WASHINGTON — Walmart marked the opening of its first Maryland training academy in Glen Burnie with the graduation of its first class last Thursday.
The Glen Burnie location serves as a training ground for supervisors and managers from 21 D.C.-area stores. Elsewhere in the region, Walmart’s Dulles, Virginia, training academy was one of the first in the nation to open in late 2016.
“We spend about 75 percent of our time in the training classes on the sales floor so they can learn to do their jobs well,” Walmart’s Kristen Wilkinson told WTOP when the Dulles academy opened.
The academies are being opened for hands-on training for Walmart supervisors and department managers, and include both classroom settings and training that recreates real life, in-store experiences.
“We role-play customer service — for example, what does it mean when you say, ‘How can I help you?’ And how do you practice different ways to approach a customer? Another example is how to set up an aisle so the customer has a presentation that lets them find what they’re looking for and know the prices, and they spend time in that aisle looking at it from a customer’s standpoint,” she said.
There is also a Walmart training academy in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and one is planned for Ellicott City, Maryland.
The training is mandatory for department managers and hourly supervisors and can last from two to six weeks. For many employees, that requires travel, and building a network of dedicated training academies eases that burden, Walmart said.
The Glen Burnie academy is the 163rd academy Walmart has opened since early 2016, with plans to open 200 of them across the country by the end of 2017.
Walmart says to date, it has trained more than 140,000 associates and expects to train 225,000 by the end of this year.
