Whenever she has a moment to spare at work, Postal Service manager Susan Marsh logs onto the computer at her desk and goes to school.

Marsh, manager of diversity and human capital development for the Postal Service's Pittsburgh-based Eastern Area, is working through Internet-based courses on building intercultural relationships and handling tough situations on the job.

"They're self-paced," she said. "They're convenient and I'm finding the content is applicable to the workplace. You can role play. It's very neat."

Marsh, a 24-year veteran of the Postal Service, is one of 300 managers in Pittsburgh and at Postal Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., who are testing a electronic learning management system that could one day be rolled out nationally.

It's a small part of a major business transformation ordered by Postmaster General John E. Potter to reduce costs, improve productivity and maximize efficiency of a mail service that competes against commercial delivery companies, e-mail and electronic bill payments.

Training is one way the Postal Service hopes it can overcome a potential loss of talent related to the aging of its work force. A third of the Postal Service's managers are eligible to retire over the next five years.

Training employees to advance or meet new challenges is a huge task when you consider that the Postal Service employs 770,000 in virtually every village, town and major city across the country. Already employees receive eight to 20 hours of job-related education a year, depending on their job titles.

One idea is to use the Internet-based system to make better use of existing training and development programs so there will be a pool of people ready to move into job slots as retirements occur.

"The federal work force in general is struggling with how to staunch the brain drain,'' said Michele Cunningham, vice president of marketing and product development at THINQ Learning Solutions Inc., a privately held Baltimore company that has a contract to supply the system.

"You can't keep people from aging but the skills, competencies and experiences they have around business processes and other elements that keep the engine moving can be retained and used to solidify the skills of younger people."

The system can be used to establish requirements for a particular management job and track how employees are developing with the technical, business or other skills thought necessary for a promotion.

William Stefl, a Pittsburgh native who is manager of employee development for the Postal Service, said the system will allow more emphasis to be put on individual career planning.

"The system allows me to match up a skill I might want to develop with an employee to an available course," he said. "I can direct an employee to that Web-based content and then I'm immediately notified when the employee has completed."

If successful here, the system will be rolled out across a multistate Eastern Area region and then nationally. Management will participate, but whether it is used by rank-and-file postal workers is an open question that depends on collective bargaining with unions.

Robert Otto, a Bedford native who is chief technology officer for the Postal Service, describes the system as a virtual university or an electronic highway that can carry courses developed internally or purchased from outside vendors.

The system should decrease overall training and travel costs and centralize and standardize disparate training programs in use across the country, he said.

"In some cases, we have maybe a dozen different versions of the same course. So this is going to allow us to cut down on our costs for courses and cut down on costs for travel," Otto said.

Travel can be costly for a national organization such as the Postal Service. In Alaska, where there are hundreds of post offices, Stefl said it can take two days for an employee to travel to a training site and two days for them to return home.

"We deal with a lot of issues on a recurring basis. We teach ethics every year. We teach workplace environmental issues and it's incredibly expensive to bring employees to a classroom.''

Pittsburgh was chosen as the test site because employees in this region have in the past shown a willingness to embrace new ideas and technology programs and because of Pittsburgh's proximity to Washington headquarters, postal managers said.

Stefl, whose office is responsible for new employee orientation, skills training and management development programs, said he also views the new system as a "coach on the desk" for managers who would need to refresh themselves on procedures or skills.

He said it could, for example, be used to quickly inform postal workers nationwide in situations such as the anthrax scare that followed Sept. 11, 2001.

Locally, employees at the large station on McKnight Road could take training there in a swing room once the new system is fully developed rather than travel to the General Mail Facility on the North Side, said Stefl.

There already is a substantial training infrastructure in place at the Postal Service. Executives and managers take classes at the Bolger Leadership Center in Potomac, Md. Union employees are trained at the National Center for Employee Development in Norman, Okla., which can house 1,000 students.

Since the Postal Service maintains one of the largest fleets of delivery vehicles in the world, much of the training in Oklahoma revolves around transportation upkeep. Technicians also are taught to maintain automated sorting equipment that can process 40,000 pieces of mail an hour, as well as postal vending machines and computer equipment.

Both training centers have broadcast studios capable of sending training information daily to hundreds of sites around the nation, including the academies where letter carriers are trained.

Stefl said the new system is "not intended by any stretch of the imagination" to replace traditional classroom training but should be considered a supplement.

"It's an additional way of reaching employees,'' he said.