How Regeneron Scaled Global Manager Development Amidst Rapid Growth

A Bit About Regeneron and Renny Bloch

Regeneron is a global Biotech company headquartered in Westchester, New York. For 35 years, the company has focused on pushing the boundaries of pharmaceutical science to bring new medicines to patients.

Since 2009, the company has grown globally more than tenfold, from 1,000 employees to more than 11,000 at the start of 2023.

Renny Bloch, the Director of Talent Development at Regeneron, has been with the company since 2014—seeing much of that rapid yearly growth in real-time.

The Challenges

In 2020, Renny and the Regeneron team were left with one large, burning question: “How do you scale leadership development?”

From 2014 to 2020, Renny and the team relied on classroom-based training, comprised of 20-25 people per room. This approach served them well at that time. As the employee population grew more geographically dispersed, however, this approach became too time consuming and less sustainable.

Challenge #1: Supporting the development of new managers at scale.

Thousands of new hires and new promotions in a short amount of time collided with the challenge of effectively supporting their development, given a lot of those employees were new managers.

According to Renny, Regeneron had “people stepping into these roles based on their strong technical ability, not having experience or training to manage people effectively.”

They were left with a dire need for a new approach for manager development.

“That’s kind of what began to bubble up… At the same time, rapid hiring, as well as the rapid promotions,” Renny added.

In a department “State of the State” address, it was made clear that org-wide manager training needed to scale and improve to ensure impactful manager development and retain strong talent. “The bolus of comments were around manager capability,” Renny stated.

Challenge #2: Provide virtual corporate development programs that offer the same benefits of in-person learning.

All while this was happening, COVID-19 was touching down across the globe. If a dispersing employee population wasn’t already enough, the threat of a global pandemic shutting down workplaces foreshadowed a major shift to remote work.

The team experimented with self-guided online learning, but found the learning experience to be unadaptable. According to Renny, “It wasn’t really dynamic enough.”

Regeneron knew they needed to find a way to scale their development programs virtually, but wanted to maintain the quality and versatility of learning they were able to obtain when keeping classroom groups to only 20 or 25 people.

From there, they sought a program that would offer bite-sized, flexible learning options, where camaraderie could still be built across global audiences.

They found that this approach did not solve their pain points, nor did it address their need for something globally scalable.

The Solution

Regeneron partnered with ion Learning to design the Elevate peer-learning program.

The new program was a continuous learning journey driven by peer-learning groups—inclusive of live virtual training, interactive breakout conversations to practice, bite-sized eLearning, and pre- and post-assessments to measure progress based on the assessed capability gaps.

The program included peer-learning group sessions after every module of content, which helped Regeneron promote a social and collaborative learning environment that previously wouldn’t have been achievable in a remote-based training program.

The Outcome

Impact on Regeneron

With the help of ion, Regeneron was able to reimagine their learning experience. The new experience reduced time-intensive administration and focused more on the participants’ ability to network and collaborate with fellow peers.

Over 95% of participants completed the program, despite being in the midst of a pandemic and massive shift in the work environment.

With that massive shift, many companies struggled with increased turnover rates. Throughout the pandemic, however, Regeneron maintained steady turnover rates and engagement scores in the program.

Managers’ understanding of the key skills required to be a great manager increased by 19%, and managers also reported that the small learning partner groups helped them retain 73% more information and content.

Impact on Learners

Members of the program remembered what it was like to have fun with their peers, and were able to better bolster those relationships following their new learning experience.