Academically, something clicked when David J. Birnbaum went to high school. “I just decided that I had to study really, really hard,” he said.
Birnbaum transitioned from an average student to a straight-A student and went on to attend the University of Rochester. In the first week of winter break his freshman year, he was in a car crash not far from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. The accident left him in a wheelchair, a functioning quadriplegic. He spent three months in intensive care and then six months in physical rehab. All the while, Birnbaum knew he would return to college.
“It was just happenstance that they released me from rehab three days before Labor Day, and for whatever reason, I enrolled in classes four days later,” he said. “In hindsight, I don’t know if it was good just jumping back in the water or if I needed time off, but that’s what I did.”
Birnbaum completed a computer science degree at Brooklyn College and graduated at the top of his class. He went on to earn a master’s degree focused on artificial intelligence from New York University. Out of graduate school, Birnbaum took a job at Bell Laboratories, the research and development division at AT&T.
It wasn’t until a decade later, while giving a presentation to the sales and marketing team, that Birnbaum became reacquainted with the classroom scenario he relished throughout his youth.
“The salespeople came up to me afterward and said that was the best training class they ever had,” Birnbaum said. “I didn’t think of it as training, but it was sort of this epiphany.”
When the chance to work as a department head for e-learning at AT&T came up, he said he jumped at the opportunity. Six years later, Birnbaum took a job at Coldwell Banker after he was offered the chance to direct both e-learning and traditional learning programs for the real estate company’s commercial side. In February 2009, Birnbaum expanded his role. He’s now vice president of learning for Coldwell Banker Commercial and Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC, the company’s residential real estate business.
Coldwell Banker was the first real estate brand to introduce a formalized learning program when it unveiled Coldwell Banker University (CBU) 20 years ago. From the start, the university has been innovative and unafraid of taking risks, said Steve Bright, senior vice president and regional director of the western region of Coldwell Banker and a three-decade veteran of the real estate company. For example, CBU introduced a virtual learning component in the mid-2000s, before Birnbaum arrived. But the buy-in for most of the company’s 85,000 sales associates was slow at best, Bright said.
“People were struggling to embrace virtual classrooms, WebEx classes and self-study programs,” he said. “David Birnbaum and his team have made a miraculous transformation of Coldwell Banker University from something that was sort of dormant and hardly ever utilized to something that people are really striving to use.”
More people at Coldwell Banker have invested time in the learning programs under Birnbaum’s tenure because the learning team eliminated the cost of taking some of the core training programs and enhanced and better promoted them, Bright said.
The industry has noticed this change, too. Under Birnbaum’s leadership Coldwell Banker University moved from 113th to ninth in Training magazine’s Training Top 125, and last year, the university finished 19th in Chief Learning Officer’s LearningElite Awards.
The Elevator Pitch
Changing or adding new features to the learning program at Coldwell Banker was only the first step. The company’s corporate structure also necessitates that Birnbaum and the learning team market learning programs to managers and associates.
There are approximately 650 company-owned Coldwell Banker offices comprising about 21 percent of their worldwide system and 28 percent of their U.S. office base. The company’s corporate office cannot mandate learning for the franchise offices. And even with the company-owned-and-operated franchises, the corporate office can only mandate learning for managers. Sales associates are always considered independent contractors. With this kind of structure, the learning team has to sell each new learning program as something sales associates and employees will want to invest time in.
“We always have to show the value of the training,” Birnbaum said. “There is a marketing element where we want, in a very quick and interesting way, to show either for the agents, managers or administrative staff in the office, the value in any of our programs.”
CBU is also used as a selling point in the employee value proposition when Coldwell Banker acquires new franchises.
“We stress heavily how this university training program can get sales associates up and producing much more quickly and much more effectively than they ever were in the history of real estate,” Bright said.
For example, more than eight of every 10 sales associates who completed a CBU program saw their income increase more than 20 percent in the same year.
Going Social
However, for sales associates to reap the benefits of Coldwell Banker’s learning programs, they need to use them. Before he took over the learning department at Coldwell Banker LLC in February 2009, Birnbaum said the learning programs were underutilized because of a complex LMS and a tedious registration system.
“[With the LMS], Realtors would go in, register and leave,” he said. “It was not cultivating our learning culture. By building a social learning portal outside of the LMS, instead of a place where people go three to maybe 10 times a year to register for a webinar, self-paced learning or maybe a very intensive course, we created the social learning portal where agents of managers visit on a weekly basis.”
Unlike the LMS, the social learning portal Birnbaum developed does not require registration. Some people in the learning department were hesitant to champion a program that would make it all but impossible to see who was taking what courses. But the results are staggering: Since launching the social learning portal, CBU has seen a nine-fold increase in the use of videos, podcasts and self-paced classes.
“For me, the fact that I don’t know who took what self-paced class or watched what video anymore was far outweighed by the nine times more usage of those deliverables,” Birnbaum said.
The social portal also allows participants to leave comments and rank courses to create a clear feedback cycle. It’s designed to act as the front end of the LMS and offer another opportunity to share best practices.
Rethinking Mobile Learning
In the last year, CBU has added new mobile components. Birnbaum said the reason behind the emphasis on mobile is simple: Most real estate agents are constantly on the go, but remain tethered to their smartphones. This scenario provided Birnbaum and his learning team with the perfect medium to add just-in-time training.
“We thought, let’s just take what we have and shrink it down to make it work on the small screen,” Birnbaum said.
First, CBU unveiled a handful of self-paced classes and videos available on mobile devices. However, Birnbaum said he realized that while most agents liked the idea of mobile learning, few actually used the modules. So the learning team went back to the drawing board. Before unveiling a new version, Birnbaum said he wants to understand why an agent or manager would be compelled to use a smartphone as a medium for learning.
Billy Biggs, director of the public sector at global performance improvement company GP Strategies, recommends companies conduct a pilot and proof of concept if they’re looking to expand into mobile learning.
“Mobile learning is relatively new, so a pilot and proof of concept is an important step, minimizes expenditures and allows companies to change strategy easily,” Biggs said. “The last thing you want to do is spend millions on full enterprise strategy, only to realize the program does nothing for the end user.”
CBU hopes to better engage agents on a mobile platform with a smartphone app. The ultimate goal will be to provide performance support in the moment of need.
Birnbaum uses the example of a house for sale by owner. These homes are a prime target for agents to get a new listing. If an agent drives by a home with a for sale by owner sign outside, he or she will be able to search the app and find a script of talking points, a PDF with short reminders or a two-minute podcast with tips. Agents can use any of these just-in-time learning methods while sitting in the car to brush up before knocking on the door and explaining to the homeowner why he or she should consider selling with an agent. Birnbaum said he expects the app to be ready in the first half of 2013.
Next year also marks Birnbaum’s 15th year in the corporate learning world. Looking back to his college years, he said he never thought his interest in computer science and artificial intelligence would lead to a career in learning, let alone leading the learning program at the oldest real estate brand in the U.S. But, in one way, Birnbaum’s continued connection and pursuit of learning is unsurprising.
“I think inside I’ve always liked learning and teaching,” he said. “It just took me a while to realize that could become my career.”
