Bank One

"A company’s success is built on the foundation of employee excellence. At Bank One, we are committed to continually investing in the education and development of our employees. Our goal is to be the best financial services company, and it’s our workforce that gives us the edge over competitors.” - Jamie Dimon, CEO, Bank One

As the nation’s sixth largest bank holding company, Bank One employs 73,500 people worldwide, and nearly 16,000 in Chicago. To manage the education and training needs of this massive staff, Bank One employed nearly 800 training professionals across 61 education units as of 1999. Over the past three years, due to unprecedented cooperation from the internal education staff and support from the new CEO, Bank One has transformed its education and training infrastructure into one that is more streamlined and strategy driven, with effective reporting capabilities, and significantly reduced costs. The bank has sharpened the link between learning and business goals by providing relevant, customized training and using innovative technologies to put critical information and knowledge at the fingertips of employees.

Bank One University, launched in early 2000, is a comprehensive learning management system that enables employees, via the Bank’s intranet, to take online courses, enroll in classroom courses, track their progress, and access just-in-time information, all from work or home. While continually evolving, Bank One University offers 1600 courses, including about 700 classroom courses. Since the new leaning menu was put up and publicized, users have increased from 4000 to 50,000.

Thus far, reorganization efforts have resulted in cost reductions in excess of $30 million and reduced the number of training units from 61 to just 10 that are now much more aligned with the Bank’s business lines. For Bank One, this realignment has been not just a strategic or cost reduction requirement, but an absolute necessity, as the workforce is spread out globally and the organization hires almost 25,000 people annually, requiring a well-coordinated talent management effort. In addition, the training is now more effective since the Bank has developed its own internal instructional design staff and now employs one full-time education manager for every 110 employees, far below the industry average of one for every 150 employees. This level of improvement in delivery of effective learning solutions helped make Bank One the highest ranked banking organization in Training Magazine’s “Training Top 100” survey for 2002.

Click here to view full case study. The information presented here was assembled in 2002. This does not necessarily represent the current status of Bank One.