Success Stories: Zyxel Training Infrastructure

Building ZyXEL’s global knowledge sharing, communication, and competence-based training structure

ZyXEL has built a global e-learning platform based on CyberLink’s CTMS

Founded in 1989, ZyXEL focuses on the networking and communication market with own brand products, having built core competitive advantages with technology and innovation. In the past, ZyXEL built a global distribution network and achieved great worldwide success in Europe, North America, and Asia. “Sharing” has always been ZyXEL’s core value and a part of the company culture. To face its global challenges and a rapidly changing market, ZyXEL selected CTMS as a knowledge sharing and e-learning platform to help facilitate the greater sharing of information and accelerate the development of its people.

Building e-Learning Within an Overall e-HRD Solution

During good times and bad, ZyXEL has continued to invest around 0.1% of annual revenue on human resource development. For internal employee development, ZyXEL has spent a lot to build employee competence maps and a competence-based training structure; for external partnerships, ZyXEL has developed partners as networking solution experts, helping to promote ZyXEL-branded solutions. As the organization grew and improved its global operations, in 2004 ZyXEL decided to deploy CTMS to build a complete corporate e-learning solution. Starting with e-learning, ZyXEL planned for an overall e-HRD platform, including competence management, performance management, Individual Development Plans (IDP), and successor management.

Colman Huang, Vice President of ZyXEL’s Administration Department, says: “For ZyXEL, our future challenge is how we can help our employees face the rapid changes of technology and the market. To achieve that goal we need the best IT technology and systems. CyberLink’s CTMS is the right solution to enable ZyXEL to develop our people in the most efficient and effective way.”

“CyberLink’s CTMS provides not only complete e-learning and Learning Management System (LMS) administration functions but also provides an intuitive user interface and the mechanism to monitor learning results,” Colman Huang said. “CTMS can be integrated with the ZyXEL HRM and other systems to give our employees a very smooth user experience. Managers can easily understand employee learning results and HR administrators can save a lot administration, and focus more on future HRD strategy.”

Accumulating and Sharing Key Knowledge Internally and Externally

In the past, ZyXEL has used CyberLink’s content authoring tool StreamAuthor to create hundreds of e-learning courses. Without proper tracking and management, the value of those courses is not realized. By using CTMS to deliver e-learning courses, ZyXEL easily accumulates corporate key knowledge which is delivered to any person who needs it. In highlighting the benefits of the CTMS system, Colman Huang says: “We have tried to build the self-learning and self-development spirit of our employees, and CTMS is the best solution to help us do that. CTMS integrates with our existing HRM and competence management systems so that employees quickly understand their training needs from their own competence gaps. They can then take learning as a serious task to do.”

“The value of an e-learning system is very significant for the global distribution of training content,” said Colman Huang. “Besides the internal HR e-learning system, ZyXEL has built a second e-learning site for globally distributed training courses. In the past, we could only deliver documents to global partners when we released new products. Face-to-face or hands-on training could only be conducted twice each year, to cover global distributors from Europe, America, and Asia. It turns out that many of our partners would not understand our technology and were unable to sell the key benefits of our new products. The quantity of support calls from distributors was pretty high. Sometimes the satisfaction from distributors and customers was low, due to the lack of proper training and information.”

“By building our global e-learning site for distributors, we can easily deliver product training when new products are about to be launched. The e-Testing functions of CTMS help us evaluate distributors’ learning results by conducting on-line testing after each course. We can enhance out training content once we find out which questions are hard for our learners,” Colman Huang added. “With CTMS, we have designed our ZyXEL Certificate Program for distributors. The basic level of certification can be finished using the e-learning site. Only distributors who pass basic level certification qualify to join lab training to get their higher-level certificate. The ZyXEL Certificate Program has greatly improved the quality of our distributors’ knowledge, and thus the satisfaction of our customers.”

“For the future, ZyXEL will build our complete e-HRD system for both internal employees and external partners. With the success we’ve already achieved through the implementation of CTMS and our e-learning platform, I believe CyberLink will remain our best partner to achieve longer term goals.”