we did discover the need for a team approach to managing the flow of information between our clients and our instructional staff. As a result, we created a new "training liaison" position, which is still in use today. A lead instructor is assigned to each new account as the liaison, and this person works on start-up procedures for new accounts and acts to channel information between our clients and our instructional staff.

Jim and Andy tried to present various strategic plans to the organization. However, these plans never seemed to take off. They realized that Online needed to learn a new way of planning and creating a shared vision of the future. Why was it that their brand of shared vision ("Here’s the vision I came up with, now I am sharing it with you") didn’t catch on? Online was missing a good conceptual framework of how the organization should be run. In the following years we began to learn how to do this better.

Summary: The Transition Years marked a departure from our dependence on applications training, the end of our geographic expansion, and the end of a traditional organizational hierarchy. At the same time, this period set the stage for technology training, mega training centers in Wilmington and Philadelphia, and innovative team-centered leadership.