Manufacturing

How Brewer Science Boosted Employee Performance Reviews by 25% and Gave Employees Ownership Over Career Development With Bridge

Brewer Science picked Bridge to offer employees different ways to learn, grow their skills, and stay engaged with ongoing career development.

Industry Manufacturing
Company Size 500+
Region Rolla, Missouri
Use Cases Performance Management, Career Development

25%

increase in performance conversations.

100%

training administered by a small team.

The Challenge

Low Employee Engagement and Poor Performance Conversation Uptake

Before adopting Bridge, Brewer Science’s processes offered limited scope to encourage long-term development, growth, or learner engagement. Because data couldn’t be easily captured, employees often didn’t remember tasks and expected HR to lead career conversations.

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.

As Brewer Science continually expands its product portfolio, the professional development team focuses on enabling employee-driven learning, performance management, and career development. This strengthens the organization’s culture of employee engagement and goal alignment.

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.

CH

Cheryl Hoener

Human Resources Specialist, Brewer Science

The Solution

Managing 100% of Training in Bridge (Without IT Support)

Brewer Science adopted Bridge, finding its 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.

AS

Amy Skyles

Learning and Development Manager, Brewer Science

Bridge LMS provided immediate value in meeting Brewer Science’s compliance requirements. Taking full advantage of Bridge’s skills development and performance management capabilities, the organization’s entire employee-first framework delivers on the following objectives:

Compliance-Based Learning

Ensuring that training and learning requirements are consistently delivered to meet all stakeholder group needs, both internal and customer-focused.

Efficiencies That Drive a Proactive Growth Mindset

Streamlining processes and people-related opportunities, allowing for the optimization of targeted growth programs.

Making Performance Management Continuous

Taking a continuous approach to performance to engage employees and align goals.

Personalized Career Pathways

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.

JH

Joseph Harris

Director, HR Systems, People Data, Learning & Development, Brewer Science

Connect daily learning with performance conversations.

The Impact

25% Increase in Quarterly Performance Conversations With Bridge

Brewer Science is using Bridge to nurture its culture of learning, performance, and career progression. Thanks to process improvements from compliance training efficiencies, the professional development team now has more freedom to build a continuous performance management process focused on targeted upskilling and frequent communication.

25% more performance conversations

Increase in quarterly performance conversations with Bridge.

100% training administered by L&D team

All training administered by the small team in Bridge.

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.

JH

Amy Skyles

Learning and Development Manager, Brewer Science

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.

JH

Joseph Harris

Director, HR Systems, People Data, Learning & Development, Brewer Science

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.

Give employees ownership of their growth with development plans.

What's Next

More Personalized Performance Reviews and Onboarding Efficiencies

The team plans to continue using Bridge’s performance management capabilities to enable greater personalization of reviews that reflect the work people are doing.

As the organization continues to grow, the team is also focusing on onboarding new hires and using smart groups to automate the delivery of this training at scale.

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.

JL

Josh Lind

Coaching and Development Specialist, Brewer Science

Company Snapshot

Brewer
Science

Get Visibility Into Employee Performance and Development With Bridge LMS

When you unify learning and performance management, you eliminate the guesswork, giving you a clear picture of employee’s skills and how they’re impacting the bottom line.

Bridge helps you make the shift from once-yearly annual reviews to a continuous cycle of feedback and coaching, creating a culture of accountability through goal tracking and giving employees ownership of their growth through personalized development plans and career paths.

Behind the Scenes

Hands-On Employee Development, Hands-Off Admin

Bridge’s all-in-one learning, skills, and performance management platform.

See how Brewer Science is using Bridge to create a cohesive experience for learning, upskilling, and career growth that’s engaging employees without creating extra work for a slim L&D team.

Give every employee a career path.

Help managers keep growth on track with 1on1 agendas.

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