Personalized learning at scale: How the L&D team behind Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger customizes their learning programs

Sue Denning [00:00:00]:

What we really set out to address when we began working on people manager capabilities, as we called it at the time, was really addressing an inconsistent understanding of what a manager does, right. So even just defining that in an organization of our size with such a varied population of workers was a key challenge.

Hannah Beaver [00:00:21]:

You’re listening to how to make a leader a leadership development podcast from Big Think plus, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hannah Beaver. Everyone learns differently. Auditory learners will prefer to hear new information, whether that be through a podcast or even an audiobook. Visual learners will prefer to see video or imagery to take in their learning. But in the workplace, learners are often faced with constraints on how and when they’re able to consume their learning materials particularly apt in today’s environment, we have a distinction between remote and in office workers, and in certain industries, a difference between desk lists and office workers as well. For today’s episode, I spoke with Sue Denning, the senior director of global talent development for PVH Corporation, the company behind the iconic brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Sue’s challenge is to make PVH’s learning programs authentic and effective, not just for those workers sitting behind a desk in the offices, but for thousands of retail employees working on the retail floor.

Hannah Beaver [00:01:27]:

She’s also tasked with developing middle managers and ensuring that people managers have the right tools for success in their management journey. To start, let’s zoom out and establish a holistic view of PVH’s learning programs and structure. We’d love to hear a little bit more about your learning programme structure at PVH, how many learners you work with, and then maybe perhaps given the retail structure, your breakdown of desk lists versus office workers.

Sue Denning [00:01:55]:

Yeah. So we’re about 30,000 associates globally, and about 10,000 of them are office based or, you know, sort of computer type type workers. Approximately 20,000 are in our retail and warehouse environment. Right. So they don’t have a desk. Right. They are deskless. Right.

Sue Denning [00:02:13]:

Which is where that comes from. But they also, they don’t have mobile devices or necessarily a little bit of. Sometimes it’s an iPad that is floating around the store or warehouse space. So reaching them has been something that we haven’t, until this last year, really approached from a global perspective. So I’m part of the global COE and we have regional centers as well who are largely doing delivery. So my team that I’m part of is my learning platforms and analytics pillar that I’m really focused on. We have global leadership development programs, global manager development programs.org capabilities and business acumen, and a program management arm that’s really about working with the regions on delivering, delivering learnings through our regional partnership and people who sit much, much closer to the day to day operations of our two brands. So we’ve got the mix of office and retail warehouse associates.

Sue Denning [00:03:16]:

Right. And it’s pretty easy to reach our office associates. Right. We can run campaigns and send emails easily, but on the retail and warehouse side, there’s a lot of different communications platforms in play and a lot of different ways of reaching them. And a lot of different. Their schedules are also totally different. Right. There’s a lot of part time associates, there’s a lot of seasonal associates who come and go, and the market needs are totally different.

Sue Denning [00:03:40]:

So we’re kind of riding a wave of interaction and we need to get them when we can get them and also give them space when they really need to be focusing on that retail aspect of their retail job.

Hannah Beaver [00:03:55]:

If you could define one key focus area that you’re focusing on and is your biggest priority right now, what would that be?

Sue Denning [00:04:01]:

Yeah, if I had to roll it up into one sort of umbrella theme, it would be something along the lines of change, agility or resilience. So with change, we tend to think of it as like we know the change is coming. Here’s how we’re going to prepare our teams for the change, here’s how we’re going to roll out the change, and here’s how we’re going to measure the effectiveness of the change. But I don’t think any of us are under any illusions of living in a world where we can expect changes. Even just last week, we had a huge technical situation that the world had to react to. This adaptation and this idea of resilience comes into play. How do we still get done what we need to do in the tech side of things? This year, we’re rolling out an LXP. We’re consolidating several learning management systems across retail platforms.

Sue Denning [00:04:54]:

We’re working through those communication platform issues that we have where we don’t have a direct line of communication. Leading through change is always a huge theme in our leadership development programs. So it’s there, and then from the organizational capability pillar, adapting to technology change, and also rapidly evolving and constantly changing workforce needs, there’s change everywhere through that. So it’s really about like, how do we respond to things and how do we work through some of these changes in a more fluid manner than we have before. So it’s not necessarily about teaching anything new or imparting any new knowledge to our associates. It’s really about how we get to them when we get to them, having more flexibility around timing and just really being able to have a pulse of where the organization’s at in terms of those topics.

Hannah Beaver [00:05:49]:

I think what you mentioned with resilience and leading through change is certainly something that I would assume that most everyone on the call can relate to. And I also think that resilience is such an interesting one as well because it impacts every single team member, whether you’re the leadership of the entire organization or just as an individual. I feel like developing that competency and that skill set around resiliency through no matter what type of tough time is thrown, whether that be technology or change management or organizational changes that come through through acquisition or changes in that sense as well. It’s nothing new. It’s not a new concept or term that we’re throwing out. But I think it’s something definitely that I’ve noticed is just consistently always top of mind.

Sue Denning [00:06:35]:

Yeah, the only thing constant is change. But we keep acting like change is going to stop at some point in time. And I’m just, you know, I think we should just move away from that and just sort of embrace the fact that our role in learning and development is really about, like, making sure people are still learning through change.

Hannah Beaver [00:06:50]:

I’d love to speak about your split between office and deskless workers. So what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced in reaching those deskless workers, and what are some of the unique solutions that you’ve come up with to address those challenges?

Sue Denning [00:07:05]:

Biggest challenge that we face with the deskless workers is really time off the sales floor. Right, or the warehouse floor, whichever it is. But any time that you take away, especially with an hourly and contingent worker population, we have to be very cognizant of that. And aware of device limitations are one thing, but if everyone’s got a device in every hand and they’re on the sales floor and they’re watching a training video, that’s kind of like being off the floor. You’re not really paying attention to what’s going on the floor, you’re paying attention to learning. Just having a device in everyone’s hand doesn’t really help. Microlearning is a great way to approach that, where people are able to snack on learning in between breaks and quiet moments on the store. And it’s really important to have the right analytics in place if you’re going to do something like that and track that.

Sue Denning [00:08:00]:

We’ve noticed and continue to note that onboarding is really the biggest time when you can get someone’s attention to go through a longer format learning content, but really day to day, you’re learning from your manager. We really try to focus on empowering managers to be developers of talent, developers of career on the sales floor, so that they’re bringing learning to their group meetings, that they’re bringing learning to their day to day interactions. And we’ve also started to talk about developing some more formal expert buddy programs on the floor where someone may be an expert in merchandising or an expert in store operations, things like that. So really formalizing that is both a way to help learning permeate throughout the store or the warehouse, but also to identify career paths and outline opportunities for associates to develop, even if they’re in a part time role, and really think about what a career in retail and fashion might look like for them.

Hannah Beaver [00:09:07]:

In addition to making sure that deskless workers receive the tools and training that they need, a large focus of Sue’s work has been on developing their manager training and in particular their manager studio program. To understand sue and PVH’s approach to training leaders, I asked her how the manager studio program came to be.

Sue Denning [00:09:29]:

Manager studio started as this terribly HR phrase that we were calling people manager capabilities. And what came out of our employee listening engagement a couple years ago was this idea that there was an inconsistent or completely lacking definition of what an individual does as a people manager. What are our roles and responsibilities? And some of that comes out of, you know, the multi brand family nature of things, and also how we were coming together as a globally matrixed organization. So it was really, really closely tied to business transformation and HR transformation. So there’s that change piece again, right? And new ways of working. And so what we really set out to address when we began working on people manager capabilities, as we called it at the time, was really addressing an inconsistent understanding of what a manager does. So even just defining that in an organization of our size with such a varied population of workers was a key challenge. So we spent about a year working through that definition between HR business leaders and focus groups, really talking to our people managers about how they saw their role and flagging any inconsistencies that we saw across the globe.

Sue Denning [00:10:48]:

And so we came up with these core drivers of people managers, core core capabilities that all managers need to have, and everyone pretty consistently agreed on that we also had to do an audit of all the different global offerings that we had in regions. So we had programs in Europe, programs in Americas and programs in APAC that all had a lot of the same topics in them. But what was missing was a connection to the employee lifecycle. We were teaching people, managers how to recruit and how to interview candidates when they didn’t have any open roles. We were talking to them about giving feedback outside of the performance and development process. We were saying, once a year you’ll give feedback, which is essentially what we were saying. And we realized that that just wasn’t true. A key part of the branding was really connecting it to the needs of our organization at the time.

Sue Denning [00:11:46]:

It was less about the look and feel and the way people interacted, then the substance of the interaction. But then we really started to think about the look and feel and how we were going to brand this and how we were going to bring it to market.

Hannah Beaver [00:11:58]:

We have the marketing piece.

Sue Denning [00:11:59]:

Yeah. The marketing piece.

Hannah Beaver [00:12:00]:

The marketing background came in.

Sue Denning [00:12:02]:

Yeah. And so look, we’re a brand. Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, these are, you know, we call them iconic brands. They are iconic brands. Our history with advertising and how our, our business has always reacted and interacted with marketing has always been something that stood out. Right. We have really high brand recognition. We have really high awareness when it comes to that.

Sue Denning [00:12:24]:

So we really wanted to build off of that. Right. That’s kind of at the core of our business. Like, yes, we make clothes, but also we make advertising. We’re one of the, Calvin Klein is one of the first organizations that had a fully in house advertising capability. And that started in the early eighties where we had this. We weren’t using agencies, we were doing everything ourselves. So it was really important that, that we carried that through.

Sue Denning [00:12:50]:

And then out of our focus groups, we worked with an external partner to help bring that into a brand identity and a positioning. What we came up with was manager, studio manager. That part’s obvious. Studio brings in a lot of the evokes the test and learn nature of being a manager and getting a safe place to try out ideas and really build on a collection, collect things. And we really needed to focus on having a unified voice of talent and focus on that strategic business impact.

Hannah Beaver [00:13:25]:

Switching gears slightly, I’d love to talk about specifically learning technologies. I know you work a lot with learning technologies and from our conversation seems to be just a passion area for you within your career. So what is a new technology that you’ve perhaps you’ve used recently or discovered that’s really leveled up your work and you found has improved the learner experience.

Sue Denning [00:13:48]:

The biggest thing that we’ve been working on with technology is establishing connectivity between our different platforms, between our HRI systems and our learning systems, between our job architecture and our learning systems. So the technology that we’ve really been trying to capitalize on are the things that give us a higher level of personalization for the learner, ways of thinking, our talent profiles to different programs, development plans, career paths, all of those things that we do in HR that we do really well, they’ve largely been disconnected from the technologies that deliver the training to the people. Right. So it’s really about building those connections. Lots of integration talks, but it’s really about connecting the right talent to the right opportunities at the right time. And that extent, it’s not just a talent management, talent marketplace kind of opportunity. It’s about learning in the flow of work, but really knowing what your work is and where your work is going and capitalizing on those moments.

Hannah Beaver [00:14:50]:

What does success look like for your team, and how do you measure that?

Sue Denning [00:14:55]:

We’re still really measuring engagement and trying to connect that engagement to business impact. Right. So we’ve been looking at sort of making sure all of our learnings end with something that we can measure right. At the end of a priority setting session, where you’re setting your annual priorities, we want to measure what you’ve entered in workday. We want to know that you’ve entered something in workday. So that’s like a really, you know, a straight line example of how we can measure, like, hey, you went to the training and then you did the thing that we asked you to do, and that’s great, that’s a really high priority. But beyond these metrics, we’re looking at our employee engagement surveys, but we’re also looking for increases in collaboration across different parts of the business. And from the global CoE perspective, we’re really looking for, for a setting like priority sessions, we will offer a globally accessible to everyone example of a session.

Sue Denning [00:15:54]:

But what’s a really great success metric is when a leader comes and says, hey, can you do that workshop for just my team? Can you tailor it to my smaller operating unit of maybe 20 to 50 people? And when we see that, then we know we’re really hitting the mark, because business leaders are asking us to do something a little bit more tailored for them but still connecting to the overall theme. They’re not coming just and saying, like, can you teach me how to do something other than set priorities? But can you, can you frame this in a workshop that helps us to set our priorities? And so that’s a. That’s a really huge success metric for us.

Hannah Beaver [00:16:31]:

At the end of my interview with sue, we opened it up for questions from the audience. Here are a couple from our Q and A. What is the greatest challenge you find with onboarding new team members?

Sue Denning [00:16:45]:

It’s having a global perspective on what onboarding looks like and making sure that we’re hitting the right moments globally, but also allowing room for the regional engagement. The regional employee experience to come through all of our campuses, for lack of a better term, are pretty different culture wise. Right. And organization wise. Here in New York, we’re stretched across three different buildings on five different floors. And we’re out in Bridgewater, New Jersey, where we also have offices, but in Amsterdam, they’re completely, essentially located. Tommy and Calvin are connected buildings with a cool bridge in between. They have a large cafeteria.

Sue Denning [00:17:20]:

So it’s really about, like, how do we balance those two different employee experiences? And for onboarding, I think it’s really about providing a standard for managers to understand what happens during the onboarding process and making sure that their onboarding associates in a similar enough way that’s, like, tailored to their function. But our greatest challenge is in making connections globally. Right. And making sure that you understand how your work, even though you sit in the US, connects with the work that someone in AIPAC is doing. And that’s a time and distance challenge. But really, how do we promote one culture globally when we’re actually, like 20 or 30 different cultures individually?

Hannah Beaver [00:18:04]:

Another question here, what do you find to be more successful in learning? Learning new tools, company training, or self guided learning?

Sue Denning [00:18:13]:

Honestly, I think self guided learning is incredibly important for it. And technical roles. Right. They’re constantly. Those are some of our biggest customers for our products. They’re constantly going in and using LinkedIn and Coursera to find new learnings and to get a specific training on a specific thing, and they’re out. We see low completion rates, but high interaction. So learning time is high, but completion rates are low.

Sue Denning [00:18:38]:

So that’s one pace of it. I think that we are seeing an increased trend and demand for in person learning that we hadn’t seen for a long time. It was kind of quiet for a while, so workshops and things of that nature. I’m alone in my office today because the rest of our team is doing a leadership development program offsite with a group of probably about 50 participants who are going through the first in person training that we’ve had globally in four or five years out of the Americas. So that’s really, really interesting. And in terms of tools and technology. It comes back to that integration piece we just last summer rolled out, office 365, so we had teams for a while, but we weren’t really using teams, for lack of a better term. So we’re really working on building the integrations between our learning platforms and our communication platforms into our day to day lives.

Sue Denning [00:19:35]:

And we’re seeing, you know, we see high adoption rates for new things, and then everyone drops off right. As we come back to something like normal. It’s really important to have a single entry point for all learning. Even though we have, may have many tools and technologies, having that single entry point, I think is critical for that adoption to stay up.

Hannah Beaver [00:19:56]:

For more from Sue Denning, check the show notes for our full conversation and for more from how to make a leader, make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back next month and every month with more insights from another L and D leader. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time as we learn how to make a leader.

Learning programs aren’t one-size-fits-all. How can we craft learning experiences that are authentic to each learner, no matter their role at the organization? In today’s episode, we dive into how Sue Denning, the Senior Director of Global Talent Development for PVH Corporation— the company behind iconic brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger—achieves just that.

PVH employs over 30,000 associates worldwide with a unique mix of office-based and deskless retail workers. Sue’s mission? To ensure all employees, from retail floor staff to middle managers, receive effective learning opportunities that meet them when and where they need it.

Sue reveals the innovative strategies PVH uses to reach their diverse workforce, from the microlearning techniques for retail staff to the dynamic “Manager Studio” program that’s redefining what it means for managers to lead effectively. Discover how Sue’s team navigates the challenge of engaging all of their employees worldwide through change agility and resilience, making learning not just possible but impactful for everyone.

For more from Sue Denning watch the full How to Make a Leader live interview.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How PVH tailors their programs to meet learners at every stage of their learning journey, whether in-office or on the retail floor
• Why microlearning is effective in providing managers with resources to facilitate on-the-job training and peer-led learning sessions.
• How to ensure people managers have the right tools for success in their management journey
• Why establishing a clear, consistent understanding of managerial roles and responsibilities is crucial for effective leadership at every level of the organization
• How to integrate learning technologies with broader HR systems to enhance learner personalization and engagement
• How to develop a multi-faceted approach to measure the effectiveness of your learning programs

Things to listen for:

01:40 Understanding the structure and scale of PVH’s learning programs​​. 

09:31 The evolution and impact of PVH’s “Manager Studio” program​​. 

13:52 Enhancing customized learner experience through technology and integration​​.

15:59 Understanding PVH’s metrics for measuring success and business impact of learning programs​​.

17:51 The challenges and strategies behind global onboarding​​.

18:22 Striking a balance between self-guided learning and company training​​.