everal years ago, the Department of Labor began building O*Net, an online database of occupational information and labor-market research. The tool can be used by public and private employers, recruiters, and job seekers to define job skills and competencies, track wages, and research employment data, says Kathleen Cashen, executive director of NASWA, the trade association in charge of training for O*Net users. "It helps employers make more educated hiring decisions and it helps job seekers make better career choices."

    O*Net was designed to replace the paper-based dictionary of occupational titles (DOT), which workforce personnel have used since the 1930s as the primary source of labor-market information, says Mary Sue Vickers, research director for NASWA. But the Department of Labor struggled to raise awareness and get buy-in for the new tool. "It’s like replacing the dictionary or the Bible," Vickers says. "Employers used the DOT for 70 years, and old habits die hard."

    To help people make the switch, the NASWA team was contracted in 2001 to create training and build support for O*Net. They began by delivering face-to-face train the- trainer courses to workforce agency personnel. Over a year and a half, NASWA trainers traveled to 38 states and trained 732 people on everything there was to know about O*Net with the hope that they would take that information back to their peers, Cashen says. But it was an expensive and time-consuming process. Budgets were tight and travel became an issue after September 11, so NASWA turned to e-learning. In conjunction with Maher and Maher, they built O*Net Academy (www.onetacademy.com), an online community where anyone anywhere can take free self-paced or live training on the value of and uses for O*Net.

    The first courses focused on the value and benefits of O*Net, to reduce apprehension about switching from the paper-based DOT to an online tool. To make the training more attractive to skeptical users, NASWA designed several shorter live courses to meet the specific needs of various groups. "Some people need to know very little about the database to use it, while others need to know everything," says Vickers. "Instead of putting them all through an eight-hour course, we take 45 minutes and give them what they need when they need it."

    The courses are delivered through live scheduled "Webinars" and cover everything from application overviews to HR planning to employee retraining and retention. The Webinar leaders use WebEx software and phone lines to deliver interactive online presentations and field questions from participants. For individuals who can’t attend the live sessions, the Webinars are recorded and stored at the site for reuse, and are supported by self-paced tutorials for those who need follow-up or performance support training while using the database.

    "People love the sessions particularly because they are convenient and address their specific needs in a short amount of time," Cashen says. The fact that users can complete training over a lunch hour also gives it considerable value. It’s a big payoff for a small investment of time, she says.

    NASWA markets the training through e-mail notifications to its members and previous O*Net users. It also delivers talks at conferences and places links to course schedules at the academy and the O*Net Web sites. But the heart of the campaign strategy is word of mouth. It’s a community that grows as news of the training spreads, Vickers says. For example, from August to November of 2002, the number of participants in Webinars increased by 50 percent. Also, there were 23,356 user sessions at O*Net sites in the last six months, and 40 percent were return users.

    But the best indicator of the academy’s success is the reaction from the government agencies themselves. "The e-learning program for O*Net put NASWA on the map," Cashen says. "The other agencies see that they can get information out so much faster using e-learning and they are coming to us for guidance on how to do it."