Leadership Training

Karie 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!

• Last year, you were on-hand in New Delhi, India for the launching of a SUN Microsystems Authorized Sun Education Center (ASEC) Program (partnering with NIIT). Can you talk more about your involvement with this program, and the importance of these ASEC Program’s in general?

There are four countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that are really important to us, particularly on the developer side of the business and the people who are engaging in learning on the customer side of the business for us. India all ready has a well established commitment to growing their developer capabilities as a country; in fact the other three countries are trying to determine how they can be more like them. So we use a great deal of partners to help us do the delivery of our training on the customer side, and that’s where the need for ASEC comes from. This program helps us have a great deal of partners all around the world who can help not only deliver but sell for us.

NIIT is a very special partner because they have a tremendous reach – they are one of the largest training companies in the world (as well). They sit right on the campus of many of the major universities in India. This way, people can get extra credentials so that when they graduate they are more likely to get a good job right out of school. They have really helped us accelerate our growth and we keep expanding the scope of our partnership. We started with Java and have recently included our Solaris curriculum. In addition, we recently signed an agreement with them in China for our ASEC Programs there.

• What are some of the new high-priority training programs that you and your team are currently working on?

We have an award winning program that we would love your readers to visit online at http://learning.sun.com/newhire. This “New Hire Experience” website has just rolled out and is a great tool for us both in regards to recruiting and new hires.

In the “accelerate” section, we focus on all the areas that new hires should focus on once they join Sun Microsystems (documentation, orientation, etc.). New hires can then search for and interact with employees around the world care of the “participate” link. In “learn”, employees can access educational resources, sign up for courses, learn about Sun’s Learning Services organization, and search Sun’s vast library of digitized information. “Explore” provides additional resources such as executive presentations and the goals of each business group.

• How about the “play” section? That sounds like fun!

(Laughing) I was just getting there, Brian! The play section provides two different games: Dawn of the Shadow Specters (a text oriented RPG), and Rise of the Shadow Specters (an arcade game). Each game caters to different demographics and age groups in our organization. As you play either game, you learn more about Sun’s products and services as you go along.

With this kind of community site, it opens up a world of opportunities for other courses and events. Say for example, we launch a new leadership program where we want our people to approach learning as a process rather than an event: they can use this community both before and after the course takes place in order to connect with others, share experiences and create a moderated learning environment.

The program has all ready won the eLearning Demo Fest Award for Best Synchronous Learning Course. We were recognized thanks to Facebook, which is great since we weren’t actually there at Demo Fest! A big part of the site’s early success can be traced back to all the employees that used the site and critiqued it internally before we launched it publicly. We’ve created this site for new hires, but we’ll take this concept and begin using it on the customer side of the business as well; for Java users, Solaris, etc.

In our director level training program, we are putting together a simulation of the business over the next three years. It will focus on how we drive our company strategy, and is being headed by our CEO Jonathan Schwartz (by they way, did you know that Jonathan was one of the first official CEO bloggers?). The simulation will look at the people you assign to various tasks and how that affects the company’s performance. In addition, the company Vice Presidents will serve as coaches to the directors during the simulation, so they will be able to work on their mentoring skills as well.

One more initiative I’d really like to talk about is our recent work with the new iPod Touch. We are integrating them into our training programs, and will soon launch a website that will mimic the look and feel of iTunes. We will then upload all of our training programs onto this site, so our employees can select the programs they need whenever and wherever they want. It will provide Sun personnel with training that is “Just in time, just enough, just for me”!

• If you were talking to an individual who was thinking about joining the SUN Microsystems team, what would you say is the most exciting aspect about working for the company?

I think it really comes back to that concept of innovation, not just in learning and development, but all across the company. If you are the kind of person who likes to see what’s possible through technology, then Sun is a great environment for you. Also, it’s an environment that’s very open and transparent. Our blogging network is just an example of how we provide an open working environment for everyone.

Most importantly to me, there are companies that talk about integrity and then there are companies that live integrity, and Sun Microsystems just lives integrity. High integrity is just part of our culture here, and one of the biggest reasons I love working here so much.

Sun Microsystems, Karie Willyerd, Chief Learning Officer, Interview, eLearning Guild, Executive Blogging, Web 2.0