"removed the day to day chore of coordinating staff and courses"
- Chris Reddington, Visa Training Specialist

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Visa is one of the most successful brand names in the World. With the backing of over 22,000 financial institutions Visa has become the leading full-service payment network. In over 300 countries and territories Visa manages the services for Consumer cards, commercial cards and an ATM network.

To maintain this position the organisation makes a major commitment to Training and Development. The European Union region employees over 600 staff who all follow a structured Personal Development Plan. Education is offered through an Open Learning Centre, however most of the training is delivered through Instructor Led Visa specific courses, presented by preferred expert suppliers.

As the investment in training has continued to rise so has the task of organising courses. Not only has the volume increased but also the management of learning paths, (ensuring delegates do not attend training out of sequence). The task of coordinating training courses had become so onerous that it was tieing up two Training and Development specialists for 80% of their time.

Over the past two years In Tuition has worked with Visa in providing IT courses. In Tuition worked on a major Windows 2000 upgrade project, where every PC user in the EU region was trained while their hardware was upgrade. In Tuition managed the administration of course bookings through a dedicated website. Based upon the success of the project and knowing the ongoing workload faced by the Training Team, In Tuition proposed to automate the administration for all Visa's training.

In November 2001, only 2 months after the project started the new booking system was launched. ICE, (In Tuition Client Extranet) links to the Visa Intranet. The system is hosted and supported by In Tuition but has the "look and feel" of the Intranet. Users can search for course dates and availability, check course content and make bookings.

The ICE system manages 12 events, and over 200 bookings per month.

Using email the system manages the confirmation and authorisation of individual bookings. Course suppliers update attendence records. The system creates reports for PeopleSoft, the central HR database, which means personnel records can be automatically updated - a task that used to be undertaken manually.

Overall the system has delivered the following benefits

• Reduced time taken to make course bookings
  
• Unburdened training specialists from unnecessary administration
  
• Given the individual more independence in planning their development
  
• Improved speed of communication
  
• Captured training data for policing, analysis and personnel records
  
• Ensured suppliers are being used cost effectively

Finally, the training specialist Chris Reddington says "the ICE system has removed the day to day chore of coordinating staff and courses, sending out confirmations and then making sure everyone turns up on the day. This has allowed me to get on with more strategic and interesting parts of my job. We are now working with In Tuition to add E Learning courses to the system so that our staff can access a comprehensive selection of learning media, while tracking what they do".