Look For Learning Partners Who Do It All
Large organizations sometimes face challenges in implementing end-to-end learning programs. Often the problems are operations and cost-related and manifest from the developmental stage itself:
- The high budgetary requirement to meet the technical complexities of simulations or interactive programs.
- Designing multilingual coursework adds to the costs and time consumed.
- End-to-end courses that are designed to be delivered over the long term may sometimes need tweaks or updates. Sometimes there are charges applicable to making changes. These costs can add up.
- Some coursework is rich in visual elements that need to be enhanced or updated. Changing visual elements can be expensive.
Training a large workforce comes with its own challenges too, such as:
- Getting more and more people aligned with the company’s digital transformation initiative
- Making the most of available timelines: getting people off the bench and on the job as rapidly as possible
- Consolidating all learning efforts under the larger enablement umbrella
From a development and operations perspective, end-to-end Learning and Development can be a lengthy, time-consuming process requiring a lot of specialized resources.
To take a typical example, creating an L&D module often involves designing a storyboard that encompasses the learning content to appear on the screen. While domain experts can collaborate with Instructional Designers and authoring tool experts to populate the main content of the storyboard, other factors must also come into play to make that content interesting, engaging, and interactive.
To that effect, audio-visual inputs need to be incorporated. Graphics designers are brought in to contribute to the visual assets. For other L&D modules that require simulations and greater degrees of interactivity such as flight simulators, industrial training systems, and long-term induction training, the complexity increases. So does the cost.
Sometimes courses for MNCs need to be rolled out in multiple languages simultaneously. Creating multilingual content is again an expensive affair, as translation, as well as localization of the content, needs to be spot-on for the training exercise to be valid and effective.
Support desk costs can pile up too when end users feel the pressure of getting up to speed before going live. Thus, the process of creating L&D modules can be expensive and time-consuming, requiring multiple levels and rounds of feedback, review, and redevelopment.
Benefits Of A Single Intuitive And Comprehensive End-To-End L&D Solution
Companies will have business goals for which the L&D activity is but a means to an end: reaching certain milestones with the intention of
- Making the most of the SAP investments they have made; and
- Giving L&D priority on a budget they can foresee.
Great content with operational simplicity across the various platforms, geographies, and cultures that form the company is an added bonus. This includes strategic outcomes like industry-specific learning material and operational ones like being able to dynamically translate content across all language and cultural needs. A milestone-based, comprehensive learning solution is the future of organizational L&D.
Is Your Learning Solutions Provider Delivering This For You?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about using milestones to measure the success of organizational learning endeavors. It is safe to say that in a post-pandemic world, there is no expense that businesses can spare that isn't directly contributing to the bottom line with at least a 200% ROI.
And yet, very few Learning and Development conversations center around returns in any form or format. Are you able to have focused, milestone-based conversations with your partner? If you haven't yet, the time is now to initiate a conversation and make learning a part of your business strategy. Needless to say, this is grossly impossible to do with vendors who do not have the bandwidth or the scale to become a partner to your business, and thus deliver on strategy and not just execution. This is where experience comes into the picture as well.
As for learning solutions providers, this is a conversation worth initiating for our clients and to be in it for the long haul, as the saying goes. To do so, one needs to have a strong base of learning analytics and platform expertise that can help track performance in the L&D space over shorter and lower time periods.