Case study: tackling the departmental culture in retail training.(Feature: Retail People)

Need a new pair of trainers? The sports department's on the second floor. Looking for that perfect birthday present? Try the gift department at the top of the escalator. Want to order an out-of-stock item? Customer services on the top floor.

If there's one thing the retail industry understands it's how to departmentalise. It's a culture that characterises the public face we see on the high street's most established retailers, and it's a culture that runs deep into the inner sanctum of the industry's back office too. But for one departmental leader in TK Maxx's learning and development division, it's a culture that needs a little shaking up.

"Learning options for retailers today are often inflexible and inaccessible," says Collette McFarlane, Head of training at TK Maxx. "Off site workshops have become the norm for the industry and while these provide an essential opportunity to share and discuss a broad spectrum of training issues, they are by nature, based on the concept of learning in communities. What's always been lacking in retail is a really robust personal learning and knowledge sharing experience to complement the off site workshop."

Collette and her team are currently re-energising TK Maxx's course infrastructure with a Mohive-designed Enterprise rapid e-learning platform. Other retailers using this system with their employees include Maxbo in Norway and Germany's Hornbach (both DIY chains) and Telehuset (telecoms storefront in Norway).

Capable of delivering skills training 'on demand' whenever and wherever it's required across the operation, Collette believes the new system will fundamentally change the way learning works within the business.

The concept of knowledge sharing over a flexible, open and interactive platform is coming fairly late to the retailing industry. With computers and Internet traditionally difficult to access for many workers out in the field and on the shop floor, modern e-learning concepts have been slow to gather momentum in the sector. Consequently, retailing has suffered longer than most, from what we might call departmental or 'silo' thinking: where independent initiatives are launched to fireworks and fanfare only to fizzle out soon after when they fail to upscale and gain traction in the wider enterprise.

The real benefit of enterprise wide e-learning is its ability to bring all of these initiatives together into a workflow-driven environment capable of incorporating expertise from anywhere in the operation. By making input from anywhere easy yet controllable, training becomes nimble and interactive. Course developers can overcome obstacles by encouraging input from experts that have always been within the business but have typically been given little or no opportunity to participate. This is the potential that TK Maxx now has at the heart of its learning infrastructure.