Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning
In the premiere episode of the Training Impact podcast, Jeff Walter, CEO of LatitudeLearning, breaks down how learning and development professionals can transform their training programs into strategic assets. At the heart of the episode is a challenge that many face: despite knowing the value of knowledge, L&D teams often struggle to secure executive buy-in and budgets. The key to reversing this trend? Understanding how executives think.
Executives categorize resources into two buckets: costs of doing business and strategic investments. Costs—such as accounting or legal departments—are essential but not growth drivers. Strategic investments, like sales or product development, are expected to yield returns. If training is viewed as a mere cost, budgets will stay lean. But if it’s repositioned as a revenue driver, it earns a seat at the executive table.
To achieve this, training leaders must start with the end in mind: What business outcome do you want to influence? Whether it’s improving customer service rep retention or boosting first-call resolution rates, identifying the measurable impact is step one. From there, L&D teams can map out who needs to be trained, what they need to know and do, and the obstacles to delivering that training—be it technology limitations, global distribution, or learner access.
Walter outlines five levels of training programs that align with increasing ROI:
Most companies operate in stages one or two, but the highest ROI comes as you move up. Don’t leap to stage five overnight. Instead, evolve gradually—first by validating knowledge acquisition, then layering in skills, performance data, and organizational alignment.
Execution hinges on ten essential training workstreams, ranging from configuring learners and content to managing assignments, progress tracking, and rewards. Particularly important is how success is measured. Going beyond course completions and satisfaction surveys, training should be evaluated based on impact. Ask: Are trained reps closing more calls? Are trained stores outperforming untrained ones?
One powerful approach is comparing performance between trained and untrained employees. This simple yet compelling narrative—demonstrating that trained staff drive better results—has a viral effect throughout an organization and strongly positions training as a growth enabler.
Walter closes with a real-world example: a franchise network undergoing bankruptcy used training levels as a deciding factor in which stores to retain. That’s the true mark of a strategic asset.
To move training from an afterthought to a driver of business success, L&D leaders must speak the language of impact. When training aligns with business goals and proves measurable ROI, it stops being a cost—and starts fueling growth.
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Hi, welcome to the Training Impact podcast.
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I’m your host, Jeff Walter, founder and CEO of Latitude Learning.
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And today we’re going to talk about transforming your training program into a strategic asset.
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So let’s get to it.
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So first thing we got to understand is what a strategic asset is.
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And we as learning professionals, we know that knowledge is good, we know that knowledge is empowering, and we know that more knowledge is
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better.
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And so we have a hard time understanding why management and the powers that be, the executive committees, keep limiting our budgets.
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And to really understand why that is the case, you really got to understand the executive mindset.
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If we think about the executive mindset, the primary things executives do
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Basically, 99% of their job is allocate resources.
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And in their brain, there’s really only two types of categories of resources.
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As an executive myself, I understand this.
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I’ve been doing this a while.
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And yes, there are two types of resources.
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There are things that are cost of doing business, and there are things that are strategic investments.
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And the things that are cost of doing business is things that you have to do to keep the business going, but it doesn’t generate a return on investment.
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So things like having an accounting system,
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or having a customer call center, having your legal department.
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I mean, these are all things that you have to do.
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You know, any type of compliance, regulatory compliance, these are all things you have to do to operate in the business, and they don’t necessarily yield a return on investment other than you need to do them to stay in business.
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Things that are strategic investment are things where if you invest the dollar, you get $2 back, and so you see,
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sales, marketing, product development, new plant and equipment.
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These are all things that can have a very high impact, where if you spend a dollar, you can get $2 back.
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And so as an executive, the executive mindset is you kind of look at the world through this lens of these two different types of resources that you’re going to allocate money to.
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Things that are costing business and things that are a strategic investment.
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And then the goal is
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as an executive is to minimize the money you spend on a cost of business and maximize the money you spend on strategic investments.
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And so the question then for us learning and development professionals is how does the executive committee think of your training program?
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Do they think of it as a cost of doing business or do they think of it as a strategic investment?
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If they think of it as a cost of doing business, they’re going to try and minimize the amount of money they spend on it.
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And so what we’re trying to accomplish in this episode is transforming
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your training program from being viewed as a cost of doing business to a strategic investment?
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And how might you do that?
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Well, the first thing, if you’re going to be wanting to get that strategic investment mindset in, is that you have to realize that you have to kind of start with the end in mind.
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That is, what type of business impact are you trying to have on the organization?
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And you have to think of it from those perspectives.
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What type of business impact are we trying to have?
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So take something
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something like onboarding for customer service reps.
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Now, it’s almost a given that you have to have a training program for bringing customer service reps on board.
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But the question is, what impact do you want to have there?
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And there’s a number of different ways you might look at that, and you might actually track a couple different tools.
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So there’s things like first call close rate for new hires.
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Are they able to resolve the calls the first time within the first six months of employment?
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That might be one way you want to have an impact because you want to improve
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a retention rate among customer service reps.
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It’s a notoriously high turnover job, and you might want to increase the return rate.
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That has a positive impact on the business.
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So those are just a couple of little examples, but you kind of get the point.
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You got to start with what kind of impact you want to have.
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And then once you wrap your arms around that, and generally, we as learning and development professionals don’t start with that mindset.
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We start with, these people need to be trained on X.
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The customer service reps need to be trained on how to handle
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calls, let’s say.
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But we don’t start with what kind of business impact we want to have.
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Do we want to improve their first close rate?
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Do we want to improve their first year retention rate?
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Do we want to improve the customer satisfaction index from the surveys when a call is answered by a new hire?
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You know, these are things we want to
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Then once we understand that, we can go into the things that we’re a little bit more comfortable with.
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Well, then, you know, that is who needs to be trained and what do they need to know and do?
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And, you know, we’re pretty good at that.
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Usually the impact is implied and we go right to I need to train these people to do this.
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So that’s, but you want to get that first thing first, what impact you’re trying to have.
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Then it’s who do I got to train?
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What do they need to know and do?
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And after that, really understand, okay, what are the challenges that I’m facing?
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Is it a challenge of timing?
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Is it a challenge of location?
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Are they spread out across the globe?
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Do they have the tools to be able to access online training?
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Do they have the time to access online training?
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Especially when you’re dealing with, say, people that are in positions that they are not at a computer or at an office, at a desk all day.
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Getting to a desk with a computer to get e-learning training can be a challenge.
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If they’re scattered all over the world because you’re doing partner training, you’re trying to
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train your resellers or you’re trying to train your franchisees.
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Again, these people are scattered all over the world and how do you organize them and how do you get to them.
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So what are the challenges that you’re facing in this particular thing?
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And then the next thing you want to kind of shift to.
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is, right, I know what I’m trying to accomplish.
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I know who I’m trying to train and what I need them to know and do.
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I know that there are these challenges that I have to overcome.
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And then you want to think about what type of training program do you want to have?
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And I don’t mean an onboarding or career development.
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We’ve been doing this for a while and we look at it as there’s kind of five different types of training programs that kind of mirrors our Kirkpatrick’s and Phillips model, but it’s more focused on the type of training program.
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And so the stage one, which
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has, you know, a modest ROI, what we call a self-directed training program.
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This is a training program where you’re not requiring any particular training.
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People are going into an environment, they’re taking the training they want.
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You might be suggesting things, but for the most part, the learners are taking the training they want or the training they and their managers are talking about, and it’s nothing that is required.
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Stage two is when you have a knowledge acquisition training program.
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Now with that, you as a training director or run
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running the training program.
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What you’re trying to ensure as the person running the training program is that that learner population has a certain set of knowledge.
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And one of the key aspects there is not just sitting in class or going through the video, but you actually need to assess that they acquired that knowledge.
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And then stage three, you’re looking at
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Skill development, you know, so stage two is like, okay, I know that they know what they need to know.
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Stage three becomes, can they do something?
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Skill is doing something.
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And with that, your training program needs to incorporate coaching and practice so that they can develop their skills.
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And so then as we move on to stage four, it’s all about individual performance and bringing key performance indicators into the training program, aligning them with the training, making sure that the training people are receiving impacts the key
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performance indicators, stage five, organization impact or organization performance, it’s that same concept that now you’re doing at an organization level, whether it’s your entire company or whether it’s at the store level, if you’re a retailer or a franchise or at the reseller level, if you distribute your products through third parties or at the supplier level, if you’re a manufacturer and you have a pretty significant supply chain.
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So those are the five stages.
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We call it the training program roadmap, but it’s basically the five
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stages of, or the five different types of training program you might have.
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Now, the key thing to remember in there is that they kind of build on each other and they increase in return on investment.
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So if you have a self-directed training program, that can be great.
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People that actually take the training can acquire a lot of knowledge, develop skills, but the impact is going to be fairly modest because it’s self-directed and the learners are taking what they want to take.
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As you go up to a knowledge acquisition
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the return on investment gets greater, skill development, even greater, individual performance, even greater, and organizational performance has the maximum impact.
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Again, as we’re talking about turning our training program from being viewed as a cost of doing business to something that is a strategic asset, you start with that beginning in mind.
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You figure out who you need to train, what they need to know and do, and then what type of training program.
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Is it a self-directed?
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Is it knowledge acquisition?
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Is it skill development?
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Is it individual performance?
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Is it organization performance?
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Now, 90, you know, been in this business a while, the vast majority of training programs tend to be in
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stage one or stage two, either self-directed or knowledge acquisition.
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And a lot of them are kind of halfway between where they have a lot of required training, but they’re not assessing the knowledge, so they don’t necessarily know if the knowledge actually was acquired by the learner.
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So, you know, if your program is there, don’t fret, you’re kind of in company, that’s where industry is as a whole.
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But if you want to start taking it up to the next level and start being viewed as a strategic investment, you need to start
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you know, assessing that the knowledge was acquired by the learner, and then start looking at, you know, going to the next level of skills and start working your way up that that roadmap to
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transform your program to higher and higher levels of return on investment.
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But you don’t have to jump right to stage five.
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You start where you’re at and you keep adding best practices and you move along.
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And that’s how you turn, you convert or you evolve your program into a strategic asset.
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Okay, now that’s all kind of the planning aspect of it.
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And now you actually have to turn that plan into reality.
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And so how do you turn that plan into reality?
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Well, there’s about 10 different work streams that you have to manage
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when you’re running a training program.
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Three of them are kind of configuration oriented.
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You got to figure out how am I going to organize my learners?
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Are there different audiences that I’m attending to?
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Types of learners?
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Where are they spread out?
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Does it matter that geographically, do I have to have somebody in a certain location?
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that’s been trained in something like, for example, if you look at school districts, they have first responders.
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And so it’s not just enough to train the first responders, but a specific school has to have a set of self first responders in there.
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How do you want to organize them?
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Do you need to organize them by location?
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Do you need to organize them by your org structure?
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When you’re training partners,
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Do you have to organize your German partners differently than your American partners?
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Are they country-based?
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Are they economic block-based?
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Lots of different questions there.
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Step one is how are you going to organize your people?
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that you’re trying to teach.
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And the second is how you organize your content.
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Is it going to be a set of resources, a set of courses?
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Are there going to be certifications?
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Are there going to be skill profiles?
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Just how are you organizing that so it’s easily accessible and can be…
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digested or it can be consumed by your learners.
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Going next is what’s the learner experience and how easy are you making it for them to consume that training?
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And so a lot of thought goes into that.
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So those are kind of three kind of configuration.
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You kind of do them at the beginning when you’re setting your program up.
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You evolve it over time, but once the program’s up and running, those kind of are set in stone and they get occasionally updated.
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Then you have a number of what I would call administrative workflows.
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And so there it’s your content creation, whether it’s resource content, course
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content, you know, are you doing big long courses or what kind of modalities of training are you using?
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Are you doing e-learning?
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Are you doing video training?
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What type of assessments are you doing?
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Classroom training, webinar based training?
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There’s all the modalities.
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And then a big push lately is, you know, to do the mini training, the bite-sized training.
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And so, you know, how are you going to create the content and what’s the kind of form, what’s the modality you shouldn’t use?
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Then, you know, moving on to the next administrative stream is
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How are you going to manage access?
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How are you going to manage all those learners?
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How do they get access?
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Do they get access to a third-party system that they all belong to and so you can do single sign-on?
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Is it going to be manual?
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Are you able to distribute the management of manual access?
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But what’s that workflow look like?
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Then you get into managing enrollments or managing a training assignment.
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And this, again, gets back to the type of training program you have.
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If it’s self-directed, then it’s just students going in and taking the courses they want to take.
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If it’s knowledge acquisition or some type of compliance training, then you got to be able to assign them.
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And then how you do the assignment depends on the type of individual, what type of training they need to take.
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Back to our customer service rep example, in an onboarding program, it’s like, okay, you’re a new
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customer service rep, you have to go through this training program, like it has to be assigned to you.
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So that’s that workflow.
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And then you also want to create a set of workflows, how you’re going to track progress.
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Is people going into your system and looking at a dashboard?
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Are there reports?
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Who’s keeping track of what and what does that work stream look like?
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All right, so now you’ve got the configuration and the administrative workflows.
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The next workflow you want to talk, the next three workflows, and there’s 10 in total, are the strategic workflows.
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And here you get into, for example, what is
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What is your reward and recognition workflow?
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How are you going to incentivize the learner to participate in the program?
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Now, for a lot of programs, especially onboarding or employee-based program, a lot of them are, the reward is you get to continue to collect the paycheck.
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This is training you have to take when you come on board.
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If you don’t take it.
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You don’t get a paycheck anymore.
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The challenge gets a little trickier when we start talking about self-directed programs.
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What type of reward and incentives are you offering people to participate in a self-directed program?
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It also gets a little trickier when we’re trying to train people that don’t work for us because we can’t use the paycheck as a way of
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ensuring that they get trained.
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And so how do you get your resellers?
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How do you get your authorized service providers?
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How do you get your customers?
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How do you get your suppliers to be trained?
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Because that can have a big impact on your operating expenses and your financial success of your company, but you don’t actually manage the learners and you can’t direct them to do it.
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So rewards and recognition, big thing to think about based on your training program.
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And then, you know, going back to where we started with the, you know,
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start with the end in mind.
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It’s like, how are you going to measure success?
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Now, the vast majority of training programs measure success by number of enrollments in a course or completions in a course.
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And it’s a good first proxy.
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Some of them also measure their success based on student surveys, people saying, you took the course, did you like the course?
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And so if you get a lot of people taking the course and a lot of people saying it was a good course, that’s success.
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And that’s a good first place to start.
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But again, we’re trying to turn our training program
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to a strategic asset.
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So you got to go to the next level and see, is the training having an impact?
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Now we can go all quantitative and look at things like we talked about before, first call close rate, customer satisfaction, things like that.
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But you can also do something that’s more qualitative, like ask the learner’s manager whether or not the training had an impact.
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Because the student will self-report that they maybe liked the course or didn’t like the training.
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And that’s an important thing to know.
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But what you really want to know is, does their manager think that the training was valuable?
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Did the training have an impact on the learner’s performance?
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One of the metaphors that we use is on the military side.
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It’s good to ask the learner whether or not they thought the training was valuable.
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But it’s kind of like asking the rural recruits in the army that just got out of bootcamp, did you think
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bootcamp was good.
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And while their input is important, it’s not as important as asking the generals or their, their, their, and the captains and the brass whether or not the bootcamp training is properly preparing that army for winning wars.
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And so one way we can get impact feedback is by asking those managers, was the training impactful?
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Did it actually make a difference?
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Um, and so that’s a very qualitative way of getting that information.
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Bring in the, the
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APIs and that also very important.
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I’m a total believer in that, but if you can’t do that, or a good way to start is to ask the managers.
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But back to the workflow, you got to think about how are you going to measure success.
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And if we want to go down and turn our programs into a strategic investment, you got to go beyond the, we trained so many people, we had so many course completions, the students said the training was good.
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You got to get to that next level of the manager saying, yes, it was highly impactful, or
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getting the actual data to show the impact.
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And then lastly, the last workflow, and this kind of gets short shifted a lot in a lot of training programs, is how are you going to keep evolving the program?
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I’m a big believer in continuous process improvement, total quality management here in Michigan.
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It’s the home of total quality management and continuous process improvement.
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And so in the training, we have to look at the same thing.
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What is your process?
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What is your work stream for improving the training program?
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program.
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And so that’s a big thing.
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So those are the 10 workflows, organize people, organize content, user experience, create the content, manage the users, manage the enrollments, track progress, rewards and incentive, measure success, and improve the program.
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And those are, you know, that’s the 10 things you got to do to actually run the training program.
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That gets us the plan.
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This is what we’re trying to achieve.
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Here’s what we’ve got to train.
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Here’s what they have to know and do.
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Here are the challenges we’re facing.
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Here’s the type of program putting in place.
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And then here are the work streams.
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And if we bring that all together, we should start to have a very highly impactful training program.
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Okay, which leads us to the next thing is now that you put that all together.
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And this gets to that last part of improvement.
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How do we make this go viral through the organization and work its way up to the C-suite that this is a program is a strategic asset.
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And again, in this industry for over 25 years, and the number one most viral thing that I’ve seen in any organization
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is if you can specify the performance of trained people versus untrained people.
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You know, what is the average performance of your trained salespeople versus your untrained salespeople?
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What is the average performance of your trained technicians versus your untrained technicians?
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What is the, you know, if you can get that type of information of the performance of trained versus untrained staff, that is exceedingly viral because in one little sentence,
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just captures the economic impact.
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Like if we take sales, for example, if a trained salesperson sells twice as many widgets as an untrained salesperson, well, anybody in the organization can quickly do the math and go, oh,
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The average salesperson sells 100 widgets, the trained salesperson sells 200 widgets, we sell widgets for so much dollars, bing, bang, boom.
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Training somebody’s worth half a million dollars a year in additional sales, or millions, and then you multiply that across the spectrum and you go, oh, having trained people is worth so many tens of millions of dollars of revenue to the organization.
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Same thing with the technician, same thing with store managers, just the performance of a trained store versus an untrained store, same thing.
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Most viral thing, so if you can take your training program
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and be able to figure out the impact of trained versus untrained staff.
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That will ripple through the organization and you’ll be well on your way to having your program not only be a strategic asset, but start to be viewed internally and by the executive suite as a strategic asset.
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And so that’s about it for now.
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Just a quick overview.
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We gotta, as learning professionals, we just intuitively believe that knowledge is good, knowledge is empowering, and more is
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better and we have a hard time understanding why we won’t get the budgets we deserve.
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We got to understand the executive mindset and realize that executives spend most of their day allocating funds and it either goes to a cost of doing business or strategic investment.
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And they’re trying to minimize the funds they give to costs of doing business.
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They’re trying to maximize the funds they get strategic investments.
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So to create, to turn your program into a strategic asset, it has to become a strategic investment.
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And when that happens, it’ll open up the floodgates
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But in order to do that and to just go over this process again, you got to start with the end in mind and you really got to ask yourself, what type of business impact am I really trying to have here?
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What type of needle am I trying to move?
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And then how can I measure that?
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And then from that, who needs to be trained?
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What do they need to know and do?
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What challenges am I facing?
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What type of training program I have?
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type of training program you’re going to put in place is going to basically set the type of return on investments you have.
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So is it a self-directed?
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Is it a knowledge acquisition, skill development, individual performance, organization performance?
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As you go up that curve, the ROI gets a bit greater and greater and greater.
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But where are you going to put your training program?
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And then once you have all that in place,
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how are those work streams going to work?
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Because that’s where the rubber hits the road.
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We can have the best plan, but if we don’t get those work streams down right, we won’t be able to deliver the training for maximum impact.
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And so that’s kind of the game plan.
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And we’ve seen that work time and again with various clients of ours.
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And, you know, in one client in particular, they were actually going through a bankruptcy.
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And at the most senior, senior level, they had to pare down the number of franchises that they had.
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And at the executive level,
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one of the attributes that came into deciding which franchises to keep and which franchises to close was the training of the franchise.
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And so, you know, I mean, it’s kind of a negative example, but you know your training program is viewed at the senior level as a strategic investment.
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If during a downsizing, the level of training at a partner or a franchise or a department is
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considered important in deciding what stores to close and what stores to keep open.
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That’s almost like the definition of a strategic investment right there.
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So I use that one, you know, like that’s when the rubber really hits the road when you see that, you know, that training program is a strategic investment.
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And so hope that gives you a little insight.
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Hope that helps in your training programs.
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You can always go to our website and get more detail on this.
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But I hope you have a great day.
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Thank you for listening.
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I enjoyed sharing this time with you and
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and I’ll see you soon.
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Have a great one.