Renewed Focus on Learning and Development

February 2, 2021

As we begin February, I wanted to share more information about our renewed focus on learning and development. Learning and development will be a key focus in 2021 building on input received through our 2020 Employee Engagement Survey, virtual townhalls, and follow up engagement discussions. Learning and development in 2021 will be focused on a number of different developmental areas, with many of the programs being facilitated in TRCA’s new Learning Management System (LMS) housed in Ceridian Dayforce.

Our new LMS, which is tied to our new Learning and Development Policy, will be the platform that houses TRCA’s learning opportunities and training catalogue. It will also be the system for all training, professional development and conference approvals. Finally, the platform will maintain all employees’ training and certifications, along with renewals and reminders. There are numerous benefits to our new LMS, including:

• Increases transparency and accessibility to learning opportunities across all divisions of TRCA
• Provides a single source for everything training and development related, including approvals
• Tracks TRCA’s compliance with mandatory training, regulations and certifications
• Monitors learner progress and performance
• Is a single repository for training history, certifications, and recertification dates
• For e-learning courses, provides employees with a self-paced, learn anywhere platform

The first organization wide courses to be launched through our new LMS, will be Certificate of Recognition (COR™) training modules; these modules are mandatory for all TRCA employees. COR is a critical TRCA priority for 2021 and beyond. COR is aimed at providing a tool to assess our health and safety management system and COR is increasingly requested by TRCA’s government partners as a requirement for conducting certain work. By embarking on obtaining COR certification in 2021, TRCA is demonstrating the critical importance to health and safety excellence and is helping to position our organization to better support our government partners. COR was typically focused on the construction sector, as many municipalities and organizations are requiring COR certification of all construction contractors, however, it is increasingly becoming more popular in other sectors. As a result, our Senior Leadership Team made an intentional decision to utilize COR as the foundation of our organization wide health and safety program to recognize our employees’ health and safety as a top priority. By working through COR we will continue to take a proactive approach towards mitigating workplace injuries and illnesses and enhancing our safety culture.

The pursuit of COR will take the commitment and work of all TRCA employees and will not be easy. There have been several organizations that have had to make several attempts to obtain COR certification. TRCA’s focus will be working through the process of incorporating COR as the foundation of our health and safety program and ensuring all employees have the training you need to perform your work safely. I ask that you continue your diligence around health and safety, and that you and your teams support the initiatives, training and audits that will come with COR.

In addition to COR, a few examples of training sessions for 2021 include:

• New Code of Conduct affirmation
• Wellness and Mental Health Webinars
• Learning Management System training and resources
• Diversity and inclusion mandatory training for all TRCA employees and new hires
• Workplace, Violence, Harassment and Discrimination mandatory training for all TRCA employees and new hires
• Supervisor-specific foundational modules geared for all people leaders at TRCA, including new supervisors and managers
• Onboarding Program Training for Supervisors
• Behavioural Interviewing Training
• Ceridian Onboarding and Recruitment Modules training
• Technology training
• Incident Management training for facility managers
• Records and Privacy training

As Human Resources builds out the training catalogue in the LMS, they will be sharing additional learning and development opportunities that focus both on the technical work TRCA performs as well as soft skill development.

Your insights from the employee engagement sessions over the past year have reaffirmed our organization’s strong interest in prioritizing continuous learning and development. I would like to thank Human Resources and Corporate Services ITRM staff for their work on developing and quickly operationalizing our new LMS while advancing several other important initiatives that arose out of our employee engagement discussions and our commitment to advance our updated Strategic Plan priorities.

I look forward to working with all of you to continue our learning and development journey beginning with our highest priority of formalizing our health and safety culture through COR training.

Sincerely,

John MacKenzie, M.Sc.(Pl) MCIP, RPP
Chief Executive Officer
Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA)