Current Agronomic Knowledge and Pioneer Hi-Bred Sales Professionals: Keeping Their Saw Sharp with CCA CEUs.

Pioneer Hi-Bred International is a leader in providing extensive agronomic information and advice to customers. These resources are provided through their sales professionals, who act as crop advisers and consultants to customers, and online through Pioneer.com and Pioneer’s GrowingPoint^® website. One example is Crop Insights, a twice-monthly, Extension-like publication from Pioneer’s Agronomy Sciences team. Each edition of Crop Insights addresses a crop production problem or practice important to Pioneer customers, and is designed to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of the topic in a few succinct pages.

Recently, select Crop Insights articles have been approved by the Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) program for continuing education units (CEUs) for Pioneer sales professionals. The purpose of these modules is to ensure that Pioneer's sales professionals understand the content and can explain the main informational points to their customers. This demonstrated mastery, through a CCA-approved quiz, is an important component in the Pioneer training program for both new and existing sales agents. The CEUs are administered via an online module in the Pioneer Sales Learning Center, a learning management system (LMS) for Pioneer’s North America sales organization. Key goals of developing these modules included timely, efficient knowledge transfer, assessment and record-keeping that minimized time and financial resources required for the sales agent, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and the CCA program.