GAC launched the GAC Corporate Academy in 2007 to deliver new training opportunities to staff around the world. GAC Corporate Academy is a fundamental building block of the GAC Group's strategic plan, which recognizes that people and organizational learning are fundamental to GAC's business. A public overview of the GAC Corporate Academy is available at the portal page http://www.gacacademy.com.

Courses are available to all staff employed throughout the GAC Group, as well as nominated personnel from GAC Network Agents and cover a variety of topics related to all aspects of GAC business.

From the beginning stages of the Academy, Human Resource Development International and HRDNZ, (a Moodle Partner in New Zealand) have played a key support role. HRD worked with GAC to develop and facilitate courses such as Business Communication in the Information Age, Introduction to the GAC World, Personal and Professional Development, Customer Services Excellence, Shipping Agency Operations, and Microsoft Office Tune-up. One of the most popular courses is the Global English Programme with more than 350 staff from the global network enrolling for this during 2010. The close relationship between GAC and HRD continues today with the design of tailor-made online courses and the training and mentoring of GAC e-facilitators—the subject matter experts. Almost half of the GAC facilitators have completed the HRD MoodleBites© online courses (http://www.moodlebites.com).

In 2006 Damien O'Donoghue—General Manager of GAC—outlined the business, functional, and technical requirements for the Academy's Learning Management System, and considered several options: a commercial LMS, an open source LMS solution, or GAC's in-house LMS.

As part of his exploration, Damien attended the Moodle Moot in Wellington, New Zealand, in June 2006 and met Stuart Mealor (Managing Director of HRD) and discussed the potential benefits of Moodle as the most robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution.

By selecting the free and open source Moodle software as the e-learning platform, GAC was able to spend a higher proportion of the budget on what would ultimately make GAC the success it is today—great course design and facilitation support. The GAC mission is "To deliver specialized, job-based skills and self-development techniques to all GAC individuals, using leading-edge technology and enlightened learning processes."

Although not commonly used in the large corporate sector back in 2006, Damien was keen to use the online collaborative learning opportunities that Moodle enables and encourages.

In short, yes. GAC Corporate Academy started off by offering quite generic courses, and has now moved to courses specifically linked to key business objectives. After a less than successful strategy of purchasing off-the-shelf SCORM content, GAC has now moved to developing courses with a combination of internal subject specialists, HRD e-learning consultants, and facilitators. The course content is uploaded into Moodle course pages with GAC-specific assignments and discussion forums added.

There is a clear strategy to ensure that the learner does not simply click through a series of screens without context and interaction. Interaction and collaboration in courses is now a fundamental part of the learning process, with the courses tightly integrating content, tasks, and collaboration.

With such a diverse professional development requirement, GAC has managed to save many thousands of dollars by using Moodle. A traditional two-day regional workshop would cost US $35K-$40K with the expenses of travel, accommodation, venue, facilitation fees, and so on, and this would only be available for staff within a specific region. An international workshop might be as much as US $50K. By using Moodle, the cost per course has been reduced by around 80 percent to approximately US $10K, and also makes the course available for staff from any region.

GAC are one of the groups of commercial Moodle users that have been able to take the academic best-practice models of online learning, and apply it in a very real way within the business context. Keeping its learning philosophy simple through action based learning, GAC will continue to offer well rounded learning solutions for the business and its support functions. Adjustments are made each year, in terms of course provision, delivery style, facilitation, and the team involved in delivering the service. This constant review of GAC ensures provision remains linked to critical business drivers, and continues to look to the wider Moodle Community and specialists for new and innovative ideas.

There are many challenges in developing a competency model for use within your organization. In choosing to use competencies, the organization is letting its staff know that these are the areas that will be measured. Therefore, it is important to ensure that there is a level of buy in and understanding from the staff in both, the areas and levels being measured and in the methodology of assessment.

There may be a temptation to build a comprehensive map of every area, and the competencies related to it, and sub competencies and so on. However, too much detail risks alienating the learners and the trainers who need to match, assess, and justify the tracking. In other words, it can be overkill.

In the example earlier, with the various product-related competencies, different staff would need different competencies. A support staff member would not necessarily need to be able to handle the pricing model or a sales team member would not need to be able to handle the technical setup of the product. So it is important to remember the competencies related to the role of the person being assessed.

In building a set of competencies, or a map, for a specific role, you may want to group them together for ease of reporting and understanding. Such groups could be soft skills, product skills, or technical skills.

One thing to remember about competencies is that for them to be useful today and tomorrow, they need to be updated and kept current. This is where they can fit into tracking the continual professional development of staff.