The 10 Workstreams Behind Every High-Impact Training Program

Jeff Walter (00:00) 

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the podcast. Today I have a special guest, one of my colleagues, Matt Anderson. Matt and I have worked together for about 20 years now, it’s been a while. 

 

Matt is head of our delivery team. Our delivery team does all the setups, makes sure the system’s up and running and does all the big bug fixes and does the R &D, Almost everything except sales marketing and finance. ⁓ So we’ve been working together, like I said, for 20 years. Matt, why don’t you just kinda tell everybody little about yourself? How’d you end up here? 

 

Matt Anderson (00:24) 

Yeah, thanks for having me today. 

 

My name is Matt Anderson. I’ve gone through a range of roles here, started as developer, went into business analyst, project management, and now head of the delivery team. Make sure for, especially for this today’s podcast, talk about the delivery of a new training program setup and all the steps that we take to make sure that you have a good full, fully working, fully functioning training program. 

 

Jeff Walter (00:55) 

Yeah, so, so far in podcast, we’ve talked a lot about in past episodes about planning and going through our, our, our, our guide. Uh, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? Who needs to be trained? What do they need to know and do? What challenges you’re facing and what best practices or what type of training program are you going to put in place? Uh, once you get all that planning done, you actually have to do it. And that’s the focus today. 

 

Matt Anderson (01:24) 

Yeah, this is where the rubber hits the road. you really have to, like I said, you’ve done all the planning, you’ve decided what’s included in your training program, your platform, even your project schedule. But then the rubber has to actually hit, the rubber hits the road and you gotta actually implement a training program that you can deliver to your users. 

 

Jeff Walter (01:44) 

Yeah, so we’ve been doing this for over 20 years. We’ve been very successful. I don’t think we’ve had a failed implementation yet. Actually, I know we have not had a failed implementation yet. And over those 20 years, we’ve gotten some pattern recognition. And what we’ve done is we’ve identified the 10 training work streams that you need to manage as part of the setup, but then also ongoing. It doesn’t stop with just the implementation, the setup. 

 

And the 10 work streams are categorized into three types of work streams, configuration, administration, and strategic. And so we’re gonna kind of go for them, talk about how we’ve seen clients manage those work streams and different approaches to it for successful programs that generate real benefit. And Matt’s done a bunch of these, so he’s got a lot of great, great insight. And so here we go. 

 

So the three types of work streams, like I said, are configuration, administration, and strategic. And the first one, configuration, is organizing the learners. How do you want to organize learners? So what does that mean to you, Matt, when you hear organized learners? 

 

Matt Anderson (02:48) 

Yeah, I mean every company has their own structure for their learners, for their users, and really you’re trying to set these up and define them in ways that they can receive the most effective training. You’re trying to define the positions, the job titles, the roles that they’ll have in the system, even the locations that they’re at, whether it’s dealerships or regions. So you’re really just trying to organize your users in a way that you can define or that you can deliver. 

 

other their learning program. 

 

Jeff Walter (03:16) 

So you mentioned locations and that’s one of the big differences with partner learning as we’ve talked about in previous episodes. When you’re doing employee training, it’s focused on the employee, you know your org chart, you know what everything means. When you’re doing partner learning, well first off, one of the first organizing principles is the partner. Which partner is the learner a part of and then how do you organize the partners? You have to… 

 

create a location or an organization for each partner. And then usually if you have a bunch of there’s some type of grouping of partners and then grouping of the groups, especially if you’re dealing with a global network. And then within that, Matt, one of the things that I think is challenging is when you’re dealing with partners is the partners have their own titles and positions for, the… 

 

the sponsor, you would, or the organization that’s doing it doesn’t dictate, doesn’t know what those titles are. And so you have to kind of, one of the things you have to do when you organize learners is create a model, right? So have you seen people, when you said positions, have you seen them model like different dealerships, franchises, or customers? 

 

Matt Anderson (04:24) 

Well, yeah, usually we rely on some kind of mapping, you know, where they can have a range of titles, but we try to get them mapped into something that we can all agree on the terminology. They can keep their own. Another thing to remember too is even though your dealerships may have a bunch of job positions and titles, you don’t have to have every single one of those in your learning platform and your learning program. They could have multiple sales positions, junior level sales positions. 

 

senior level sales position, but if all of your salespeople need to learn the same materials, you can just map that to one sales position in your platform. 

 

Jeff Walter (04:56) 

So we’re really looking at when we’re talking about organizing learners is what are the different audiences? And one vector being what partner do they belong to, one vector being what are their roles and responsibilities. And it’s important to note that because we’re dealing with a partner network, an individual might actually have multiple profiles because they might be working. 

 

either in multiple locations for a given franchise or dealership network or partner who has multiple locations, or they might be working for multiple partners in different capacities. So that’s organizing learners. You’ve got the vector of roles and responsibilities. You’ve got the vector of partner, and then organizing the partners into groups of partners like districts, regions, countries, et cetera, and then organizing the people into 

 

areas of responsibility from a training perspective, like you say, you don’t have to have all the job titles in there. You can have salesperson one, two, three, but you can lump that all over the salespeople, or you can have salespeople one, two, three, and then group them into a position group. What other ways of organizing learners other than the position and partner have you seen? Have you seen any other? 

 

Matt Anderson (06:02) 

Like you mentioned, groups is a good way to group multiple types of users together so that can receive the same certification or the same learning. that’s groups, audiences, locations, organizations, that’s… 

 

Audience can be a set of attributes, a set of criteria that group the users into one audience. I’m trying to think of one. 

 

one audience could be new hires. Anyone that’s a new user in the system with a start date within the last 30 days could be put into a new user audience so that they can receive training related to new users. 

 

Jeff Walter (06:33) 

So one audience might be my European sales people onboarding. And that would be an audience. 

 

Matt Anderson (06:39) 

And then as we’re getting into the learning that they’ll be receiving, you could have European new hire onboarding. And then you would have a collection of courses that are available to that audience. 

 

Jeff Walter (06:49) 

Right. And an individual might be part of multiple audiences, such as an onboarding, and I’m a salesperson, and I’m in this area, like say the EU, and therefore there’s certain training I have to take because I’m in the EU versus being in North America. So, you know, I might be in multiple audiences. So it can get pretty complicated, especially when you have a global network in 100 plus countries like some of our clients. 

 

Moving on to the next one. So that’s organizing learners and it could be as simple as everybody’s in one giant pool and you just have really one audience to as complicated as they’re in this region of the world, they do this type of thing, you know, here’s their roles and responsibilities, they’re new, they’re, or they’re, you know, been around for 10 years and you want to give them something else or they’ve achieved some level of expertise and now you’re taking to the next level. Next. 

 

But that’s a, you to really think about that work stream and how you’re gonna do it and especially on implementation. And what we’ve seen is if you really put your brain to it and think it through on the implementation, it makes the ongoing administration much easier. 

 

Matt Anderson (07:59) 

We’ll see that throughout all the work streams. The more thought you can put into these work streams now, the better your launch of your program will be and then even ongoing maintenance of your program. 

 

Jeff Walter (08:09) 

So the next one is organizing the training content. Now that sounds pretty broad, why would we just say courses? 

 

Matt Anderson (08:14) 

Yeah. 

 

Yeah, yeah. So obviously with a training program, you’re going to have a wide range of courses, dozens, maybe even hundreds of courses. You want to start thinking about ways to categorize them so that your learners can find the courses. Whether that’s categorized by topics or the content type. 

 

or even tagging them so that users can find those later on in a search. The more you can think about organizing your content upfront, the better it’ll be for the ongoing maintenance and for users to be able to find those later on. 

 

Jeff Walter (08:47) 

Yeah, so courses is one type of training content and another would be resources. So in our vernacular courses are the things you enroll in and you get credit for and a transcript and they count towards something. But then resources are just any type of file or web page or any type of content that you just want to make available to your learning community. 

 

as a reference and it’s not necessarily tracked as I took a course or you don’t get credit for it towards a certification or anything. 

 

Matt Anderson (09:18) 

So yeah, like you said, even just starting to think about which content you want to be tracked with a transcript and which do you want just available to users like a resource at any time. You know, this is the time to start thinking about categorizing those as a simple resource or a course that gets tracked. 

 

Jeff Walter (09:35) 

Yeah, so that would be the training content and then organizing it is, know, organizing courses, organizing to resources, categorizing it, coming up with a tree of how you want a category tree, depending if you have hundreds of, which some of our clients do, you want to get pretty robust to make it easier for learners to find it. But then also you mentioned accreditations and certifications, I think you mentioned, is another way. 

 

know, certifications and curriculums and skill profiles. So I want you to talk about it’s another way of organizing all this, the courses and the content into a delivery mechanism. So. 

 

Matt Anderson (10:11) 

Yeah, I mean, speaking of the sales, we were talking earlier about sales training. If you know you have a collection of courses that your basic sales, you categorize them as sales level one, you can tag them or keyword, whatever, however you want to do that. But then you add them to a certification or an accreditation service or sales level one. So that the we’ll get to it later on about how you actually get people enrolled in that. But, you know, first, first step is to think about how you want to categorize those courses into. 

 

whether they’re going to be just available for all users to find, or if they’re going to be added to a certification for them to take. 

 

Jeff Walter (10:42) 

Right and when we start look talking about accreditation you can look at things like a standalone certification like sales level one you take these five courses and that’s way of organizing the training content right the courses are in the catalog but these five courses make up this certification and you finish the five courses and you get that you get certified which could be a badge could be a certificate of completion but then also you might especially we see this in technical training 

 

You might want to organize the courses into a skill profile where you’ve got a bunch of skills and skill levels and where you are. And that’s another way of organizing training content. So you might have skills like if you’re a barista making espresso drinks, making a latte. If you’re looking in the automotive space, might be brakes, electrical, body. 

 

If you’re looking at franchises, might be especially restaurants, be front of the house, back of the house, and the skills in food preparation, the skills related to service. And then having different levels and say, okay, these five courses are, know, know, protein preparation level one, or, you know, body repair level one, and then two, three. And so… 

 

So a skill profile is just a different way of organizing those courses rather than tagging them or putting them in topics. So again, multiple vectors of organizing the content. So on the content you have the courses, which are things that you enroll in and you get credit for, and they can be self-study, they can be instructor-led, they can be assessments, or they can be reference material or resources in our vernacular. 

 

And then organizing that can be categorical, like you were saying, or it could be more formal into a certification or a skill profile. And then the one last one that we hear a lot about is a learning path. So let’s tell everybody what a learning path is, way of organizing things. 

 

Matt Anderson (12:38) 

And in our system, Learning Path is a collection of learning objects. It’s not assigned to users, but it’s got its own collection of courses or resources with its own landing page, its own style, its own URL. It’s just a way to, again, it’s a category. It’s a way to capture a collection of those learning objects into one location so that users can find that and see a nice style about. 

 

how it looks, some information specific, or even frequently asked questions about that topic. And then just an easy way for users to get to it and view a collection. 

 

Jeff Walter (13:07) 

Yeah, so unlike saying putting it as a topic or a category in the catalog, the path is a nice way to present a collection of courses. I think that’s a great way putting it. A collection of courses to users. so again, a couple of different dimensions there to think about. The more complicated or sophisticated your training program is, the more you want to put some thoughts into 

 

Matt Anderson (13:28) 

And let me add one more thing. The more you can add with the tagging or the keywords or the topics, the more you can add to your content, the easier it is to then manage those later, like adding them to a learning path, because the learning path can be either a static set of courses where you specifically selected them as the admin, or it can be a dynamic set of courses where everything matching a specific keyword. Like for example, if you tagged all of your employee onboarding with a specific keyword or topic, 

 

your learning path for onboarding could then just dynamically pull all courses with that tag. 

 

Jeff Walter (14:02) 

I think the category equals onboarding. Okay, very cool. Moving on to the third configuration, Workstream is the learner experience. And this is where the rubber meets the road for the learner. And what kind of experience do you want them to have? so I want you to talk a little bit about different types of, what do we mean by learner experience? 

 

Matt Anderson (14:04) 

Yep, exactly. 

 

Yeah, it covers a wide range again, but it could be, it’s everything from the way they access to the system, to the way it looks once they’ve actually logged in, the way your courses look, the way your courses launch. Like for example, start with the different ways that they can access the system. Do you want them to log in with username and password, or do you want them to have single sign on where they just go to a specific URL and they’re automatically logged in, the system recognizes them from somewhere else. 

 

That’s all part of the user experience. The way the web page looks, where they land, your portal landing page, what kind of style do you want to give it, what kind of logos, what kind of colors and buttons you want it to look like. Big for me is how the courses look, what kind of images you attach to the courses. Keep the learners engaged. Give them a little teaser on what they’re about to learn. 

 

Jeff Walter (15:10) 

And so there’s a lot of branding in there. lot of, I guess one other thing that we didn’t mention on content is also the HTML content that you can put in that would be more like reference pages as well, resources reference. But then the other, and that’s within a typical LMS. How do you want to configure it? How do you want to… 

 

you know, kind of look and feel does the learner experience. Our system, can mess with the style sheet, change colors, add things. It’s very flexible. lot of custom HTML content that you can put in on different pages to really personalize it to your environment. 

 

There’s another dimension too, we’ve had a couple clients do this, where the learner experience is they never actually go into the LMS. And we call that embedded learning, where they actually embed. 

 

the learning into a different system. So Matt had mentioned single sign-on. You know, can either come into the experience could be you come in with username and password or you’ve logged into some other system and then clicked a link and it automatically signs you in using your other credentials. But we’ve had other clients that said, well, you know, as an administrator, I’m fine going into the LMS because I can set everything up. 

 

But I want my learners to just launch courses off of this other system, and so where the learning is embedded. 

 

And we actually have one client where they put a gate in place for their partners. It’s a financial services firm and from a compliance standpoint, if you’re going to start offering credit cards to folks, you have to take the compliance training and they will not let their partner employees offer credit cards unless they’ve taken the training. And then the training’s right there. They log into the system that allows them to… 

 

capture credit card applications, they won’t be able to actually take an application, but then they can launch the course right there, get their compliance, and then go on and take an application. So interesting there is the learner never even goes into the learning platform. It’s actually embedded in a third party. And then one other on the learner experience. 

 

and we’ve had a couple clients do this as well, is where they don’t want it embedded in a third system and they have a very particular user experience in mind that really no learning platform supports. And so they create… 

 

a completely customized learning experience using APIs to access all the LMS, all the training content and things. And so that’s a third dimension. 

 

Matt Anderson (17:51) 

Yeah 

 

Like you mentioned, there’s a lot there where the platform itself is kind of hidden. There’s a lot. Most of our clients want their platform to look like their own company. They want it to look like you have a good logo, have your own color scheme, have your own courses and look and feel. Most clients want it to look like their own website. So you’re trying to make the make sure the platform is responsive enough, flexible enough to handle all the styles. Speaking of responsive, another big one these days is your platform and your 

 

has to be mobile friendly, has to be responsive. We know that users are taking their training on a range of platforms, a range of devices. So you know some of them are on their phone at night or on the bus or wherever it is. So you have to make sure your platform is responsive, your design is responsive, even the delivery of your content is responsive in a way that looks good on a phone, even as small as a phone. 

 

Jeff Walter (18:41) 

Yeah, I mean that’s another interesting, another vector, another dimension of the learner experience is what device are you designing the experience for, whether it’s a mobile tablet or desktop. And we’ve seen more and more, not surprisingly over the last decade or so, more and more move towards the mobile and tablet and away from the desktop, although there are certain things, simulations in particular, that are 

 

difficult to emulate on a mobile but it’s interesting. It’s another one of those dimensions when you’re configuring your program and you’re trying to figure out what the learner experience should be. That’s another dimension to into account is what’s the experience there. So those three organized learners, organized training content and the learner experience, they’re kind of configuration oriented. 

 

You’re really heavily focused on that when you’re doing the setup and the initial implementation, but it’s something that we’ve seen with all of our clients. They’re continually thinking about because the world changes. And so how they’ve organized it, you know, they will do an implementation. They’ll configure it in a certain way. And then a year or two later, it’s like, Hey, I brought on this new category of users. need to. 

 

know, reorganize, or especially if there’s a merger, reorganize in a certain way. But even just as life changes, new products are launched, new brands are launched. I’ve got partners now that sell this brand that didn’t exist two years ago, and I’ve got to configure, well that was another organized people that we didn’t talk about was, especially when we dealing with partner learning. If you’re a multi-brand organization. 

 

you know, not all partners sell and service all brands, right? So that’s another dimension of the organized people. But so while these are very heavily involved in the setup of your program. 

 

It is something you need to keep thinking on an ongoing basis. Now moving on to once you got all that kind of squared away, we’re into the four administration workflows. And so this is really the day-to-day activity of running the training program. And the first is creating that training content. We talked about organizing it before. 

 

and how you want to organize it and what kind of certifications you want to have, what kind of skill profiles, how you want to categorize it, what’s a resource, what’s a course. But then you actually have to create it and update it. And so that’s a process that a surprisingly number of clients don’t give enough attention to. 

 

Matt Anderson (21:05) 

Yeah, 

 

it takes some good effort to design relevant material. 

 

that your users will find engaging and interesting. We know most companies have promo videos, presentation videos, tons of documentation. And so it’s really up to, you know, part of the work stream here is to figure out how to compile those into an actual learning object. Whether it’s a video with an assessment afterwards or just a video where it’s self-study and the user says, yes, I watched this. Or if it’s just a resource that’s available at all times. 

 

This is an important step to actually design the relevant material. 

 

Jeff Walter (21:40) 

Yeah, and this is a place where we’re seeing just AI really penetrating is in the content creation side You know not just just an order of magnitude increase in productivity from from that We’re seeing the cost of creating of course just plummet Just because of the tools and using AI and being able to take all that content that you have and then Actually use that to create new content 

 

Another interesting emerging approach is 

 

instead of shooting video using avatars for explainer videos. interesting thing we’ve seen there on the create and update content, it’s nice on the create content, right? Because you got the avatar and they do an explainer video and some of these avatars and some of these tools are just really, really good at this point. But where the power really comes in is in the update. 

 

And you might say, it’s easier to create it than it is to a certain degree. You get some productivity there. But what the really cool thing is on these explainer videos is if you’re using AI and you’re using an avatar, they’re all the videos and the avatar is all text-based. That’s how you edit and create the video. And so the cool thing is when there’s an update, in, know, we’re talking partner training, it’s usually 

 

selling and servicing your products, right? Well, products are updated all the time. And so using an avatar explainer video, you just have to go in and edit the text, the talking points that have changed. So when a new model comes out or the new flavor of shake comes out or the new coffee drink or the new 

 

technique for installing whatever the product is, you can just go into the existing video, the words, then poof, you got an updated video, we don’t have to reshoot it. 

 

Matt Anderson (23:36) 

We’ve had that happen with our own promotional videos where we’ve used the AI in a transcript. 

 

It’s a fully published video, but then, you know, right in, maybe we’re doing some final testing and staging and a few things changed and we changed some functionality and it was as simple as going and changing a few words in the transcript, re-uploading it into the AI and having it republished. It was a five minute change instead of having to have someone go back into the recording booth or whatever, however you recorded it in the first place. But it was as simple as changing the transcript and re-uploading it. 

 

Jeff Walter (24:06) 

Right, 

 

so we’ve used it ourselves and what tool do we use again? Synthesia. Synthesia, that’s right. Not a plug for them, but a great tool. We’ve been using it. 

 

Matt Anderson (24:10) 

Synthesia? 

 

If you go to our blog posts, have a lot of the Synthesia AI presentations. And yeah, it’s as simple as a transcript that we’ve written up or even just pulled from other content, AI, and then some screenshots and some videos. You match them up and then it’s really easy to make updates later on. 

 

Jeff Walter (24:33) 

Yeah, so as Matt was saying on the create and update the training content, we have to train our users, our administrators, and we were in that same challenge that everybody else has, is like you make a video, an explainer video, and then we update the product, and all of sudden the explainer video is obsolete and you gotta reshoot the whole thing. Now we can just go in and edit it, so. 

 

Anything else on the create and update content? that covers it. All right, so moving on to the next administrative work stream is managing the learners, managing their access to the learning platform. And so we alluded to that a little earlier, weren’t you? 

 

Matt Anderson (25:09) 

This is another one where there’s a range of options for managing your users. So it’s basically how do you create your users? How do you maintain them? 

 

Do they come in through data feeds? Are they manual entry by your administrators? You can have them manual entry by your portal administrators, your top level administrators, but sometimes you have ⁓ a worldwide set of users. Maybe you want to distribute some of those user management down to the location managers or even your district managers so that they can manage their users. Add, edit, delete their users. Another thing to think about is how new users will access the system. Do you want new users to register themselves? 

 

Jeff Walter (25:27) 

world 

 

Matt Anderson (25:44) 

self-registration, do you want them to notify your admins who will add them? So yeah there’s a range of options here for managing your user, adding, editing, and deleting users. 

 

Jeff Walter (25:52) 

Yeah, now and and in terms of managing users, you know, it’s always better and easier if there’s some other system that is doing that and then you can do what we talked about earlier the single sign-on where you just have a link off of that system into your system into your learning platform and then all the add edit delete the users all being kept happening on this existing platform 

 

that you’re already using and there’s no duplicative effort and everybody just automatically gets access to your learning platform. However, that happens 99 % of the time when you’re doing employee training because with your employees, you know who they are because you’re paying them, or at least in your payroll system, and probably a couple of other systems too. And so there’s plenty of, your HRS system or plenty of other. 

 

systems that you can link off of where you’re already setting up your employees. The challenge, my, little thunder action coming in here. I hope I’m not saying anything that’s upsetting the gods. But one of the challenges on partner training is you don’t have a system that has all that. 

 

that has all the learners of every partner. And that’s what you were alluding to earlier. And so it has to be manual. And then you’ve got the questions of, well, do you do it all centrally and you have a central administrator granting all the credentials to everybody? Or do you delegate that down to your partners? And does your platform enable that? 

 

Matt Anderson (27:13) 

Part of the delegating it to those partners is to set some parameters around that, set some limits around that. Number of users that they can have at a certain location or a certain region. How do they get deactivated? We still got some thunder going on. Do they automatically get deactivated after a certain number of inactivity days? So just different parameters to make sure your user base is active and… 

 

Jeff Walter (27:36) 

accurate. 

 

Yeah, so again on the partner training just managing user access that add, modify, deactivate is a challenge because you usually do not have a third-party system that’s doing that for you. You don’t have an HRS system for your partners. Some of our clients do and that’s awesome because we just do single sign-on but most don’t and you know ideally you want to do some type of delegated system like Matt was saying for you managing the learners. 

 

Then the next thing you have is managing enrollments and assigning training. How do you assign training? So what’s some of the ways you’ve seen people do that? 

 

Matt Anderson (28:09) 

Yeah, this is another one where you’re trying to make sure the users are getting enrolled in the appropriate courses. There’s a few different options. That can be self-study, self-enrollment, excuse me, self-enrollment, where the users enroll themselves in the appropriate courses, or it can be automatically enrolled based on a certain set of criteria or audience or certification. So, yeah, you want to just think about how your users are going to get enrolled in the appropriate courses. 

 

Jeff Walter (28:34) 

Yeah, so what kind of, how have you seen that happen? Like you mentioned self-enrollment, right? So okay, there, with self-enrollment, there’s catalog, the learner goes into the catalog, searches the catalog for the courses they want, takes them, enrolls in them, or puts them on their training plan to be taken later. What other methods? 

 

Matt Anderson (28:52) 

So that’s 

 

the first one where it’s just open to the entire catalogs open. Uh, anybody, any user can enroll in any course. Uh, then there’s like the half step, which would be a learning path or something where you direct them to a learning path. have courses available. They decide which ones they want to enroll themselves. It’s kind of like you they’re pushed into the self enrollment, but then yeah, there’s also where it’s automatically enrolled based on a set of criteria. It can be that you can give them goals and a certification, but then that would. 

 

automatically enroll them and it’s in their learning plan automatically. 

 

Jeff Walter (29:25) 

Right, so that would be setting some type of rule that runs automatically. It says, you’re this type of person, like the example we used earlier. You just joined one of our European partners in a sales position. There’s a rule that would automatically assign you the EU sales onboarding curriculum, for example. And then, 

 

So you’ve got the self-enrollment, self-assignment, you’ve got rule-based assignment, and then think the one other dimension I would also mention is manager or administrator assignments, where your manager or an administrator or somebody other than the learner themselves is assigning them in the training course. So I think those are, and so you gotta manage each one of those. 

 

You’ve to manage the rules and manage the folks. All right, the fourth one on the administration side is tracking progress. Because usually we’re offering training because we want some type of outcome and we want to make sure people are getting the training. 

 

Matt Anderson (30:24) 

Yeah, tracking the progress is usually reporting. It’s reporting on where you’re at in your training, whether it’s dashboards for your students, dashboards for your managers, reports for each, certifications that they see. It’s basically you’re just trying to track their progress through reporting. 

 

Jeff Walter (30:40) 

Yeah, so, and the question there is like what type of reports, what type of reporting, what type of filters on the dashboards? Are you gonna use who’s responsible for tracking that? What is the process for intervening if you’re not getting the training and compliance that you’re looking for, if people are not participating, what’s the next step? 

 

That’s the tracking progress. All right, and that kind of wraps up the four administrative tasks, the main things, the creating and updating your training content, the managing learner access to the system, the managing or assigning training, and then tracking progress on the training objectives. And that’s really a lot of your day-to-day type of thing. you one thing we didn’t really talk about on the enrollments that just crossed my mind was instructor-led training. 

 

So I think when we were talking, we were thinking more about self-paced learning. The thing on the instructor-led that you want to focus on also from managing enrollments is the problem with instructor-led is you can’t take the course if there’s not an offering for the course. So I can only enroll in an offering. I can’t enroll in the course. 

 

You know, so I can’t take Chem 101 if it’s not offered. But when it’s offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 2, I can enroll in Lecture All 3, I can enroll in that, right, with Professor Smith. So another, you know, so you got a couple different ways of managing or assigning training there as well. You can assign the course to somebody or person can assign the course to themselves and say, okay, I want to take this instructor-led course. 

 

Once you see those assignments, to optimize the instructor-led training, you want to be able to have that assignment visible to the instructors. And they can see that, so many people in a certain area or certain region, certain training locale where they’re teaching, or if it’s a webinar-based thing, it can be a broader, much bigger region. 

 

But oh, I’ve got enough people that are interested in the course that have assigned it either to themselves or their manager assigned it to them or a rule assigned it to them that there is 50 people in this area that are interested in that course. And so I as the instructor for that, and maybe I have a 30 person limit on my classroom size, I see 50 people are interested. I’m going to go create an offering. then I want to ideally, 

 

automatically enroll up to the limit the people into that course or at the very least notify those 50 people that there’s an offering instead of requiring them to go look at the offerings and see if one was made. So that’s on the managing enrollments and assigning training another thing. How can you automate the instructor led? 

 

What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to have to force the student to have to go look for it all the time. Because they won’t. Or what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to create a bunch of instructor-led offerings that are partially attended. Because the cost of doing it doesn’t matter if you have one student or 100 students. Most of the cost is the instructor’s time and energy doing it. 

 

Matt Anderson (33:54) 

Yeah, like you said, having some version of an interest list or I’m interested in the course is one way to collect that interest even though the user can’t technically enroll in it yet. can let someone know that they’re interested and then as soon as it becomes available they can be automatically enrolled or instructor enrolled. But just some way to show interest in a course before they actually enroll. 

 

Jeff Walter (34:16) 

Yeah, so, so. Circle back to the managing enrollments and training assignment. And so, so those are the four administrative work streams. And that leads us with, and I’d say on most of the clients, most of the training programs that we’ve dealt with over the years, that’s the one that people have a pretty good handle on. You know, on the, on the configuration one, 

 

Matt Anderson (34:19) 

Circle back on that. 

 

Jeff Walter (34:41) 

They tend to have a good handle on what they want. The question is whether or not the platform that they’re using can support what they want. And we see a lot of that being an issue with people managing partner training programs that are using a learning platform that was built for employee training. A lot of times they can’t get the organized the users the way they want or the user experience the way they want. 

 

But now the last category here, the strategic, here’s where I think as an industry, we’re a little light on, especially on the partner training side. a lot of this, and this is one of the reasons we’re doing this podcast or this particular episode, but also this podcast in general is to really focus on the challenges of partner training versus employee training. Because employee training, 

 

when you get to the strategic lot of this is, you know, actually the first strategic one, rewards and recognition. Right? So on the employee side, it’s pretty straightforward. 

 

Matt Anderson (35:37) 

Yeah, on the employee side, I’d like a badge or a certificate or maybe even some swag. know, can I get something for doing this training? 

 

Jeff Walter (35:45) 

Well, 

 

I was gonna say on the employee side, it’s simple, because you have to take the training, because if you want to be employed, you have to take the Required training. It’s required. It’s required. 

 

Matt Anderson (35:52) 

choir. 

 

Jeff Walter (35:58) 

So on employee side, comes to rewards and recognition, you have all those things and those are nice things to give the employee. But also the reward could be you continue to get a paycheck. If you do not take the onboarding class. 

 

Matt Anderson (36:13) 

You won’t be here after the album. 

 

Jeff Walter (36:15) 

be here after the onboarding. Or if you don’t take the compliance course, or courses that your job requires, that we as a company require you to take, you will not be doing that job much longer. But it gets a little trickier when it comes to partner training, because now you’re trying to train an employee that works for your partner. 

 

You don’t control their paycheck. can’t tell them it’s a condition of employment. You can’t give them a raise. You’re not really involved in their career development. That’s their employer’s job. 

 

So, but you still gotta get them to take the training. what is, you you mentioned some things already, the badges, the certificates, points in a store to get some swag. What are some of the other incentives and rewards that you’ve seen? 

 

Matt Anderson (36:58) 

So yeah, there’s incentives and rewards at the employee level. Like I said, a badge, a certification that you can promote on social media. 

 

We’ve had other, we’ve had employees that they say, yes, if I get certified, just please send me some swag, send me a hat with company logo on it. So just some rewards and recognition there for the employee. But then on flip side, there’s also the rewards and recognition for the partner or the organization where they have, if they have a certain number of certified users that that partner is considered certified and then they can get some rewards and recognition. 

 

Jeff Walter (37:33) 

Yeah, and I’d say when it comes to partner training that that’s what we’ve seen more of you know, mean, you know a lot of the badges and the certificates and and the point system for the learner to get some swag like you said But where the real rubber meets the road is preferential treatment as a certified partner and to become a certified partner You need three certified salespeople five certified technicians two certified cashiers 

 

or store managers, whatever the program is. But then that gets you, know, well on a franchise situation, discounts off the product pricing, maybe gets you some marketing credits, you know, in the automotive space, discounts on floor plan financing, know, a point or two off that. And then actually, 

 

know, lots of different ways. In manufacturers, we’ve seen higher warranty repair rates for certified partners versus uncertified partners. And so a bunch of different creative ways in which you can not only incent the learner, which is where we generally, our brains generally go to, but in partner learning, what we see is also a lot of focus on certifying the partner. 

 

and then the partner deciding, which three salespeople get certified, which five technicians get certified. So that’s another good one. Another strategic thing, and this is one of my personal favorites, is measuring success. Measuring success. 

 

I’m a big believer in measuring the business impact of things. And I think training can have a huge impact on the business and that’s why we’re doing it. What would you say most folks, how do most training programs measure their success? 

 

Matt Anderson (39:14) 

Yeah, it’s kind of like think about the roadmap that you’ve published. Most training programs start in the lower levels. yep, we’ve got a certain number of users that completed this course. We’re getting these assessment scores and our feedback looks good. We’re running a successful training program. But yeah, where you really like to go is further up that roadmap where you start getting into the performance metrics and real impact on the company. 

 

Jeff Walter (39:40) 

Yeah, and when I think of measuring success, and like Matt said, I think most folks that run training programs, they’re asking the learner, did you like the training? And if they got a bunch of enrollments, or if enrollments are up, and the students like the training, then that’s a double thumbs up, and they’ve done themselves a good job. 

 

And I think that’s important, don’t get me wrong. It’s important for the learner to have a good experience. It’s important to have a program grow. mean, know, grow through enrollment is a, know, we enrolled a thousand people last year in this course. We enrolled 1,100 this year. That is a positive indicator of success. But we need to go beyond that to really show business impact. 

 

And to me, the analogy that always comes to my mind, it’s kind of like asking soldiers or running a boot camp for the military based on what the soldiers coming out felt about the program. Right? 

 

It’s like, well, you know, we run through this program to turn them civilians, these civilians into soldiers. We ask them, you know, and we got more people come through and that’s good. And then we ask them, how’d you like the program? And they say, we like this, we didn’t like this. And so we adjust the program so they like it better. And, you know, and over time they, the recruits liked the bootcamp better. Yeah, the only problem with that is that’s not why they’re in bootcamp. You know, they’re in bootcamp. 

 

to turn them into soldiers so you can go win wars, right? And it’s the war fighting capability that’s the important thing, not whether or not the recruit enjoyed boot camp. So that’s what always comes to my mind when people tell me that they measure their success through enrollments or through learner feedback. And like I said, it’s not the military, it’s corporate. 

 

But that’s not what we’re trying to achieve. really, for your program is the analogy of the war fighting capability? What are you actually trying to achieve? Are you trying to your warranty reworked down? Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to get a new partner onboarded quicker so they ramp up to profitability much quicker? 

 

Are you to help them improve their margins? Are you trying to get them to improve your margins by moving more product? What are you trying to do with the training program? And that’s how we should be measuring our success. And the cool thing is, if I could just riff on that for a second, we do have clients that do that. And the clients that do that, 

 

and this is just a hack for all your training managers out there. The clients that do that never have a problem getting budget because it’s known up and down the chain of command all the way up to the C-suite that a dollar invested in a training program yields two, three, four dollars of result. And so when the training program says, I need $100,000 to do this or a million dollars to do that, 

 

the answer is usually yes. Justified. Because they’re gonna get a multi-fold return on investment. So, I really encourage folks, it’s good to start, if you’re starting, start out with hey, people are taking it, hey, the learners like it, but I would migrate to something, the coolest, I’m sorry, I can riff a little more. 

 

The coolest thing I’ve seen with one of our clients, and I say cool because it is a impact oriented metric that’s really easy to administer, and that’s the Net Promoter Score. And asking the partners, would you recommend this training program to another partner? Zero to 10, right, and that’s Net Promoter Score. And it’s a great proxy. 

 

for actual business impact. If the partner, the partner manager or partner principal says, yes, I would recommend this training program to another partner and they give you a nine or 10 and they’re a net promoter, then you have a nice high net promoter score. It’s a very easy to administer proxy for business impact. 

 

you know, versus doing it at the learner level. You do it at the partner level. And again, we’ve had clients that have done that and to great effect and up and down the chain of command. 

 

at that client, they know that if they’re increasing their net promoter score for training by five, 10, 15 points, at the C-suite, they know that that means it’s gonna have positive business impact. another thing. And then the last strategic thing is improving the training program. So. 

 

Matt Anderson (44:05) 

Yeah, 

 

this kind of goes to the roadmap again where early levels on your training program are about knowledge acquisition and you want to really get into the skills development as you move down that roadmap. This is another one where you need to make sure you have the right tools to evaluate your success and your training program and then how do you best improve them and keep moving them down that roadmap. 

 

Jeff Walter (44:26) 

Yeah, and I would say when it comes to improving the training program, again, if I look at us as an industry, the improvement is usually limited to, I’ve got some content updates I have to make. I have some new training I need to deliver. And not looking at the overall program and the impact it’s having on the business. And so, to Matt’s point, yeah, we put together our training program roadmap. 

 

to help make it easier for people to see how to evolve their program to higher and higher levels of impact. 

 

But the point is not to follow our roadmap. The point is to think about your program and how do you take it to the next level. Not just put the latest content updates in place, but how do I move it from a knowledge acquisition based program that has a certain level of impact to a skill development program to a performance impact program. 

 

Matt Anderson (45:15) 

Yeah, and if you have the right, if you’re doing that tracking between learning and the performance metrics, you can also start getting into some pretty advanced analysis where you see, these courses have a direct impact on these metrics or these courses have no impact on anything. And so you can start phasing out some courses or promoting more, know, whether it’s surface level one or accreditation level one, where then you start organizing it a little bit better based on the performance metrics. But again, you have to first make sure that you have the structure there so you can properly evaluate. 

 

evaluate it. 

 

Jeff Walter (45:45) 

Thank you. so those are the 10 major work streams that, again, strategic, was rewards and recognition, measuring success, and improving the program. And what, again, these came from 20 plus years of experience doing this, the 10 different work streams that you need to focus on when you’re implementing your program. Like you said, the Surefire training impact guide is really about planning. 

 

and then you get down into the doing. And these are the 10 things you gotta worry about. And if you focus on these 10 things and execute them well, you’ll have a very successful, high impact training program. just to regroup them again, there were the three configuration work streams, organizing your learners, organizing training content, and the learner experience. There were the four administrative work streams. 

 

creating and updating training content, managing learner access to the system, to the learning platform, assigning training and managing enrollments, and then tracking progress. And then you’ve got your three strategic rewards and recognition, measuring success, and improving the training program. And so those are the 10. That wraps up. Any… 

 

Anything you want to add as we wrap up here, Matt? 

 

Matt Anderson (47:10) 

No, thank you for having me. This stuff is really exciting to see it where you have these concepts and some planning and now you’re really putting it into a real training program. This is really exciting to meet with clients and really try to follow these work streams, turn into something real, and then you get it launched and you get the users in there with the learning program. So it’s just really exciting stuff here. Thank you for having me. 

 

Jeff Walter (47:31) 

Thank you for being here and as Matt was saying, we get excited because when we see people, we’re just true believers that training can make a huge impact in the lives of the individuals involved, the learners, but also the partners and the organizations that are sponsoring it. And there’s a lot of time and energy that goes into it. We like to see our clients, not even our clients, we would just like to see the industry. 

 

realize the benefit that we know that’s out there and that’s why we put this together. So Matt, thanks for coming by today and stopping in and to everybody out there, thank you for listening. See you next time.