ost companies are used to being schmoozed by their vendors. But at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. it’s the other way around. Every year, the learning and development department at the global consulting giant invites more than 30 of its learning vendors to a two-day, on-site Learning Partnership Symposium at the company’s offices in Herndon, VA.

Why on Earth would a company pay close to $50,000 for its vendors to pitch products and services to its employees? The answer is simple, says Vicente Gonzalez, senior employee development manager at Booz Allen. It helps Booz Allen accomplish its strategic objectives.

The vendors provide Booz Allen employees with learning products and services from graduate and undergraduate degree programs to professional certifications and continuing-education courses. Booz Allen’s longstanding partnership with Johns Hopkins University, for example, enables workers to earn a number of graduate degrees, including a custom Booz Allen MBA program in which students take classes on-site at Booz Allen offices and work together to solve real Booz Allen business issues.

The training these vendors provide helps Booz Allen develop its primary asset: its people. The more education that consultants and other Booz Allen staff receive, the better they perform on their client projects and programs. “Our business is focused on consulting. We don’t sell widgets; we sell intellectual capital that helps our clients do their jobs better,” Gonzalez says.

The learning vendors not only improve the performance of Booz Allen employees, they also help the company retain them. On average, its employees enrolled in learning programs have an attrition rate of only 3 percent per year — well below the industry average of 20 percent. Gonzalez estimates that over a five-year period, the return on investment derived from that impressive employee-retention rate will add up to another $200 million in cost savings for the company.

All told, Booz Allen spends close to $15 million each year with its university and training partners. To maximize this investment, Booz Allen provides these partners with an unobstructed view into its business, both from the corporate and learning-and-development department perspectives. The partners can then provide better-tailored products and services that support Booz Allen’s organizational goals.

“When you’re in a true partnership, you want to share information, open the lines of communication, and tell your vendors what your business challenges are,” Gonzalez says. The more that you help them to understand your business, the more able they’ll be to help you meet those challenges and the more effective the partnership is going to be.”

partnership program

In 2002, the company launched the Learning Provider Partnership Program, which grants preferred-provider status and an array of other benefits to a select group of learning vendors. The primary goal of the program — at least initially — says Gonzalez, was to provide employees with a single point of access to academic-development opportunities and to better leverage relationships with vendors in order to provide employees with the best development programs possible.

The program has enabled Booz Allen to negotiate reduced educational rates, allowing the company and its workers to stretch educational dollars further. Some vendors in the program also offer the company’s employees flexible scheduling, convenient on-site learning programs at Booz Allen offices, discounted tuition for employees’ family members, and certification guarantees, among other benefits.

“We view our partnerships as marriages,” Gonzalez says. “The goal is to create mutually rewarding relationships so that the companies that are partnering with us have a vested interest in our long-term success, and we, in turn, have an interest in helping to drive their business over the long term.”

Then there are the hard numbers. During the 2006 fiscal year alone, the firm saved approximately $2.5 million in learning-and-development costs compared to what it used to spend on continuing-education programs before launching the partnership program. These savings, according to Gonzalez, are attributable to economies of scale achieved by the program, and negotiation of aggressive pricing structures with the participating learning partners.

The annual Learning Partnership Symposium is the program’s centerpiece. According to Gonzalez, the symposium helps the learning and development department build a community with its learning partners. “Most important, it allows us to share our current state and future planning for employee development, providing a context for our partners to further understand how their businesses may more effectively align to help us drive toward our corporate goals,” he says.

A Room Full of Sharks

One feature of the annual event is an evening cocktail and networking reception, which gives partners an opportunity to meet informally with the Booz Allen learning and development team and to network with each other.

Aimee George Leary, Booz Allen’s director of learning and development, says the reception often comes as a shocker to outsiders. For example, when Booz Allen invited several of its training-industry peers to the reception for benchmarking purposes a few years ago, some were leery of being “let loose in a room full of sharks.” By the end of the evening, however, their attitude had changed 180 degrees.

“What they found is that vendor relationships needn’t be adversarial,” says George Leary. “The evening was about building relationships, having a celebration, and sharing best practices. All of them — to their surprise — got a lot out of the exchange.”

Strategic Alliances

On the very first day of the Learning Partnership Symposium, Booz Allen delivers a series of briefings addressing the company’s strategic initiatives, operational needs, trends affecting its industry, and the learning and development department’s plans and strategies for the upcoming year. “We focus on aligning our learning-offering goals with the firm’s strategies,” Gonzalez says. “We also share some of our past successes, many of which were achieved with our partners, so that they know how they contributed to our success.”

Next, partners participate in a round-robin panel discussion and Q&A led by members of the Booz Allen learning and development department leadership team and representatives from each of the company’s core areas of business. During the discussion, panel members answer questions solicited from partners one month prior to the event, and then open up the floor for an informal Q&A. “Some questions are more formally focused around strategy, while less-formal questions are asked too, such as how our partners can integrate their products to better serve our needs, and how they can gain more access not only to us but to the broader Booz Allen business and to our clients,” Gonzalez says.

Finally, partners end the day with a consulting session during which they are assigned real-life case studies drawn from Booz Allen’s business. Teams of vendors with like products and offerings create “best-in-class” solutions to address the cases. The outcomes of these partner collaborations signify a big win not only for Booz Allen, notes Gonzalez, but also for the partners, who often use the activity as a platform to network with one another and determine how they might work together in the future to provide more robust solutions to Booz Allen and other customers.

“If you listen to feedback from participants, you hear, ‘Before, I would never have picked up the phone to call Joe. I would do that now, and I have defined opportunities to work with him — not just with Booz Allen, but with others as well,’” Gonzalez says.

Jennifer Runyon, a business development manager at ESI International Inc., a training provider in Arlington, VA, agrees. She says the Symposium is invaluable in helping to break down barriers among Booz Allen’s vendors — many of whom are competitors in the marketplace — and encouraging “mutual exchange and discussion about how to position products together to support Booz Allen and other customers.”

letting vendors loose

As if opening the curtains to its business and helping vendors build their own partnerships weren’t enough, Booz Allen also hosts a half-day partner expo on the final day of the Symposium. Dubbed the Learning Symposium Exhibit Event, the expo provides a forum for partners to showcase their products, learning services, and new ideas to Booz Allen employees, many of whom are bused in from the company headquarters in nearby McLean, VA, to attend the event.

All told, 57 partners from 33 companies exhibited at Booz Allen’s November 2006 expo, which marked the Symposium’s fourth year. The event also offers a singular opportunity for Booz Allen employees to find out more about the learning offerings available to them. More than 650 Booz Allen employees attended the company’s November 2006 expo, including 60 learning and development department staff. “We had an incredible response from employees this year,” Gonzalez says. “People signed up for college and certificate programs on the spot.” During the 2006 Expo, a handful of learning providers also presented Learning Provider Briefings: one-hour breakout sessions on topics such as emerging industry trends and new learning solutions.

“We pay close attention to feedback from our partners, and the event has evolved over the years as a result of that feedback,” Gonzalez says. Partner input gathered prior to the 2006 Symposium, for example, indicated that while partners loved the event in many ways, “they wanted to roll up their sleeves a bit more and get into the business side of things,” he explains. In response, Gonzalez and his team re-engineered the 2006 symposium and expo to place more emphasis on providing partners with opportunities to drive business results, such as the new case-study exercises and learning-provider briefings.

Its close partnership with vendors and its annual event have helped Booz Allen to become an industry leader in internal training. Since 2000, the department has nabbed nearly every honor in its industry, including the No. 1 spot on Training magazine’s 2006 Top 100 List and the American Society for Training and Development’s #1 BEST Award.

The results are simple: Better, more-convenient, and more-customized learning products and services build intellectual capital and encourage employee retention, which improves Booz Allen’s service to its own clients. As Gonzalez explains, “Just as we’re focused on building long-term, effective relationships with our clients, we also extend that attitude to our partners and vendors to build long-term effective relationships with them.” e