External training that stimulates the return on investment: steps to create programs

Create, deliver and optimize external training

The learning needs of modern organizations extend beyond the training of employees and customers. If your company has partners, suppliers, distributors or resellers, learning and development (L&D) should meet the unique needs and knowledge gaps with coherent, dynamic and personalized external training. In this article, we will explore the six stages that L&D can take to create external training programs that give real investment yields (King).

The evolution of external training

Until recently, traditional business training was a business top to bottom which mainly focused on employees and partners. The information has flowed in one direction: directly towards the learner (often an employee, a customer or a partner). Given that supply chains and commercial systems have evolved to become more complex than ever, L&D had to adjust its scope to meet the growing training needs not only employees, but from the entire extensive corporate ecosystem of suppliers, distributors and others.

Change to external training also required a more dynamic approach to knowledge management. L&D can no longer send a training manual to a partner and call it one day. The exchange of knowledge has become a two -way street and an operational necessity for modern companies.

The advantages and challenges of external training

Competitive organizations include the positive impact that a strategic approach to external training may have, by organizing, by organizing, providing and improving the training, industry and company training resources for all members of the company. A better informed partner or customer will have a better experience with the product or service of a company and could start to consider this company as a source of confidence for the knowledge of industry or products.

When creating an external training strategy, determining what aspects of organizational learning must be shared can be difficult. Many organizations choose to share only information on products or services, but more robust programs choose to share innovative or effective business practices of their partners through the company, or to offer training opportunities for general skills to improve results for suppliers, partners and customers. Opt for learning management systems that offer predefined courses on such subjects can help L&D easily launch these external training, without the need to create personalized courses.

Including these training courses based on skills in external stakeholders who may not have solid internal learning resources, can also promote stronger commercial relations and reduce their dependence on the customer experience of your organization (CX). This releases time and resources for your CX team members and your sales team to focus on high -level strategy or high -value commercial opportunities.

Despite the obvious advantages of holistic knowledge sharing, all customers, suppliers or partners will not be open to this approach. If a partner has his own robust learning program, for example, he can consider your external training as an intrusion. But obtaining membership of a learning strategy between the coherent intermediary company is worth it, because external training can improve your company's offers and overall customer experience, which ultimately leads to churches and more income possibilities.

Build a learning program for the expanded company

The training of each field of your business is not an easy task. A robust L&D strategy for business level training must meet the needs and gaps in partners, suppliers and other stakeholders in the organization, while requesting the comments of each learner to continuously improve external training. Follow these six tips to help you create, deliver and optimize your external training program:

1. Identify your target external learners

Which stakeholders are members of your business? Know who are your partners, suppliers, distributors, resellers and other key stakeholders, will help executive leadership understand their value and the potential return on investment to train them.

2. Evaluate the apprenticeship documents available

Before creating net external training, L&D should identify the specific skills that their external teams can already learn and if their knowledge has been documented. What courses exist in the libraries of your partners? How do they currently train their teams? These questions must be addressed internally and jointly with other external stakeholders.

3. Identify the required training

After identifying the knowledge and skills of your business already, you will need to take stock of what your external training program will need. L&D should ask: “What precious information is necessary, but does not yet exist?” Again, this evaluation must be carried out both internally and in collaboration with the external stakeholders.

4. Delimiting shareable and non -stimulating knowledge

For many companies, there are certain information that does not need to be shared or cannot be shared. When creating an external training program, be sure to protect any owner's knowledge that your organization would not want to share widely. (The Toyota mantra was “sharing intensively, but selectively.”)

5. Build collaboration in your external training strategy

It is important to collect comments from external stakeholders before, during and after the training process. As you have finished step 4 and have asked for “What to be shared?”, Determine how your business and its partners, distributors, sellers or resellers want to share it. What solutions or platforms for business learning can be used? How will authorizations be managed? How will the schedules and messages be coordinated? You will also have to attract executive leadership to ensure that the program creates savings and income by asking “who pays what?”

6. Gather the comments and iterez

The work is not finished when external training has been built and implemented. To continue to extract the most value from external training, L&D will have to follow up with external learners and stakeholders to collect comments on the training itself, as well as all customer comments on your product or service.

Building frequent comments and improvement cycles in external training is at the heart of this modern strategy. This guarantees that these learners outside your employee database is always aligned with the vision and objectives of your business. The integration of your external training platform into existing commercial systems such as CRMS, SIRH and sales platform software is essential for obtaining usable information on the impact of external training in the company.