When it comes to new technology, an insurance carrier often finds itself in a difficult position: Its current employees know the company and the insurance industry but don't have the newer skills the company is seeking, or new hires may have some hot technology skills but don't know insurance and have no insight into the company's culture.

The IT Fast Track program at Nationwide is geared toward targeted training of specific skill sets, particularly among current employees, 10 of whom recently completed a successful 12-week training program in J2EE application development.

Tracy Smith, CTO for Nationwide Services Co., which provides infrastructure and corporate applications for the financial services company, explains the carrier was looking to train current employees in skills that may be in limited supply. "Frequently they are newer technologies," he says, "the kind that are difficult to find in the marketplace or where there is a significant hurdle in doing normal training."The first IT Fast Track program focused on J2EE, but Smith reports Nationwide will explore training programs for solution analysts, requirement analysts, and people involved in complex data modeling and middleware software. "The intent is to be able to do repeatable training in a focused area and be able to do it for the entire enterprise," he says.

With multiple lines of business, Nationwide needed J2EE developers but had to find the most effective way of retraining existing employees. "Our employees have two significant assets that are really invaluable," indicates Smith. One of those assets is being part of the Nationwide culture, which Smith refers to as ImagiNationwide. "It's hard to put a price tag on that, but it's significant to us," he says. The other asset is business knowledge. "Once someone becomes familiar with the insurance industry, that person is much more valuable than another J2EE programmer who does not have that experience," he adds.

The carrier knew learning some of the targeted skills requires more than a few sessions in the training room. Nationwide is using a combination of coursework, case studies, and hands-on training. "Our hypothesis is it takes a concentrated, full-time 12 weeks to do this," he says. About half of IT Fast Track involves classroom work, and a large part of it includes training from senior application development people. Smith describes the training as structured programming experiences. "Having coursework is something we've had in place for some time," he notes. "Packing it all into six weeks of work and then building on it with the practical experience has been the innovative part for us."

For the J2EE Fast Track, the trainees went through classroom studies, followed by a session involving practical aspects of the technology, and then additional coursework. "Along with that, we are doing internal case studies," says Smith.

Nationwide also brought in some instructional design people to help with the training. "We have great subject matter experts, but they're not necessarily great educators," he remarks. "We've tried to put the content from our experts into the case studies, and we brought in the instruction design folks who are familiar with how best to communicate for training."

Many of the training materials were put together in-house but weren't necessarily materials that had been produced for the most effective educational experience, Smith comments. "The instruction designers have been a significant value to the subject matter," he says.

The first IT Fast Track session was completed in February. Work experience among the group varied from a minimum of two years to some who have been with Nationwide for 10 years or more. "One premise we brought into this was to teach J2EE to people who already were competent application development people in general," says Smith. Nationwide previously had an internal skill assessments program in place, so program applicants did a detailed self-skill assessment, which was used in the interview process. "We were able to pick the 10 people who had the combination of strong application development experience as well as motivation and eagerness to learn and take on a challenge," he says.

Some came from a mainframe environment, some from internal Lotus Notes development, and others from the Visual Basic Microsoft environment. "They all had some application development experience, so we didn't have to teach them the concept of the development cycle or what unit testing was as opposed to systems testing or performance testing," Smith says. "They understood deployment–the fundamentals. They were people who were good in application development. That was the filter. They didn't have to know anything about J2EE."

The trainees all had important roles in the company prior to joining IT Fast Track, he explains, adding, "They were being pulled out completely [for the training] with the intent of not going back [to their earlier jobs]. Internally, it was as though they just applied and were transferred to a new job. As of [late February], they moved to their new positions in three different existing J2EE development and support teams."

Nationwide learned an incredible amount in this pilot program, according to Smith. "We got rapid feedback on what was working and what we needed to reinforce," he says. "We now have 10 people who are going in as effective entry-level J2EE programmers. But more important, we have significantly refined our training program for anyone to go through J2EE."

Special Reports /

Nationwide Puts Application Developers on Fast Track

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