My name is Peter Meerman, and I am the founder of SLT Consulting. SLT stands for Strategic Learning Transformation and represents my passion for learning in general and corporate learning and development in particular.
I live with my wife and 2 children in The Netherlands and holds office in the city of Tilburg.
Although I have an educational background in Engineering (Aerospace Engineering to be exact), I have been working in the field of corporate learning and development for almost 20 years.
I’ve started working as consultant with Accenture in 2004, in what was then called the Human Performance service line. Over the course of 6 years I was exposed to various change management, organization design, strategy, system implementation and learning & development projects as clients like KNP (telecom), Philips (high tech) and Shell (oil & gas). Being able to work in these diverse roles enables me to gain a lot of different skills and experiences adjacent to L&D, but the final years at Accenture, I spend at Shell helping setting up the Shell Open University with their Blended Learning strategy, tools and processes. It was then when I realized that my main interest was with corporate L&D: Helping companies to develop the vision, the strategy, the organization and implement the technology required to organize learning and development in corporations.
After Accenture, I spend a few years at 2 small Dutch L&D companies. First as a project manager, then consulting and delivery manager and the last company as general manager. The focus of these years were more on digital learning content development; how to create meaningful, engaging and high quality content. The most satisfying project from that period was a training for the people at the election offices who, during general elections have to ensure that all voting follows the rules. We created an interactive website with video’s, instructions, reference materials and mini games, supported by Google Analytics to better understand who was visiting, what they visited and be able to adjust the site based on these engagement data points.
However I did miss both working in an international setting, and in the strategy, process and technology side of L&D. That is why I founded SLT Consulting in 2014 with the aim to provide high level consulting in learning strategy and transformation.
My first project in 2014 was back at Shell, where I helped the global legal compliance learning team to optimize their processes, technology and data. Compliance learning was delivered through Saba and was in a suboptimal state. There was no reliable process to deploy and update (annual) compliance learning programs, and their were no standards in how to best use the technology (Saba LMS), which simply caused to much friction and too many mistakes. In parallel with improving the process and the use of technology I was designing and developing a global compliance learning dashboard for all compliance officers at Shell to enable them to track in time completions and take action with to many past due. At the time each compliance officer created their own reports and dashboard using excel. This caused in a large variety of numbers and conclusions as often different compliance officers used different datasets/filters (sometimes they forgot parts of the data, sometimes they included too much data), and different definitions & calculations to come to the correct compliance learning status. This prevented Shell from having a single ‘source of truth’ and it caused a lot of miscommunication, confusion and unnecessary escalations. A single, well controlled, accurate and user friendly dashboard was to prevent all the manual work, and create that single source of truth. This was actually my journey in the world of big data and Business Intelligence: with the help of Spotfire, we were able to extract over 2 million global compliance training records collected over several years in the LMS. With this data, I created a dashboard with different relevant views (by organization, by topic, by location and by function) to display percentages and numbers of records compliant, coming due and past due. It was the first time in Shell’s history that had a single overview of all global compliance learning records and a single overall percentage of past due records that enabled the Shell compliance office to manage compliance learning much more accurately.
The second half of my work at Shell in that period was helping the global learning strategy team fairly similar challenges; create global processes and definitions, optimize the learning technology infrastructure accordingly and generate data driven insights to help monitor and steer towards the strategy. A lot of the work related to creating standards and definitions; creating a uniform way of working and a uniform language. A great illustration of how having standards makes L&D work not just simper, but also enables much more data insights. Continuing the work in learning analytics, I created ‘Learning Databooks ‘ that allowed Shell Learning leaders to (1) manage their portfolio in terms of utilization, costs and impact, (2) have meaningful conversations with business leaders on learning uptake; are employees upskilling themselves in the right topics? and (3) reduce spend related to underutilized external libraries. As part of this we also setup a learning analytics center of excellence in India to support the databooks and all requests for more custom analytics.
During the last months at Shell, the role of director global learning solutions at Philips opened up, and I decided to apply for that role. As director global learning solutions, I was accountable for all global learning technology (with Cornerstone on Demand as the central LMS), services, operations and analytics. As part of my role, I was also an MT member of the Philips University. The very interesting element of this role was the combination of transformation & strategic decision making with the University MT, while simultaneously ‘running the engine room’. The time at Philips enabled me to build a large global team, again put in standards and processes (benefiting the quality and availability of learning data!), get to know the tool and execute committee of Cornerstone onDemand (back then and still today the world’s leading learning technology provider), and progress with learning analytics. I particularly liked the initiative where we created a compliance learning dashboard for managers in Qlik (another Business Intelligence tool) with the explicit intend that it would integrate with the overall manager compliance dashboard. A really nice example of putting your key customers first, as in my opinion the key customers for learning analytics are employees and managers. It was also the time when more strict data privacy regulations resulting from the European GDPR legislation came into play. Building trust by safeguarding personal data became an integral part of the work in learning operations and analytics.
After leaving Philips, I was planning to write a book on learning analytics. But consulting work kept me from finishing it (it actually is still work in progress). I engaged with several very interesting projects at the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, all evolving around data and analytics: creating a data strategy for learning and development, and later a data strategy for the whole of HR. Creating interim learning dashboards, educating L&D professionals in learning analytics. 2 of the most impactful initiatives evolved around building a portfolio management practice; a process supported by data driven insights to ensure that the global learning portfolio of offerings is well utilized and covers all critical topics and skills. And the last initiative I was involved in was around targeted upskilling, where we really went deep on how to organize an upskilling program is such a way that you assure you capture all the data you need to do the impact analysis you need to prove the programs effect!
Currently, I’m working hard to built the learning analytics toolkit, which will be SLT’s upskilling engine on learning analytics for all L&D professionals. The toolkit will launch in Q1 2024, and will be packed with our best content, instructions, models, concepts, knowledge and skills test, practice and demonstration materials, and a custom GPT to help every L&D professional to address the challenges they face in learning Analytics.
I’m also part time helping ASML, one of the worlds most innovative companies, with their analytics journey in formal learning, informal learning and KM, and skills!
If you would like to connect, please reach out to me via email (peter@sltconsulting.nl), or feel free to schedule a 30 min introduction call via Calendly.
Looking forward to meet you!