Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning
In this unique episode of the Training Impact Podcast, Jeff Walter takes listeners on a reflective hike through the woods of Northern Michigan to answer a deceptively simple question: What makes partner training different from employee training? What begins as a casual query from a colleague unfolds into an in-depth comparison that explores the core design, objectives, and administration of two fundamentally different learning models.
Walter emphasizes the key distinction—focus. Employee training is inherently individual-centric, designed around onboarding, compliance, and career development. It presumes an established organizational structure where learners’ roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines are well-known. Managers drive accountability, and learners’ progress is tracked through integrated HR systems. Employee training often relies on horizontal content—standardized modules that cover generic skills like communication, software use, or customer service, frequently sourced from third-party providers.
In contrast, partner training is organizationally focused. It targets independent businesses—dealers, resellers, service providers—whose employees need the skills to sell, service, or use a company’s products effectively. These learners exist outside the direct employment structure, and as such, the training platform must support nuanced partner models, brand-specific content, and location-based certification tracking.
Walter explains how partner training demands a system capable of managing thousands of partner locations, each with distinct hierarchies, product lines, and training needs. Success is measured not by individual completion, but by whether a location can be deemed a “certified partner”—defined by a matrix of certified individuals across sales, service, and management roles.
The discussion also highlights the motivational differences. Employees are often compelled by job requirements, while partners require incentives—discounts, bonuses, recognition—to prioritize learning. Certification thus becomes central, serving as both a credential and a condition for enhanced partnership benefits.
Access management is another vital distinction. While employee systems rely on HR integration for user creation, partner platforms must support self-registration, partner approvals, and automation to avoid administrative bottlenecks. Similarly, learners may wear multiple hats—a necessity for small businesses where one person might be a technician, sales rep, and service manager. An effective LMS must allow for such role fluidity.
Finally, Walter stresses content creation. Partner training often demands proprietary, brand-specific materials that cannot be sourced from generic course providers. This means organizations must own the content development lifecycle to ensure accuracy and relevance.
In summary, this episode unpacks how partner training requires a fundamentally different learning architecture—one centered on organizations, certifications, scalability, and flexibility. Walter uses this hiking meditation to underscore why the LatitudeLearning LMS is purpose-built for partner learning, not just an adaptation of employee-based models.
This thoughtful walk through the complexities of extended enterprise training leaves listeners with a clear understanding of why purpose-built solutions matter—and how a well-designed partner training program can drive performance across the value chain.
00:00 Exploring Training Programs: Employee vs. Partner
05:18 Understanding Employee Training Programs
09:40 Diving into Partner Training Programs
14:32 Incentives and Engagement in Partner Training
18:01 User Management in Training Programs
22:55 Key Differences in Training Focus
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Hey, it’s Jeff, and I’m up here in Northern Michigan.
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It’s Memorial Day weekend.
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And right before I left for the weekend, I was talking to a colleague of mine, and she was asking, Hey, I know we sell a little partner learning platform, and that it has more features and functions that partners need, you know, clients need to implement partner training programs versus an employee-based platform.
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But how are employee training programs differed from partner training programs?
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And it really got me thinking and I was pondering for hours.
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And so I’m up here, like I said, in Northern Michigan and I’m about to take a little hike and I figured while I walk around the woods here, I’ll explore the difference between an employee and a partner training program and why our partner training or partner learning platform
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the Latitude Learning LMS has the features it has and why that’s important.
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So join me on the journey as we take a hike through the woods up here in Michigan.
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All right.
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Well, this seems like a good place to start.
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We have a beautiful field here.
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It’s been in the forties all day today, but the sun is starting to break out.
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We’ve had a bunch of rain.
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And so when I look at the difference between an employee training program and a partner training program, and this might sound obvious in retrospect, but yeah, we
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When people ask us about that, we’ve talked about features and functions on our learning platform and what makes it a partner learning platform.
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But I had this epiphany, like I said, after my colleague asked me the question, and the epiphany was, and like I said, it sounds obvious in retrospect, but a employee training program is centered on the employee.
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It’s all about the employee and a partner training program
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While there are still learners that have to learn, the actual focus of the training program, the center of the program, its essence is about the partner and having a trained partner versus a trained employee.
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And so let me just kind of dive into that a little bit more.
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So if you look at an employee training program, there’s basically three use cases in an employee training program, right?
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There’s onboarding, compliance, and career development.
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And so, you know, you get a new hire employee, there’s usually some type of onboarding training that they go through to prepare them for their job, so they understand HR, do all the HR functions, but a lot of it is training them to make sure they can do their job properly, and that’s the onboarding training.
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And then there’s usually some compliance training with an organization.
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Sometimes it’s regulatory and legal compliance.
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Sometimes it’s more corporate compliance or certain courses or that that the organization wants them to take.
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And so there’s, yeah, so for example, if they were working a restaurant, you know, food safety course might be an example of a corporate compliance or a forklift operations course, if they’re a forklift operator.
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And so there’s these compliance courses they have to take.
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And then once they get into their career, the next thing is the career development.
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And usually that’ll come after a performance review or a manager might say something like, Hey, you’re really good at A and B, but you could use the work on C and D, and so why don’t you take these training courses to help you out in C and D.
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And then the employee themselves might go, Hey, from a career development standpoint, eventually I want to be here and have this type of role and this type of job in the organization as the next step.
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And therefore here’s the training that would be prescribed to them or that they would take in order to help prepare them for that career.
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And that’s your employee training program in a nutshell, where onboarding, compliance, and career development.
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And the key there is it’s all about the individual employee.
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And in order to make sure that the employee gets their required training, you know, it’s their manager’s responsibility to make sure that they complete whatever the required training is.
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Now, you might have somebody in corporate that’s overseeing some of the, you know, making sure everybody gets the compliance training.
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You know, say, you know, from a safety training perspective, there might be somebody overlooking a corporate, making sure everybody gets the proper safety training.
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But if the individual is not getting there, has not taken the proper safety training, they will usually communicate with the individual employee and their manager to make sure that they get their training that’s required.
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So what you have there, like I said, is you know who the employee is, you know who they work for, you know who the manager is, because these are all your employees.
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Again, it’s all centered around that particular individual getting the skills and knowledges and skills they need to onboard, getting the compliance training that’s necessary for their role based on the organization’s compliance needs.
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And then from a career development standpoint, how can they do their current job better?
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What training can they do to further their career?
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So again, very employee-centric.
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Very learner-centric, it’s all about the learner.
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And you know who the learner is, you know who their manager is, and you know who their manager’s manager is, you know the entire hierarchy.
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Things are very different when you’re doing a partner training program.
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So first off, when we’re talking about partner training programs, it’s usually, what is a partner?
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A partner is a separate organization that you have a contractual relationship with,
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that is either selling, servicing, or in the case of customers, using your product.
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And in some cases, they are supplying you.
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So, but mostly it’s selling, servicing, and using your product.
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That’s what a partner training program is usually focused on.
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And so you have these partners, and what you’re concerned about as a training manager, somebody running the training program, is that the partner
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and their employees have the knowledges and skills necessary to sell, service, or use your products.
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Often you don’t know who those people are.
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You don’t know who the employees of the partner are.
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You don’t know who their managers are.
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You don’t know what their job title is within that organization.
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But what you do know is that to be a trained reseller, it’s really important to have three trained
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salespeople that know how to sell your product.
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Or to be a trained service provider, you need four technicians that really understand how to install and service your product.
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Or to be a trained customer, you need a certain number of people that are trained in how to use your product and interact with your organization.
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And so that’s, so again, if we’re comparing the two,
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On employee training program, the center focus is the employee.
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On the partner training program, it’s the partner organization.
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And then since partners can have many locations, it actually becomes the specific location that you’re concerned about.
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Does the Omaha branch have the talent necessary, have the skills necessary?
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to be a successful partner.
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Does the New York branch have it?
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Does the LA branch have it?
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And so you end up really wanting to focus on partner organizations and the individual locations within the partner.
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That’s your focus.
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It’s an organizational focus versus an employee focus.
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Now, because of that, if we go back to the use cases for partner training,
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You have the onboarding.
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You’re going to onboard a partner.
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It’s not an individual that you’re onboarding.
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It’s an organization that you’re onboarding.
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You’re onboarding, say, the Austin branch of a certain organization.
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And to onboard them, it’s not just an individual that needs to learn a set of skills to be an effective employee.
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You’re going to bring on a group of people to make sure that that group collectively has the knowledge and skills
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so they can be an effective partner location.
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And so after the onboarding, you want to make sure that that partner has a set of employees that have the knowledge and skills that are necessary to be a successful partner to sell, service, or use your products.
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And so there’s an ongoing thing there.
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Now, you don’t know who the managers are, you don’t know who the people are,
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And so, but you do know who the partner is and you do know, you know, the partner location for partners that have multiple locations.
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And so you want to start to do things like, well, I don’t necessarily know who the partner employees are or who works for whom, but I can create a model of what a partner looks like.
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I can say there’s a salesperson and there’s a sales manager, or there’s a technician and a service manager.
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Then you create that model of what a partner organization looks like.
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Then you can tools that allow you to easily create dozens or if not hundreds, and sometimes with some of our clients, thousands of partner locations scattered all over the continent, all over the world.
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And because of the sheer number of those, you have to be able to group those organizations and locations into some type of grouping that would be like, I’d say, a district.
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and then group districts into regions, regions into areas or business units, country, which could be a country or continent, et cetera.
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You also, when you’re doing that and setting all that up, if you’re a multi-brand organization, not every partner sells services or buys every brand you have.
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So you also want to be able to sit there and say, hey, this particular partner uses these brands, this particular partner.
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services these brands, because that’s going to change the training that you’re going to want to do for that partner.
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You know, a partner that just sells your motorcycles, say, and doesn’t sell your snowmobiles, doesn’t need to get training on how to sell and service snowmobiles.
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So again, that’s the crux and the basis there is you need something that you can model the partner organization.
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You can populate that and easily set up hundreds and sometimes thousands of these organizations.
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You can group the organizations into groups, which are usually districts or regions, and then manage it as such.
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And then you want to be able to track that it’s a trained partner.
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Now, how do you do that?
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You don’t know the skills and capability of the individual learner.
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And so what partner training programs tend to do
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do is create certifications.
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They tend to sit there and go, well, to be a certified salesperson of brand X, this is what you have to learn and know how to do.
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Or to be a certified salesperson of brand Y, this is a different set of things that you have to take, different courses, different assessments, different skills.
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Same thing on the service side, same thing on the customer side, and they tend to use certifications
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so that they know that the certified individual has a certain base of knowledge and a certain set of skills.
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And then what a trained partner is, is a partner with a certain set of certified individuals in sales, service, or usage, depending on whether it’s a reseller, a service provider, or a customer.
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And so all of a sudden, certification
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becomes very important for partner training because that’s how the person trying to run the training program is going to track progress.
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They’re going to track progress by seeing how many certified individuals there are out there, but even more importantly, how many certified partners there are.
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And a certified partner would be one that has three certified salespeople, one certified sales manager, you know, two certified technicians for the brand that they carry.
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Now, when we start talking about manager certification, like sales manager, you also want to start to bake things into not just that, you know, have these knowledges and you have these skills as a sales manager, let’s say, but also that a certain number or a certain percentage of your salespeople are certified.
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So for you to be a certified manager, not only do you have to learn and know these things, but
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within your location, you have a certain number of people below you that have been certified.
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And so that kind of creates a hierarchy.
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And then again, at the partner level, you want to say, well, for a partner to be certified, they have to have so many sales managers, certified sales managers, certified salespeople, certified service managers, certified technicians, et cetera, et cetera.
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And so you can see that’s a very different
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than the employee-based training, right?
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Where it’s all about the employee, the specific knowledges and skills that that specific employee needs, the specific compliance training that that specific employee needs.
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And over here, it’s really more you’re focusing on that partner and that organization, and you want to be able to create that, model it,
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populate hundreds of organizations very easily, group them into districts and regions very easily.
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And then you want to be able to use certifications to say, this is a certified salesperson, this is a certified sales manager, this is a certified technician, this is a certified service manager.
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And then with a certain number of those, this is a certified partner location.
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And then you start tracking to partner locations.
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And then the other thing you see a lot in partner training
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is you go, Okay, great.
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I have a business relationship with these people, but I can’t make them take the training.
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You know, another key difference between the employee and the partner training programs is with an employee training program, they are your employee.
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You don’t have to employ them.
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And so if you say, Hey, look, in order for you to have this job, this is the training you have to take.
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Well, it becomes a condition of employment.
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And if they refuse to take that training, then you can let them go.
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On the partner side, you can’t do that.
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You can’t say to a partner, These people, this person that works for you has to take this training, or you can let them go.
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So the question is, how do you get the individual learners at the partner, and how do you get the partner to want to take the training?
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And that’s where, again,
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you start to see more incentive-based and reward-based things happen in partner learning than you do in employee learning.
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So employee learning, it’s basically, hey, you just got to take these courses.
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It’s a condition of employment.
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And then from a career development standpoint, you might want to take these courses to improve your performance at this job and prepare yourself for the next job that you’re looking to take.
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On the partner side, it’s I got to create an, you want to create an incentive and the successful programs do this.
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I want to create an incentive for the partner to make sure that their people get the training they need.
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And so, you know, and those incentives can be anywhere from cash bonuses to the partner or to the partner employee.
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It could be points where they can go redeem the points for something.
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But what we see a lot of times, and that’s, again, at the individual level, but what we see a lot of times is
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rewarding the partner and through better terms of business.
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So you might give them a slight discount on the products that they’re reselling.
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You might give them a better rate on the warranty work that they’re doing.
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You might charge them less on the training if you’re charging for the training.
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You’re just, you’re doing these things to incent the
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partner to make sure that they get the people trained and certified and have the requisite number of certified staff.
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And you see this over and over again in partner training.
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Very different than when you see an employee training where it’s like, look, you need to take these courses to be employed and then you should, you know, to improve yourself at your current job and prepare yourself for your next job, here are the courses you should take.
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Very different kind of approach.
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Another key difference is access to the learning environment.
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On the employee side, you know who they are.
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You’re paying them to give them access to the learning environment.
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All you have to do is integrate with your HR system and poof, you know who they are, you know what their role is, and therefore you know what training to assign them.
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With your partners, you don’t know who works for them.
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Often, we have a couple of clients that they do, but often you don’t know who they work for.
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And so it’s a huge manual effort to get the folks into the system.
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So one of the key differences there is how you’re going to approach user management.
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And what you want to do on the partner training side is delegate it to the partner.
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You know, more specifically, you want the individual learner to enter all their information and register for the system.
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You want the partner to then say, Yes, this is a person that works for me, and have them come into their organization.
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And then you’ve delegated all that.
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Now, since usually in these environments, you’re paying a fee on a user basis, you want to be able to manage that centrally and not rely on your partners.
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to deactivate folks.
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So essentially, you want to be able to do something like set a rule that if somebody hasn’t logged in in so many days, they get deactivated and then you’re not paying for ghost seats.
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So your whole user management is a very different approach.
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It’s very different between the two.
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And it’s kind of, again, the nature of the beast, right?
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The difference between an employee-centric training program and a partner-centric training program.
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You don’t know who actually works for the partner, you need to rely on the partner to give you that information, and you want
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do that and delegate it so you’re not flooded with a ton of access requests and you’re not maintaining all that.
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And so that’s another key difference between the two programs.
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And I’d say another key difference is, again, the nature of what you’re training them on.
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On the employee side, there’s a lot of what I would call horizontal knowledges and skills, you know, things that knowledge and skills that other companies
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need, and therefore you can go to publishers, course publishers to get the course.
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You know, things like basic supervisory skills, customer service skills, business math, how to use Microsoft Word, how to use some common tools that are out there in the marketplace, you know, how to be a good employee and treat others well.
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There’s
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scores of organizations or publishers that have those courses and very horizontal in nature, you know, kind of marketing 101, sales 101, how to be a good salesperson, a lot of employee training programs.
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Most of what they’re training their people on are on what I would call these horizontal skills.
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And then there’s, you know, some organization-specific things, of course, but a lot of the training is general skills that can be applicable to many different organizations, and you would end up getting those courses from a publisher.
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Very different on the partner side.
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Again, your partners are the folks that are selling, servicing, or using your products, and that they’re your products, and only your products, and therefore,
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There is not a publisher that has courseware on how to sell, service, or use your product.
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And so another big difference that you see is in these cases, in partner training, you have to build your courseware and your resources because it’s your product and how to sell your product and how your product stacks up against the competition, how to service your product, how to use your product, all unique to you and your product.
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And so that becomes another key differentiator between the two is, you know, more generic, horizontal,
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training and an employee-based, although of course there is organization-specific training there as well, but a lot of kind of horizontal generic training that you can get from publisher and partner training, it’s almost exclusively custom-built courseware because it’s all around your product.
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So that’s another key difference between the two.
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And then as we move on,
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Another key difference between the two organizations or two types of training programs is the roles people play.
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In employee training program, the employee plays a particular role.
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They have a particular job title within your organization.
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You know what the roles and responsibility of that job are, and they really just wear that one hat of whatever that role is.
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Now, there can be lots of responsibilities there, but that position,
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That job has a specific set of responsibilities and you can tailor the training to that specific responsibilities.
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And the employee is usually, that’s what they do for you.
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On the partner side, you don’t know exactly the job titles of these people or what their responsibilities are.
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And depending on the partner, they might, but you do create that model, you know, the salesperson, the service person.
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But depending on the partner, an individual might be doing multiple roles.
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You know, you might have set up and said, Hey, here’s a salesperson and a sales manager, and here’s a service person and a service manager.
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But an individual might be your sales manager, salesperson, and a service technician, especially when you’re talking about smaller partners.
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Your larger partners might have half a dozen people doing each role.
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Your smaller partners might have individuals doing multiple roles.
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So that’s another
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key difference is you have to be able to allow an individual to wear multiple hats because you created that model that’s generic across all your partners.
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An individual partner might have organized their company a little differently and combined some of those roles into one job.
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And so you need to be able to allow your learner to have those multiple roles.
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And again, you don’t see that in the employee training because
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that job, that role has been defined by that company, and usually the person, that’s what they do.
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The other thing you see in partner training, and it gets to the multiple role that is differential, is if you’re a large network, you have lots and lots and lots of partners, like say a franchise, for example, franchisor, there’s a strong possibility that
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a franchise employee could be working for multiple franchises, or franchisees, I should say.
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And so they might work during the week at the east side location that’s owned by one franchisee, and they might be a technician there or a barista at a coffee shop, let’s say.
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But then on weekends, they work over at a different franchise location owned by a different franchisee.
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And over there, they might be a sales associate.
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So again, that multi-role capability of an individual being able to wear multiple hats becomes very important in partner learning that you don’t see in the employee side.
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And so that’s another major difference between the two types of training programs.
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And again, it goes back to the nature of the training program, right?
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The one is centered on the individual.
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The other is centered on the partner organization.
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And so I think there you have some of the major differences or how employee training programs are different than partner training programs.
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There’s a different nature to them.
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And to sum it all up, and like I said, it might sound obvious, but the center of focus in an employee training program is the employee.
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The center of focus in a partner training is the partner organization.
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not the individual learner.
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And that difference in focus changes the nature of how you run those training programs and changes the requirements of what you need from a learning platform.
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And so hopefully that sheds some light on my colleague’s question of how these programs differ.
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I hope that it was informative to you.
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I enjoyed
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thinking through it while I was out here on this beautiful day up in northern Michigan in the woods taking a hike.
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Thank you for your time.
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I appreciate it and God bless you.