Allego Customer Spotlight: Shields Health Solutions
Welcome to the Allego Customer Spotlight, where we share insights from conversations with customers who rely on Allego to help transform their sales learning and enablement.
This month we spoke with Lauren Lamb, Director, Corporate Training and Communications, at Shields Health Solutions about her career and the challenges facing learning professionals today.
Allego: Tell us about your experience in learning and training?
Lauren Lamb: I started off at Tyco Kendall Healthcare, which then became Covidien. We went on to be acquired by Medtronic. I never left the company, but stayed through multiple changes of hands. I was in sales, I did marketing, and I also did training.
At those companies, we used Allego as a sales-focused coaching tool for pitch presentations, best practices, role playing, and sales messaging. Fast forward to my current life with Shields Health Solutions, where I’m the director of corporate training and communications.
Allego: What is training like at Shields?
Lauren: Shields Health Solutions is a specialty pharmacy integrator. We’re experiencing explosive growth. Over the past four years, we’ve grown at 300% year over year. This year we’ll double in size from 1,000 employees to 2,000.
It’s been so exciting. Alongside the Shields employees who are in Allego and learning every day, we also have our partner health systems. They have their hospital employees who are also taking our trainings through Allego, so we’ve expanded our footprint in terms of teaching and learning.
Allego: What do you like about your current role?
Lauren: The really neat thing about my role now is that I had the opportunity to build a training program from scratch. And having used Allego in my prior life at Medtronic, I knew what it could do for an organization, especially a growing one like Shields.
And so, I went ahead and proposed that we use Allego not as just our learning management system, but also as a communication platform. I knew that Allego, being a true enablement platform, would be able to help us get the job done at Shields.
Allego: How are you tackling learning in a virtual environment?
Lauren: One of the things that we’ve been challenged with since the pandemic is digitizing everything, from improving our required courses that folks have to take online each year, to classroom training, to live training that we do for our in-pharmacy liaisons who are interacting with patients on a daily basis.
We have about sixty required courses that get deployed every year. We have about twenty pharmacist-required courses that are disease-state specific, twenty technician-required courses, and a number of corporate-required modules.
We also digitized our quarterly leadership series. That went from a three-day live session to a two-hour virtual session each morning for four days. And we digitized other trainings that are facilitated on a regular basis—our emotional intelligence, change management, town halls, and a Top 60 leadership meeting just last week.
Allego: What’s one of the biggest challenges facing learning professionals today?
Lauren: It’s a challenge to make everything digitized and make it impactful. How do you still make it interactive? How do you continue to make it engaging?
With Allego, I’m able to encourage and increase interactivity, even in a virtual learning environment. Interactivity is really the key to learning, especially when it comes to doing online modules.
The other thing that’s important in the virtual world is being able to track the learning. The learners are no longer sitting in front of us in the classroom. We’re not getting that eye-to-eye contact with them. We’re not seeing the body language and the facial expressions. So being able to track their learning is super important.
Allego: Do you have any advice for others who may be looking for new technology to support their training efforts?
Lauren: Before I chose Allego, I did a lot of research and investigation into learning management systems, communication platforms, and all the options that are out there. Allego does so many things so well and enables educators like me to do whatever I want to do with whatever audience I want to do it with.
I think that it’s important to realize that you can choose a platform as a learning management system—and there are some great ones out there—but you lose that communication use case. Or you can choose some type of a video platform, but then you lose that all in one learning management system slash communication feel.
I think the thing that Allego does really well is they have the learning management system piece and the communication piece all in one. It’s like beautifully intertwined. Rather than sending an email, now people are able to create a little video and tap, they’re done.
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