Customer Story
How Brewer Science Boosted Employee Performance Reviews by 25% and Made Career Growth More Hands-On With Bridge
See why Brewer Science picked Bridge to offer employees different ways to learn, grow their skills, and stay engaged with ongoing career development.
Mission
Founded in 1981, Brewer Science is a leader in the development and fabrication of semiconductors and microelectronic devices. It helps customers reach their technology goals with a results-oriented approach to problem-solving.
The Challenge
Low Engagement: Employees Forgot Tasks and Weren’t Driving Career Conversations
With Brewer Science continually expanding its portfolio of products, the professional development team focuses on enabling employee-driven learning, performance, and career programs. This strengthens the organization’s culture of employee engagement and goal alignment.
Prior to adopting Bridge, Brewer Science’s processes offered limited scope to encourage long-term development, growth, or learner engagement. Since data couldn’t be easily captured, it found that employees often wouldn’t remember tasks and would expect HR to lead career conversations.
Before Bridge, the traditional training approach relied heavily on pre-recorded modules, which led to challenges, including limited engagement, low attendance, and an inability to cater to varying learning paces and modalities. The adoption of the live training sessions through Bridge has successfully addressed the company’s goals of enhancing engagement, flexibility, and knowledge retention. This gives subject matter experts the ability to schedule and facilitate at their own pace and need, while remaining compliant and maintaining the required structure. This live training module is also valuable for tracking internal and external training.-Cheryl Hoener, Human Resources Specialist
The Solution
No IT Needed: 100% of Training Now Managed by a Small Team with Bridge
Brewer Science’s journey with Bridge started when the professional development team adopted the learning management system. It found Bridge’s ease of use and simplicity of administration gave it the flexibility and freedom to administer training without the need for technical expertise.
“We were heavily dependent on our IT resources. And due to finite capacity on that team, it wasn't always easy for us to get requests customized or modified within our legacy system. So, we needed a system that was simple enough for people without an IT background to administer. Bridge’s number one selling point was that 100% of it can be administered within our small group. Everyone has a very similar experience, no matter which part of the interface they're interacting with. Bridge is beautifully simple, and that’s why we’ve felt so comfortable adopting it.-Amy Skyles, Learning and Development Manager
The LMS provided immediate value in meeting Brewer Science’s compliance requirements. Taking full advantage of Bridge’s performance management platform alongside the LMS supports the organization’s entire employee-first framework and delivers on the following objectives:
Compliance-based learning objectives:
Ensuring that training and learning requirements are consistently delivered to meet all stakeholder group needs, both internal and customer-focused.Impactful efficiencies that drive a proactive growth mindset:
Streamlining processes and people-related opportunities, allowing for the optimization of targeted growth programs.A progressive and consistent approach to performance reviews:
Taking a continuous approach to performance to engage and align employees.Thoughtful communication channels that enable engaged career plans:
Creating a centralized, accessible collaboration platform that conducts deeper, more active planning between employees and their managers to enable career pathways.
Our learning use case began by ensuring compliance from our customer base. Our customers have a lot of train-the-trainer needs to make sure their teams are trained appropriately on the products they purchase from us. Additionally, as we’re a government contractor, we have a lot of compliance requirements, like ISO and OSHA, that we have to certify.-Joseph Harris, Director, HR Systems, People Data, Learning & Development
The Results
Quarterly Reviews Completed Jump 25% with Bridge
Brewer Science is using Bridge to nurture its culture of learning, performance, and career progression. Thanks to process improvements resulting from compliance training efficiencies, the professional development team now has more freedom.
We're striving for efficiencies in personnel, systems, and interactions so we can promote a proactive mindset and continuous improvement. Because of the time savings we’ve gained by leveraging Bridge, we’ve freed up time where we can meet individually with managers to find out what development needs they have for their employees. That helps us collectively become more strategic so we can focus on different groups instead of coming up with broad, blanket concepts. We’re able to create targeted programs that meet the needs of individual teams.-Amy Skyles, Learning and Development Manager
With time and resources newly available to enable people managers to deliver employee development, they're seeing more frequent and purposeful career discussions. This, in turn, has improved manager-employee connections and means employees have the resources available to take greater ownership of their development and growth, starting by identifying personal career drivers and then building development plans. Using Bridge to conduct manager-employee one-on-ones keeps tasks, goals, and learning connected and measurable.
“Bridge enables a good initial communication between managers and employees. Our pilot users and their managers go through the “Career Drivers” exercise and document it in Bridge. Bridge really puts the onus on the employee and the manager to create the plan, as well as the related tasks.-Joseph Harris, Director, HR Systems, People Data, Learning & Development
Brewer Science has used Bridge to create a cohesive experience for learning, development, and performance that engages employees and has increased the amount of data captured. For example, as a result of process improvements and efficiencies, the team has documented a 25% increase in the number of employees completing quarterly performance reviews. This increase in data has given the team more data related to hiring, employee development, and satisfaction. In addition, this means the organization now has more data to improve critical decision-making regarding employee performance and goal alignment.
Bridge provides us with all the tools we need to build an efficient and effective performance management framework. Employees and their managers build a solid foundation of tasks, goals, accomplishments, and one-on-ones, all within the Bridge system. They then leverage that information to participate in timely and relevant quarterly performance conversations.-Josh Lind, Coaching and Development Specialist
Industry
Technology Manufacturing
Established
1981
Headquarters
Rolla, Missouri
