For Walgreens to effectively deliver on our strategy through our people, we need to significantly improve talent capabilities and the talent pipeline at all levels within our functional areas. To build an effective functional development experience, we couldn’t focus exclusively on just learning assets. We are charged with delivering and enabling entire career development experiences to ensure we’re building the right functional capabilities that will help drive the right mix of talent mobility, which will empower our people to deliver on our strategy—and ultimately to deliver what’s best for our customers.

We are responding to this opportunity with building the Walgreens University Business Schools. Our Schools need to have a strong infrastructure in place as a starting point. This means job title harmonization occurs (if needed) followed by building out robust functional and/or role success profiles. Then, we use the differentiated functional skills that have been identified through the profiling to build robust learning solution suites, which are built using the 70-20-10 premise. The full experience also includes support for career conversations b/t employee and manager, IDP-building tools, illustrative career pathing tools, targeted skill assessments, complimentary support that depicts a “day-in-the-life” as well as employee incentives (such as direct articulation opportunities for college credit and other available credentialing options).

We’re getting very positive feedback, and we’re seeing the work pay off for our employees. We launched our first school in January 2017—our Retail School of Beauty. We’re seeing increasing enrollment numbers into the school, and we have early evidence of employees moving into new roles and/or earning promotions that have been because of the kind of development they have experienced through the school. Although the early results have been positive, there have been many lessons learned. We’re refining how we gather the right data to build our profiles, and we’re broadening our capability to design the right set of curricula that will ultimately serve the mobility we’re truly looking for as we build out additional schools