Interview with David Chidley

Citation

by Ruth Young, I. (2009), "Interview with David Chidley", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 17 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2009.04417baa.001

Interview with David Chidley

Article Type: Interview with David Chidley From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 17, Issue 2

Interview by Ruth Young

David Chidley and Michelle Russell are responsible for putting together and implementing Royal Caribbean International’s award winning Cruising for Excellence training program. Here David Chidley, Training Manager for Royal Caribbean International brands, Celebrity Cruises and Azmara Cruises talks about the program.

First, could you tell our readers about Cruising for Excellence and how it came about?

The Cruising for Excellence training program originated in 2003 when Michelle Russell, UK & Ireland Training Manager at Royal Caribbean, identified a need to provide training for the trade partners who sell cruises for Royal Caribbean and put a business case together to support this. The program began as face-to-face training and involved Michelle and I traveling round the country, going to travel agents’ shops or business centers and training staff that way. Around that time cruising as a holiday choice was really beginning to take off and Royal Caribbean identified the need to drive more custom through Europe from the UK because at that time most of our passengers were American and going out of American ports. We needed to find ways to increase our market share and continual face-to-face training was becoming difficult because there were only two of us. So, in 2006 we put together a proposal for an online training program. In order to do this we looked at the product and how the travel agents like to learn and what they needed to know and from there we began to put an online training package together working with a Scottish company called Front Page Design. Initially we were not sure how successful the program would be, yet we managed to get over 5,000 users in the first year and all of our trade partners seemed to love it.

Why do you think the program has been so successful?

I think the main reasons are the usability and the accessibility. We had to do a lot of testing and training needs analysis which involved asking a group of travel agents from different areas, different ages and a range of backgrounds what sorts of things they would like to see in an online program. We realized that although no two people have the same experiences there are a lot of travel agents that leave school and college and using a computer is second nature to them and conversely there are a large number who are homeworkers or are slightly older and have come back to work after their children have left home who are not so computer savvy, so we had to make sure that the program met the needs of both groups. I think it is the ease of use and also the fact that the program can be accessed via a home computer. For example we had one travel agency that did not have any computer systems in their shop yet 500 people actually signed up and used the system, so they were obviously doing it from home and in their own time. I think the trade press really took hold of the idea too and there was a lot of promotion and excitement around it because we were the first cruise line to do something like this and lots of other people have followed since.

You still run the face-to-face training alongside the online program. Do you find that the two approaches complement each other well?

Definitely, Michelle and I started off as face-to-face trainers and we certainly did not want to lose that aspect of it because we really enjoy it. What we did find though was the more we looked at the online training program, the more we could actually bring aspects of it into the face-to-face training. We would get people to do a little bit of the online training before they came to the face-to-face program as an introduction, so it was a blended learning approach without us even really realizing it at the time.

Did you have any teething problems with the program?

I think our initial problem was that, as I mentioned earlier, not all of our travel agents had access to computers at work or they had access but the computers were quite old and they would have problems with firewalls or they did not have Flash software or sound on their computers. This limited our plans for the program slightly but over the last year or so all or our travel agents have updated their computer systems and have begun to take the IT infrastructure much more seriously. So, now the majority of users have great internet access which has enabled us to update the program and make use of the Flash element and incorporate sound which has heightened the interactivity and the enjoyment of the system.

The number of people using the program underlines its popularity with travel agents, but do you have any tangible results to support the success of the training program for the business?

We do not hide the fact that initially we found it very difficult to prove a return on investment for the program in the sense that this travel agent had made x amount more bookings due to the fact they had used the training program. I think the training along with a number of other factors such as a heightened marketing campaign, and television advertisements culminated in an increase in market share which has almost doubled from 9 percent to 16 percent. As a company that is on track for where we wanted to be. Another element has been the fact that a lot of the trade partners we work with have actually written the program into their appraisal and staff agreements so that employees have to do this program in order to progress which is a real success for us.

Finally, do you have any plans to develop the program further in the future?

Actually what I am doing today is looking at version one of the re-launch. In the first 18 months of the program we added the Captain Zone, which is the interactive section. We started off with three levels; Cadet, Bursar and Captain but we found that we ended up with thousands of captains who did not really have anywhere to go after that and could not continue with their learning so we introduced the Captain’s Zone where users can access blogs, podcasts, vodcasts and any new information that we post to the site. Recently we have been assessing this and have decided to make the Captain Zone the entry point to the program so that everyone who uses the program can access this area. It is not as structured as it first was and is more of an informal learning approach but what we are going to do is award points for training and these will add up to different rewards. We are also looking at enhancing our virtual classroom program, which we provide through Web Ex. We make sure that people who have been to one of our face-to-face events can meet back in a month or two following the event and can be trained on computer learning through the virtual classroom as we are not sure about the success of doing that just as an e-learning program and we like to have some element of control over it so we are looking at enhancing that part of the program in addition to the blogs and the social networking elements.