Wal-Mart's new sessions aim for consistent training

SHAWNEE, Kan. – Jesse Rice's job is to sell meat in the grocery department of a Kansas City Wal-Mart store. But ask him what he does and you'll hear him sell himself as well as his employer.

He'll tell you how he uses the retailer's "My Productivity" tool to help with cross merchandising — to, say, pull buns from the bread shelves and display them next to the hot dogs and hamburger meat in grilling season, but not at Easter when hams get pride of place.

"I strive for excellence," Rice said. "We want the customers to come in and find everything they need. And if they have questions, we want everyone to be there, to be able to help them."

Wal-Mart officials insist that Rice wasn't coached to say that.

It could well be that there's no faking the enthusiasm of a young man who's a couple of days into the new Wal-Mart Academy, a training program that by the end of 2017 will have reached a quarter million employees of the world's largest retailer.

For Rice, the meat department isn't just a low-wage or temporary job. He intends to one day become a store manager and, beyond that, a market manager supervising multiple stores.

All of the dozen front-line hourly supervisors or department managers recently grouped around a training table in the back of the Shawnee, Kan., Wal-Mart store may not share Rice's thoughts or goals, but for a few days they were captive to a concentrated Wal-Mart effort, new this year, to infuse consistency across its massive retail landscape.

While the company slows down store expansion to invest in remodeling and raising employee pay, it also is establishing dedicated training sites in select stores across the country, 100 so far and 200 by the end of the year.

Ian Markley, one of 17 trainers at the Shawnee academy, wears a headset and carries an electronic device around the training room. Lesson information is synced onto the trainees' individual screens or projected on a wall-mounted screen.

In another room, facilitator Nichole Um­scheid leads a class through a "replenishment cycle" exercise. She reminds them that Wal-Mart's computer systems do 90 percent of inventory ordering automatically, but "you may need to do about 10 percent manually." What if a forecast ice storm depletes the bread aisle or the ice-melt supplies?

It's still too early for the company to know if these exercises truly help in motivating or retaining workers. The Wal-Mart Academies debuted in February 2016 for top store managers only. In October, assistant store managers, Wal-Mart's first level of salaried management, began cycling through. There's an incentive for completion: Starting pay is $9 an hour, but it jumps to $10 when the 90-day foundation program is finished.

Some of the training includes unabashed cheerleading. There's a yellow and blue graphic on the floor that leads from the training rooms to the retail floor. Walk the path and read: