Extended enterprise training: Best practices and tips

There are numerous extended enterprise training benefits, but here are just a few:

When your sales partners and suppliers are thoroughly trained in your solutions, they can market and explain them more effectively, leading to sales growth.

By making sure your extended enterprise is up to speed with your company's policies and procedures, you can minimise the threat of compliance issues.

When your extended enterprise is well-educated in your solutions, each member can collaborate more effectively to reach mutual objectives.

By disseminating knowledge and best practices within your extended enterprise, you can stimulate innovation and creativity.

By equipping customers with the necessary training to use your products or services, you enhance user adoption, reduce frustration and increase overall satisfaction.

Crafting a successful extended enterprise learning programme hinges on creating content that is customised to cater to the distinctive needs of the learners. This customisation involves considering each learner's specific knowledge, skills, experiences, as well as roles and duties within each partner organisation.

You can get learner feedback from surveys and questionnaires to better understand their needs and preferences. Data analytics add more objective feedback on how learners are using and experiencing the content. A great tool here is the learning management system (LMS). 

Technology is a key determinant of the success of an extended enterprise learning programme. You can use a dedicated LMS to deliver content to learners in an accessible and convenient way. The platform will also let you monitor learner progress and offer feedback, which can ensure active engagement and effective learning.

Elearning is the content format for the delivering extended enterprise training online. Elearning has numerous benefits, such as adaptability, affordability, and scalability. Nonetheless, it's crucial to make sure that the elearning content is well-structured and engaging to maintain learner motivation.

To sustain learner engagement, it's vital to create a captivating and interactive learning process. You can achieve this with methods such as the following:

• Interactive exercises: These tasks can assist learners in applying what they have learned and to test their understanding. 
• Gamification: Adopting gaming principles and strategies can make learning more enjoyable and intriguing. For instance, developing a leaderboard or assigning points for accomplishing specific tasks. 
• Social learning: This offers a platform for learners to cooperate and share their experiences. This can keep them motivated and engaged.

Monitoring learner progress and offering feedback is essential to ensure effective learning. Feedback can help you identify areas where learners need additional support and make necessary modifications to the learning programme.

You can use various methods to assess learner progress, such as quizzes, tests, or assignments. You could also ask your learners to conduct self-assessments. And, of course, you can ask your learners to provide feedback in several ways, such as written feedback or through individual or group feedback sessions.

Who are the external entities that would derive benefits from training offered by your organisation?

What are the capabilities you desire your learners to possess after concluding the training?

Methods to consider include multimedia elearning, brochures, webinars, and instructor-led training (ILT).

Make sure the learning content resonates with your learners and is relevant to their needs. Avoid rolling out the same product information to sales partners and component suppliers for example - their needs are completely different and their training should reflect this. 

Monitor the performance of your extended enterprise learning programmes to evaluate its influence on your organisation's objectives. Are there certain partner types within the network who engage with the content more than others? If so, could this reflect any weaknesses in your delivery?

See if you can tie content engagement and assessment metrics to measurable business outcomes further down the line.

Many organisations with a complex network of partners are also working in dynamic, technology-driven markets. Therefore, it's important to stay up to date with the trends and tech in your industry when it comes to training, so that you don't lose an edge to competitors.

AI is a hot topic across many industries now, and L&D teams are looking to leverage it as much as their peers in other departments. There are now AI-powered learning tools to make creating and rolling out training content faster and more accessible. 

imc Express is a leading example of this, allowing subject matter experts in any company department - or even within partner companies - to create e-learning modules in as little as 10 minutes. This means that training content development is no longer limited to the L&D department, and rapid e-learning content can encourage peer to peer knowledge sharing.

imc Express even allows you to translate content into over 60 languages at the click of a button, enabling extended enterprise learning at scale - even globally. 

The role of L&D can now be about content curation and quality control, rather than only content creation. 

Organisations slow to adopt AI within their toolkits are likely to lose out to their competitors who leverage this technology to increase their productivity. 

In the context of professional development and corporate training, microlearning and just-in-time learning are both modern approaches that focus on efficiency and convenience. 

Microlearning

A an approach to training, microlearning involves breaking down complex topics into smaller, more manageable segments. These segments are typically short (usually around 5-10 minutes), focused on a specific learning objective, and designed to be completed in a single session.

Benefits of Microlearning include: 

• Efficiency: Because microlearning focuses on small, specific topics, learners can quickly acquire new skills or knowledge without having to wade through irrelevant information.
• Flexibility: Microlearning can be consumed at the learner's own pace, and the short format makes it easy to fit learning into busy schedules.
• Engagement: Short, focused content can help to maintain learner engagement, particularly when it is interactive or includes multimedia elements.

Just-in-time learning

As a training approach, just-in-time learning delivers information exactly when and where the learner needs it. This is often used in the workplace to provide employees with the knowledge or skills they need to complete a specific task or solve a particular problem. This could be extremely valuable for external sales partners who need to get up to speed quickly when you launch a new product line.

Benefits of just-in-time learning include:

• Relevance: You can provide information in the context of a specific task or problem, which makes it immediately applicable and meaningful for the learner.
• Performance support: Just-in-time learning can help you improve performance by providing immediate access to further information on your products and services - perhaps if a customer was to ask an external partner a new or difficult question.
• Learning Retention: Because the information is applied immediately, learners are more likely to remember it in the future.

You can deliver both microlearning and just-in-time learning in a variety of formats, including online tutorials, mobile apps, short videos, and interactive simulations. These approaches are particularly effective when you combine them with other learning strategies, such as blended learning, social learning, and personalised learning.

When budgets are squeezed, there is pressure to demonstrate the ROI of every activity and investment. L&D is often under particular scrutiny. Learning data analytics will provide the insights needed to ensure training content is bringing the desired learning outcomes, highlighting areas that need to be improved. 

Analytics can also show you individual employees or groups within your extended enterprise who need additional training support. L&D teams become empowered to spend their resources where it will bring the maximum positive impact.