Before Peter Shelby joined the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in late 2010 as chief learning officer, the intelligence agency’s in-house university was split into five separate schools with little collaboration.
by Site Staff
November 19, 2012
NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE
In an era of government austerity and a do more with less attitude, Shelby knew the university would not be sustainable amid budget cuts if programs weren’t streamlined.
To facilitate the situation Shelby forged relationships with other members of the intelligence community, the federal government and industry counterparts. The NRO now has a reciprocal agreement with the CIA to share learning resources, and CIA instructors came to the NRO to teach several programs. With this partnership, the two have built two week-long programs: fundamentals of supervision and fundamentals of management.
Through contacts at the Federal Interagency CLO Council, Shelby and the NRO learning team received source code for the Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s leadership development Web presence. These collaboration tools would have cost the NRO nearly $10 million to create if it had to start from scratch. Instead, with a flat budget in fiscal year 2012, the NRO was able to increase employee learning opportunities 90 percent without any additional financial resources.
In addition to bringing new programs into the NRO University, Shelby worked to consolidate existing programs. In the past year, NRO University eliminated 14 redundant systems. It also added the NRO online passport and a 12-part set of training and development initiatives for on-boarding. Before development of these programs, the on-boarding process took between six and nine months. Now, it takes less than a week. Further, as part of the centralization process, NRO University added centralized registration tools, which makes all parts of the university easily accessible to any employee.