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At Sprint, we believe there are two key areas of responsibility when it comes to employee development: an employee is responsible for his or her own skill and career development, while the employee's manager is responsible for supporting him or her in this effort. To this end, Sprint offers an array of tools to help both employees and managers.
The resources available to employees and managers for career development include:
Many training and skill development tools are developed and managed by Sprint University (SU), an award-winning, nationally recognized learning, development, and performance organization. Sprint University offers employees leading-edge development opportunities, as well as extensive training in areas specific to their job requirements.
The majority of Sprint employees (approximately 60 percent) are frontline customer care or retail/sales support. Sprint University uses a blend of learning methods to enhance employee' skills such as its best-in-class performer-support solutions to imbed learning and tools into work flows for frontline employees, to directly drive business performance improvement.
Sprint employees average 53 training hours annually.
Additionally, Sprint University supports over 5,000 offerings to all employees for personal, skill-based and professional development available on demand, through its online training warehouse. SU supports a specialized online training center specifically designed to prepare employees for industry certification in technical areas, process expertise and project management. Sprint University provides millions of training hours each year. Available training courses include personal and professional development topics such as improving interpersonal skills, building teams, leadership techniques, coping with difficult people and assessments on how co-workers view your skills. All of this training is above and beyond the standard training for our front-line employees and is delivered in a variety of methods including:
Developing quality managers is an important area of focus at Sprint, and Management Quality serves as the foundation for doing this. The effectiveness of our managers is measured through a Management Quality objective on Performance Plans for those who supervise others and centers around three areas:
Development and informational tools targeted for managers of people include:
In addition, Sprint people managers model the principles of Management Quality resulting in strong scores for the 2012 Sprint Employee Survey top manager drivers of employee commitment and engagement. These results are benchmarked against other companies and Sprint managers continue to score above benchmark. Employees report the highest satisfaction with their managers holding them accountable for results; clarity of job responsibilities; and confidence that their work is aligned with the company's strategy. Employees indicate that the most important management quality behaviors are making suggestions that help them do their jobs better; encouraging employee development; and providing ongoing feedback and coaching.
For more information on the Employee Survey, see the Engagement and Work/Life Balance section.