Scaling training programmes is a challenge. How can organisations effectively deliver exponentially increasing amounts of training while keeping effectiveness?
And what about going global?
Global training programmes present unique challenges, such as maintaining a corporate common vision, while allocating room for adaptation or localisation to make the skills and practices relevant everywhere. On top of this, ensuring quality, control costs, secure planning… seems much? Let's explore the key factors that influence the success of large-scale, international training programmes.
- 1- Have clear objectives and a rollout strategy.
- 2- Define the right programme and experience for you.
- 3- Select a global training provider.
- 4- Involve corporate and local stakeholders.
- 5- Consider culture, language and local features.
- 6- Staff and onboard the right facilitators.
- 7- Keep budget and administration under control.
- 8- Monitor the consistency of the rollout.
- Video summary
- Conclusion
1- Have clear objectives and a rollout strategy.
What do I want to achieve?
As with any plan and project, setting goals is key.
In this case, it is important to have a clear vision of what your corporate programme should look like. Specifically, what do you aim to achieve in terms of KPIs and tangible results in workplace performance? These will illustrate your project scorecard and will be necessary throughout the deployment process to ensure you’re on the right track.
2- Define the right programme and experience for you.
What should be the content and methodology?
There’s plenty of great off-the-shelf learning solutions available on the market. You can choose to use some of them, to adapt them to your company’s specific needs, or to draft a completely customised learning experience from scratch (maybe combining existing off-the-shelf solutions).
All options work, as the best choice depends on many factors. Relying on off-the-shelf can reduce upfront investment, speed up implementation and reasonably provide positive outcomes. Alternatively, a customised programme may lead to faster adoption and enable you to tackle very specific objectives.
3- Select a global training provider.
Who is able to deliver training glocally (i.e., globally with a local touch)?
Often, you'll collaborate with the training vendor to define the content, resources and learning experience. But many times, a vendor is selected based on the programmes they bring you. Therefore, it’s important to partner with one who can guarantee they’ll bring and onboard certified trainers while displaying strong project management capabilities for this rollout.
Truism: for global initiatives, it is more effective to rely on global vendors rather than a multiplicity of local ones, or than a single local provider who will fly or deliver training virtually from one location…
4- Involve corporate and local stakeholders.
Who will promote the programme, and who needs to be engaged internally?
Your local stakeholders need to see “their win” in leveraging from your corporate initiative. They will certainly have thought of other alternatives, so they’ll support yours as long as it brings them better value.
If you want your harmonized approach to succeed, you’ll have to present a winning business case for the global initiative. Therefore, you will require corporate sponsorship and support, and tailored arguments to get local buy-in. With your support, they will then take the lead on scheduling, publishing, promoting, administering and paying for the programme.
5- Consider culture, language and local features.
How much should the learning experience vary per region?
Don’t wait for your local colleagues to request twists and tweaks in the programme to make it relevant for their region.
Play it proactively and define the “local spice” of your corporate programme. You may think you can avoid this until someone unexpectedly crashes your meeting by bringing up the issue… or even worse, if it occurs later, when engagement metrics and results are not what you expected.
Consider these mottos as mantras: “Translation is not localisation”, “English is not English”, or simply “A here is B there”.
6- Staff and onboard the right facilitators.
Who are my envoys?
Whether you use your internal trainers, your global vendor’s trainers or a mixed group: make sure that they represent your organisation in terms of style, cultural match, background and expertise.
Engage them to ensure they understand the big picture, align with company values, and can effectively convey the messages. Give them context, explaining the learners’ journey within the company, their existing knowledge and their expectations from the programme. Team up with them, so they know their role and actions in the bigger process (i.e. make them “be part” instead of just “doing their part”).
7- Keep budget and administration under control.
Taking a broader look, what else do I need to manage?
Global rollouts may involve some costs that you don’t usually deal with in local deployments.
Allocate enough (time and) budget for programme design (or fine-tuning) and anticipate the needed rounds of pilot(s) and validation (you may also involve your local stakeholders).
Figure out the best deployment strategy and seek clarity of cost per region, per cohort, per participant. Don’t forget to calculate the total cost of ownership instead of just the “total amount of vendor invoices” (e.g. time, logistics & platform or venue, eventual T&A, , process costs…).
Agree on the best contracting, administration and invoicing scheme with your procurement . Check if your systems are ready to integrate and support the programme worldwide. Create a global calendar considering holidays and high business periods…
Wow, anything else? Well… Certainly there is more, but let’s keep it “simple” for today…
8- Monitor the consistency of the rollout.
Is this working as expected?
We’ve briefly mentioned the milestones of programme sign-off and trainer onboarding, and then it’s very likely you’ll want to run some pilot sessions before hard launch. (In fact, defining your launch and rollout strategy is also another key to consider).
Still, after all that, you will keep following up closely on feedback and KPIs collected from the programme. Therefore, it’s important to maintain regular checkpoints with your vendor and key stakeholders to learn from their experience in each region and eventually make programme adaptations.
Video summary
Conclusion
Of course, there’s more to unveil for each of the keys… we may go more in-depth in future posts.
If you would like to learn more about how Cegos can help you roll out a successful global learning experience, get in touch.
