August 14, 2000

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Online Training Helps MetLife Develop, Keep IT Staff

Insurance company wants E-business-savvy workers to implement customer-service initiatives

By Sandra Swanson with Diane Rezendes Khirallah

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t Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., training is key to developing a first-class IT staff. MetLife uses training to address personnel goals such as recruitment, retention, and E-business skills development.

The New York insurance company is adding more than 100 online courses from E-learning vendor DigitalThink Inc. to its IT learning portal this month. The portal includes access to an online library of more than 1,500 technical books and an online master's program in IS through Drexel University in Philadelphia. IT workers can also look up information on 500 in-room classes, including a 12-week E-commerce boot camp. MetLife has spent about $200,000 to build the portal, not including content costs, and will make it available to all of its 4,000 IT workers by year's end.

The portal offers online training on the fundamentals of E-business; courses include examples of effective models and cover technologies that are driving E-business. MetLife "is working toward more E-business for customer service and other initiatives, so we want IT people to have the appropriate skills," says VP of IT Mike Ehrenzweig.

MetLife isn't alone in its pursuit of E-business skills development. E-business courses make up nearly 75% of DigitalThink's E-learning revenue for financial-services companies, says Larry Roadcap, senior product marketing manager for financial services.

MetLife also views training as a recruitment and retention tool. The self-directed nature of E-learning gives MetLife IT workers the freedom to redirect their career paths. "We may have people in our network areas who want to get into application development," Ehrenzweig says. Through E-learning, "they can see if they have a flair for some of the languages and tools."

Elliott Masie, director of the Masie Center, a learning-technology research firm, says such programs are important: "After money, the reason people stay with jobs is to do cool projects--'cool' meaning where they can learn something new."

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