RS Group Provides Education Benefits and Pathways to New or Expanded Roles for Employees

With its Workforce Edge portal launching in March 2021, RS Group (formerly Allied Electronics) has used the platform for more than a year. Through it, the company manages its education benefits while minimizing the hands-on work done by their HR department. 

LaRissa O’Neal, the company’s director of learning and development, Americas, recently discussed how she originally connected with Workforce Edge and how it’s helped to streamline the company’s benefits administration. 

What’s your goal with education benefits at RS Group?

“I’ve seen how education can open doors and provide opportunities for transforming people’s lives,” O’Neal says. “When I first got to RS and was able to dig into the capability needs of our organization and compare that to the existing skill sets within our organization, I knew that education was one of the ways we could enable career growth across our teams.” 

O’Neal goes on to explain that one of her first projects was to assess and solidify RS Group’s education partnerships. This also involved revising its education strategy. “I see my job as not just focusing on internal professional investments in our people but also in their holistic growth,” she explains. 

“We don’t just want to help make them better at their current job, we also want to provide them pathways to new or expanded roles.” 

Why Workforce Edge?

O’Neal notes that when she first started at RS Group, tuition reimbursement was already in place as one of the education benefits offered to employees. However, the program was not very well known, and not that many people took advantage of it. 

“It was managed manually,” she explains. “Our HR coordinator had Excel spreadsheets that she was trying to keep up with. This was not only cumbersome and complicated; it was pretty difficult for us to identify an ROI value for doing something more robust with what we offer.” 

Using the existing system, it was difficult to get metrics because there was no infrastructure in place. 

“As with any manual process, it was just tedious to even see how many students had gone through the program in the past couple of years as well as how much reimbursement the company had provided,” she adds. 

After searching for education benefits programs and corporate partners who might help RS Group manage theirs, O’Neal got in touch with the Workforce Edge team. “They helped us get going and made the process really easy. With Workforce Edge, we create admin and individual dashboards to manage in-network and out-of-network academic opportunities,” she explains. “We started to see an uptick in students using tuition-aligned pricing but we also had students in several non-network programs, so being able to find a solution to manage it all seamlessly and easily was really nice.” 

O’Neal goes on to describe the value of Workforce Edge advisors. 

"They do the individual consultations with our employees, so it’s not an added burden to our HR team. We don’t have to be experts and answer questions about individual courses, degree programs, etc. The Workforce Edge advisors take care of that.” 

How has implementation gone?

Noting a smooth process overall, O’Neal mentions, “There was little bit of a learning curve for our folks. They were used to our usual processes so we had to redirect them to using the new portal. Once we pointed our employees to the Workforce Edge site, they started using it more and more. It kind of runs itself, which is great.” 

When asked what she valued most about the implementation process, O’Neal points out the effect Workforce Edge has had on the HR reps at RS Group. 

“When you’re dealing with a company’s people teams, the ones who handle benefits, reimbursement forms, and getting the info out to everyone, they’re always busy and stretched thin. So any tool that can make their jobs easier, more intuitive, and that takes care of the heavy lifting is great. That’s what Workforce Edge has done for us.” 

Learn more about how Workforce Edge helps HR teams streamline their education benefits processes here.