Centralizing and Revitalizing Field Operations Training

The Situation

CenterPoint Energy’s electric business is facing a massive influx of new employees to replace a high volume of retirements and continue to meet the needs of an expanding customer base. At the same time, duties between employees and contractors are changing, and legacy training programs were not consistently aligned to work performed in the field.

Mosaic was brought in to conduct a review and analysis of CenterPoint’s electric field operations training programs to help support their goal of equipping a new generation of employees with the knowledge and skills needed to do their work safely and reliably.

During the training analysis, CenterPoint’s gas business became aware of an opportunity to benefit from economies of scale by coming alongside the electric training department as they begin the journey to build standardized, competency-based training programs. The gas business was aware of a lack of consistency and rigor in training programs across its five operating areas due to various acquisitions and the regionalized execution of training. On top of that, gas training was finding itself overwhelmingly focused on meeting compliance requirements versus building true competence in field employees.

Mosaic Offers a Solution

Mosaic recommended building and implementing a training strategy that prepares employees to be work-ready as quickly as possible and ensures career-long competence and operations safety by providing appropriate training and development throughout a field operations employee’s career with CenterPoint.

To accomplish this goal, CenterPoint partnered with Mosaic to quickly implement the following three components of the program:

Centralizing electric and gas operations training programs. CenterPoint’s gas and electric operations training programs are in the process of unifying their efforts to align with industry best practices, benefit from economies of scale with resources and technology, and drive consistency across regions and business units.
Setting up a two-tiered governance model to ensure alignment of training with business goals. An operations training council that is made up of individuals close to the work make training recommendations that are approved by an enterprise council consisting of executive leadership and representatives from all major aspects of the company. This process ensures the validity of all training requests, the alignment of training with corporate objectives, and the mitigation of any scheduling conflicts across the enterprise.
Defining competence and building apprenticeships and training programs for critical roles across electric, gas, and shared services. Defining competence means determining the type of work employees will be performing over the next three to ten years, then identifying the knowledge and skills required to complete that work to build curriculum maps and content for critical roles.

Case Study