Focus on Learning

In March 2013, Katharine Harris was a new hire at GSG Financial in New York City. She was also new to equipment finance, having spent her first few years out of school in another industry. Armed with a business degree, however, she was ready for new challenges, and CEO Andrew Bender hired her as the company’s first enrollee in its Leadership Training Program.

“Employees today don’t just want a paycheck; they want a career path. If you don’t provide it for them, they’ll look somewhere else.”

—Katharine Harris, GSG Financial







Today, Harris is GSG’s Vice President of Operations, responsible for overseeing internal leasing procedures and managing the operations team from documentation through to funding. She also oversees the Leadership Training Program and designs new-hire training curricula. Recently she began building out a career map for more junior employees. “If I hadn’t gone through our company’s Leadership Training Program, I think I’d still be in Documentation, where I’d be getting tons of experience,” she says. “But when you’re focused in just one area, it’s hard to look at other parts of the company and understand on a deeper level what’s being done there and what you might do to improve it. Without my training, I’m sure I wouldn’t have the breadth of knowledge and understanding that I do now.”

Nor would she be a company executive. Training at GSG not only kept Harris in equipment finance, it furnished a ladder for advancement and the realization of her potential. “I think training is critical for the future of equipment finance companies,” she says. “This is a large and aging industry that is attractive to young people once they know about it. But employees today don’t just want a paycheck; they want a career path. If you don’t provide it for them, they’ll look somewhere else.”

Harris says that by having training programs in place, companies demonstrate their interest and investment in the future of their employees. “Training programs can also reinforce a company’s culture,” she says, adding, “They’re such valuable tools. Here at GSG, our retention rate in the Leadership Training Program is nearly 100%. People really get hooked.”

Fueling the Fire

It wasn’t long ago that Millennials had a reputation for expecting career advancement based on length of employment. But that’s changing as young professionals ask for and seize chances to learn and develop. “They put tremendous value on opportunity, so learning is a fundamental requirement of the company they work for,” says Matthew Bain, Learning Consultant for the Americas Region at DLL in Wayne, Pennsylvania. “Learning is a much higher priority for Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z than it was for past generations.”

Rightly so: As equipment finance companies and their customers implement artificial intelligence, data analytics and other newer technologies, industry employees will need new knowledge and new skills. The graying of the industry will also open leadership positions and create expanding roles for those now entering the industry. Moreover, the quickening pace of change is likely to ensure that from now on in most industries, strategic and regular training will be vital to individual and corporate success.

“Learning is a much higher priority for Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z than it was for past generations.”

—Matthew Bain, DLL







At DLL, training develops employee skills and meets company goals for customer service by focusing on performance improvement. “One of our focus areas is vendor finance knowledge,” says Bain. “To meet the needs of our customers—who are facing difficult demands due to the changing nature of industry—we have to help our employees get better at adjusting to our customers’ needs. So we teach innovation through design thinking, where the customer is the focus of everything we do. Whether that’s designing a product or changing a process, we focus on customer needs and how it will impact the customer.”

Because DLL’s demographic of customers is changing, Bain says DLL must change with it. “If you’re going to be innovative, diversity is a key factor,” he says. “We’re very good at innovating deals and structures for customers, but we have to get better. And when you’re innovating, diversity is needed to produce a richer product.”

Varied Approaches, Similar Goals

Because business models, markets and philosophies differ vastly from company to company, equipment finance training and approaches to it also vary. Some companies limit in-house training to on-boarding for new employees and look to ELFA and other sources for advanced learning. Others design many of their own programs and hire other companies to deliver them. Still others use a changing combination of internal and external resources to achieve the breadth of offerings they need, while some companies develop new career paths in response to employee talents and interests.

No matter the approach, Alexa Carnibella, ELFA’s Director of Professional Development, says more equipment finance companies than ever are investing in their people by providing training. “Training not only prepares employees to succeed in their roles; it also fosters loyalty,” says Carnibella. “Employees feel valued and retention rises.”

Employers also appreciate the ease with which some training can now be accomplished. ELFA’s newly revamped “Be the Boss” Fundamentals of Equipment Leasing and Finance online course delivers information in seven micro-lessons of eight to 10 minutes each that can be taken at any time. Interactive features include periodic knowledge checks and an entertaining game in which learners apply their new knowledge by running a leasing company. At any point, learners can move back and forth between instruction sessions and the game to test their skills and information.

There’s little question that online training is as effective as it is trendy. But Carnibella says in-person learning and networking is more important than ever. To that end, ELFA’s Principles of Leasing and Finance Workshops are seeing renewed interest. The course is offered several times yearly at various locations. Companies can also host the course at their own offices for their own employees.

“Employees expect training today, and it’s required to get good people and keep them.”

—Andrew Bender, GSG Financial

Personalizing Paths

Despite the resurgence of training and advances in the technology and science that serve it, however, challenges still exist. A new one is charting personal learning paths for every employee. “I strongly believe that everyone on the team wants to know where they stand every day and what they need to do to reach the next level,” says Andrew Bender, CEO of GSG Financial. And while he admires the characteristic as one that’s direct and eliminates surprises, “It’s also more difficult,” he says, “because you’re building individual career development programs.”

In as few as two months after their arrival, new GSG employees are identified as possessing an aptitude for either sales or operations. Subsequent training is chosen accordingly. Developing sales professionals enroll in the Miller-Heiman sales-mapping and training program, while developing leaders may join Vistage, a peer advisory network for executives of small to mid-size businesses, and participate in the company’s Leadership Training Program.

But GSG Financial is refining its training these days in light of a new parent company and new markets. “What worked for us the first 13 years won’t work going forward as a captive and as the markets change,” says Bender of the organization’s employee-development efforts. “Employees expect training today, and it’s required to get good people and keep them. And if they help build it, they’re more accountable to it.”

Bender has weighed the cost and effort of individualized training with the cost of recruiting and found it a no-brainer. “If you already have somebody great, why not build that plan with them and keep them invested and excited,” he says. Because GSG has done exactly that, turnover has been minimal and, as Harris suggests, morale seems to be scraping the sky.

First American Equipment Finance, an RBC/City National Company in Fairport, New York, also has a variety of training paths mapped out, based on employee roles. In five years the company has grown from around 100 to nearly 250 employees and Mandy Williams, Vice President of Learning and Development, says training is a key component to supporting that growth. “Our primary internal programs are our new-hire onboarding programs, a mentoring program and internal development courses in our FAEF University, which are open to all employees,” she says. “We also use ELFA’s online Fundamentals course, and we conduct preparatory classes for the CLFP (Certified Leasing and Finance Professional) examination.”

Williams says that when it comes to training, employees are enthusiastic and competitive. “Our Salesforce platform training leverages badging and a gaming element, which instills competition to complete the most courses,” she says, adding, “We’ve had to relocate some of our instructor-led courses to larger rooms based on the sign-up rate.” Williams says First American Equipment Finance also has a large number of colleagues who participate as mentors, and a large number who want to be mentees.

Interpreting ROI

When employees are learning, customers are happy and the bottom line is growing, no one loses sleep trying to calculate their training’s return on investment (ROI). Decide to do it, though, and you’ll find it devilishly difficult. So elusive is this figure that DLL’s Bain says less than 8% of organizations succeed at measuring the real ROI of their training. That’s not surprising, given that effectiveness must be determined not only through surveys of employee reaction to the training and testing for the extent of learning. Changes in employee behavior must also be documented, and results measured as to the degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training.

“We’ve had to relocate some of our instructor-led courses to larger rooms based on the sign-up rate.”

—Mandy Williams, First American Equipment Finance, an RBC/City National Company







“Why do most companies train? I’d say for retention, performance improvement and strategic development of talent,” says Bain. “Learning is about performance improvement, and if I were to say what success looks like at our company, it would be that we are successful in all of DLL’s six strategic pillars, which are setting our company up for success in the future.”

Williams says the ultimate success of any training program is its ability to positively influence business outcomes. “The ultimate ROI is whether we’re impacting our goal to be the best company to work for and work with,” she adds. “That means achieving financial returns in increased sales and increased customer satisfaction, and maintaining employee loyalty in our workforce so the business can succeed and serve our clients.”

First American uses the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model, a common standard in the training industry, and seeks to align with its four levels of evaluation. “But measuring can be timely or costly to do,” Williams says, “so the extent to which we would measure at those levels depends on the scale of those programs and the extent to which we need to determine success.”

“The ROI thing is really difficult,” admits Bender. “We’re very specific about objectives and what people want to accomplish, and we examine these with our employees every quarter. During the year those rocks roll up and we use Gazelles’ one-page strategic plan to see if we’re on track. But, ultimately, we see success as happy employees who are productive and want to be promoted.”