For many organizations, “extended enterprise” training is a relatively easy to implement because their partners and customers all reside in the same country. But for organizations whose partners, customers, and other important external entities are dispersed around the world, the implementation of an effective and comprehensive training program becomes a complex mission. And while developing any type of corporate training and eLearning program can be complicated, introducing Global Training brings a unique set of challenges and calls for increased focus when developing content and considering deployment options.
What is Global Training?
Global Training refers to the implementation of a company’s learning and development program that includes a shared set of training objectives designed to benefit employees and other participants, regardless of their location. The differentiating factor between global training and localized training programs is that the content and strategies it includes must accommodate a wide audience (as opposed to a specific group of employees or participant demographic).
Offering a global training program delivers a message that your company:
Is aware of and supports the unique training needs of various cultures and audiences
Understands that working to operate ethically and effectively in cultures other than one’s own is a critical skill for an employee to develop
Developing a Global Training Strategy
Developing the right global training strategy is essential to prepare your employees, partners, and customers across various cultures and countries. The following steps can help you plan and implement a training strategy that will meet the specific needs of your organization.
Build Your Team
The first step in build a global training program is in choosing the right people to participate in building and delivering the program. Instructional Designers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and administrators will all play a role in the project and each of your unique audiences should be represented in some way. Ideally, at least some members of the team will have previous experience in delivering a project that had a cross-cultural element.
Align Your Program Objectives Across Cultures
As with any significant initiative, it is important to get buy-in from the highest level of your organization. To accomplish this, you will need to discuss program objectives with company leaders and decide how the training program will support with business goals, as well as how to approach it in a way that is sensitive to the needs and expectations of all cultures.
Balance these Objectives with Training Needs
The next step is in creating training strategies from the perspective of your participants, as an effective global training program aligns your objectives with the needs of your diverse training audiences. To accomplish this, you will need to communicate with each region independently to determine their requirements and priorities. You will also need to discover regional performance gaps and plan training objectives to close them.
Build Your Content
The quality of your training content and courses will have a major impact on the success of the program. You need to make sure that you will content that translates well across languages and consider cultural differences during the development process. You will also need to choose a Learning Management System (LMS) that is well-suited for global training by providing the ability to segment and scale your program with cross-cultural, multi-audience design in mind.
Launch and Manage the Program
At this point, the program is ready for launch. Given the scale and diversity of global training programs, a phased rollout is often best as it allows you to test the program on a small scale before rolling it out to the masses. It is important to track employee engagement and progress in order to measure the success of the program and determine when and where changes or enhancements may be required.
LMS Portals for Global Training Programs
LMS Portals provides our clients and partners with a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system to support corporate and global training programs. With LMS Portals, program administrators can launch and manage any number of dedicated, customized training environments (portals) to support the needs unique needs of each audience. And each portal offers a rapid and simplified course development engine, along with robust tools for user onboarding, collaboration, analytics, and more.
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