At IQ Solutions, we believe that learning and development are vital to both personal employee success as well as achievements in public health. Since 2006, we have provided training and professional development support to our employees to ensure their knowledge and skills continually expand both with the demands of our business and with their own desires for advancement. At IQ Solutions, we hold ourselves accountable for staying abreast of new technologies and learning best practices, and we continually seek new and relevant approaches to professional development to meet the needs of our employees.
Over the course of the last decade, we have implemented an array of learning techniques—including webinars, virtual collaborations, and prerecorded video presentations—to supplement our live classroom-based training. As we realized difficulties related to staff members’ busy schedules and lack of time to attend these live sessions, IQ Solutions took a step further into the evolving world of e-learning.
As an organization that capitalizes on the importance of continual learning and development—and seeks to meet our employees’ needs—we most recently invested in an online learning portal for staff to support our efforts to create paths for advancement within the company. We spent the last year identifying and customizing a learning management system to complement the enhancements we made to our structure and service lines. IQ Solutions envisioned an online portal to provide training content in areas that meet our employees’ needs and help them advance professionally. We acquired learning content from vendors such as Skillsoft and Lynda.com, and we created a structured curriculum, as well as learning tracks for operations and management, leadership, and technical skills, such as data analytics, web design and development, and user experience design. We also conducted vigorous user testing to make sure the platform was as easy as possible to access and navigate.
The result of our efforts is a customized learning portal we call IQ Smart. It currently contains 270 individual lessons that have been structured into courses covering topics such as project management fundamentals, developing and managing teams, leading critical tasks, agile project management, becoming a network administrator, and becoming an expert in search engine optimization. The portal also includes skills development courses in areas such as giving presentations, effective writing, and using Microsoft tools. A key feature of IQ Smart is that it assists managers and supervisors in playing an active role in staff development. The portal allows them to assign team members courses specific to performance improvement or advancement goals and to access their learning profiles to monitor progress.
IQ Smart launched on February 22, 2017. The development of this learning portal has been a company-wide labor of love. We will continue to update IQ Smart with new content and features to meet the expanding needs of our employees and the company
