Interview with Karie Willyerd of Sun Microsystems
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008Karie Willyerd is the Chief Learning Officer at Sun Microsystems, and is responsible for product and technical training, executive learning, business, management and professional skill development, and sales and service learning for Sun around the globe. Sun Microsystems provides network computing infrastructure solutions that include computer systems, software, storage, and services. Its core brands include the Java technology platform, the Solaris operating system, StorageTek and the UltraSPARC processor.
Karie holds a Masters in Instructional & Performance Technology from Boise State University and a Doctorate in Management from Case Western Reserve University. She is a former board member of ASTD and serves on several local non-profit boards near her home in Redwood Shores, California.
• You’ve had quite a distinguished learning career, starting as an instructional designer at an engineering training consulting firm in the nuclear industry, and serving recently as Vice President and Chief Talent Officer for Solectron. What was it about the culture and environment at SUN Mircosystems that made you decide it was a good fit for you?
I completed my education as an adult, and one of the degree programs I enrolled in was a doctoral program at Case Western Reserve University. Because it was a program in executive management, one of the requirements was to select a company to study; profiling their leadership teams, what the organizational culture is like, and assess their leadership capabilities. I picked a company that at the time was actually a client of the company that I was working for, and that company was Sun. I read everything I could find in the press on them, attended conferences where leaders from Sun were speaking, and I really became intrigued with them. So when I decided I was ready to move to a new position, I was actually approached by Sun about a role that they had just created, that being Chief Learning Officer!
The really fun thing about this job is that Sun got very radical about the position they put together. I now run technology training for one of the largest IT Global Training companies in the world. I also run training for our sales and services team, our partners who help us sell and support Sun products and services, as well as support training for our developers and universities. So in total, I have four main audiences; customers, partners, employees and communities, which covers a total of 150,000 people. Last year alone we delivered over 5 million hours of training to those individuals.
Because we work with all four of these audiences, I get to leverage the purchasing power and the infrastructure of a much larger organization than if we only worked with employee learning. Also, I love that Sun is a company of innovation; that’s a very attractive feature in a company to me. If you come up with a good idea, it’s the idea that carries, not your position in the company. People that come to Sun tend to stay a long time, and at the risk of sounding sappy, I can say that I have simply fallen in love with the company and really enjoy working here!
• Because you’re responsible for training so many employees, can you tell us more about the people that you work with in each of these areas?
We have several key positions, starting with our advocates, who are customer facing: think of them as our account executives. One of them heads up the customer community advocates, and another runs employee and partner learning. We also have a technology & reporting group, as well as a significant design & development group. I also have three regional CLO’s, and they in turn manage sixteen additional CLO’s, also organized by their location. Each of these regional CLO’s has to wear the same hats that I do, so you see just how important these individuals are to our organization.
• Sun Microsystems has a very extensive blogging network for their employees, and I noticed you have a blog called “Learning 2.0”. What does writing for this blog do for you personally, and how does it help connect you with the SUN Microsystems community?
It’s interesting, because my very first job was as a newspaper reporter, so I started blogging with more of a personal essay style simply because that’s a style that I’m comfortable with. But in the future, I see myself blogging more about leadership observations and focusing more on how to use technology in a learning environment. The Sun blogging community is a very interesting and active community, and it’s always great when I get emails from employees asking me when my next blog entry will be!
