National Vision is one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing optical retailers with 1,300 locations and over 15,000 employees. Founded 30 years ago, National Vision has a well-earned reputation for providing affordable eye care and eyewear backed by exceptional service. When the company sought to modernize and elevate its employee training program with the goals of increasing engagement, reducing turnover, and accelerating internal promotions, it chose OpenSesame as its eLearning partner.
A vision for the future
Marc Strickland was tapped for the role of Director of People Development nearly three years ago, and his first initiative was to modernize and expand the company’s training and eLearning curriculum. “For years, we produced most of our curriculum internally,” he says. “But we’ve grown too large for that — we weren’t keeping up with the changing employee development landscape. And it simply isn’t a good use of our department’s resources to recreate content that’s already available.”
Strickland was introduced to OpenSesame while attending a learning solutions conference. “I spoke with several content vendors, but OpenSesame stood out to me,” he says. “Their catalog is massive, and their content is fresh, dynamic, diverse, and highly relevant. I could see it resonating with our teams, keeping engagement levels high and inspiring new learning.”
National Vision’s new curriculum initiative went live in early 2021 and the positive impact was quickly evident. “We identified several goals for the change,” Strickland explains. “We wanted to increase internal promotions, reduce turnover, and elevate employee engagement with the training,” Strickland explains. “We also focused our efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion as DEI is an integral part of National Vision’s mission.”
“We’ve reduced our employee turnover from 30% to 22% by offering a personalized leadership development program to new store managers.”
Marc Strickland, Director of People Development, National Vision
Increasing internal promotions by 25%
National Vision understands that increasing internal promotions is good for business — and its employees — so it launched a concerted effort to improve those promotions by 25%.
Previously, management roles were nearly evenly split between new hires and internal promotions. To change that metric, Strickland and his team reached out to OpenSesame for help selecting emerging leadership and other management training courses to grow its next generation of managers. And it’s working. “We’ve gone from 30-50% internal promotions to 70-75% now,” says Strickland. “The benefits of the new dynamic are significant. We’re spending less time and money on recruiting while providing an attainable career path for the rising stars in our organization.”
Reducing turnover by 25%
To minimize management turnover, National Vision created a new program designed to promote District Training Managers that would, in turn, identify, promote, and train store-level managers. “We pulled together a curriculum program to ‘certify’ the new store managers,” Strickland says. “It’s working incredibly well. We’ve reduced our employee turnover from 30% to 22% by offering a personalized leadership development program to new store managers.”
8%
reduction in employee turnover employee turnover through a personalized leadership development program
75%
internal promotions, up from 30-50%
Seeing real results
OpenSesame content is empowering other initiatives at National Vision. “Our DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) team has leaned into the training options available through OpenSesame,” notes Strickland. “Every month the DEI team finds a new focus, such as LGBTQ awareness or mental health awareness and hosts a lunch-and-learn session to introduce the topic and the training and information courses available to staff surrounding those topics. We’re proud of these efforts and extremely pleased at the high engagement levels we see with the content.”
In addition to the positive metrics attributed to its learning and development program, Strickland and his team love the feedback they get from employees who avail themselves of the new learning opportunities. “Comments from our engagement surveys are always positive,” says Strickland. “We hear things like, ‘I’m blown away at what’s available, from personal finance to wellness.’”
Previously, National Vision had separate contracts with a half- dozen content vendors to provide courses on compliance, soft skills, and IT security, for example. “We canceled them all for OpenSesame,” says Strickland. “It saves us money and is much more convenient.”
Eyes on the prize
“It’s one thing to have lots of content, and OpenSesame does have lots of content,” concludes Strickland. “It’s another thing entirely to curate that content specifically for an organization. Our OpenSesame representative understands our goals and our culture and makes recommendations for publishers and individual courses that meet our objectives and fit our style. This level of service is one of the reasons why OpenSesame is a great investment for National Vision. It’s content plus personalized service.”
“This level of service is one of the reasons why OpenSesame is a great investment for National Vision. It’s content plus personalized service.”
Marc Strickland, Director of People Development, National Vision