Extended Enterprise Training: Business Need and Success Parameters

Extended enterprise training is a strategic approach to train and develop the extended enterprise ecosystem – customers, partners, suppliers, distributors, resellers, and franchisees. It is a powerful way to think beyond employee training and ultimately drive business growth.

According to Brandon Hall Group, 77% of organizations say extended enterprise learning improves customer relations and 68% agree it increases brand/product awareness. Furthermore, 44% of organizations say extended enterprise learning reduces training costs.

Recently, Harbinger conducted a joint webinar with Adobe to reveal the secret sauce to creating the best extended enterprise training design strategy. The webinar ‘Designing Successful Extended Enterprise Training Experience’ was hosted by Arun Bhat, Senior Director, Harbinger Group and featured an expert panel: Rick Smith, Senior Director – Global Product Training, JLG Industries and Aditya Basu, Group Manager – Solution Partner Program, Adobe.

Let’s dive into the expert insights on some of the significant business needs and success parameters of designing extended enterprise training.

Business Need for Designing Extended Enterprise Training

Extended enterprise training is a much-needed effort to train your customers, who in turn would train their own customers on how to use your products and services and benefit from them in the best way possible. It not only helps train your extended enterprise ecosystem but also build a network of trainers, which in turn brings positive business outcomes for you. In addition, it can reduce training costs as you share those costs with your partners and customers.

For example, lift and equipment manufacturer JLG Industries would want to train their customers on how to safely operate their large construction equipment. They would want to provide the best extended enterprise training to their customers.

In the joint Harbinger + Adobe webinar, JLG’s Rick mentioned that the manufacturer wants to raise the bar to provide better training to their customers and equipment operators, covering standards, regulations, and other key aspects.

In this regard, JLG is building a trainer network with Harbinger and Adobe where JLG customers can use part of the Adobe system and JLG University to deliver online training to their own customers. JLG customers can also manage that training using Adobe Learning Manager and Headless UI that Harbinger has put together for JLG. This enables JLG customers to provide higher quality training to their own customers.

Eventually, the setup allows JLG to build a crowdsourced system that helps them continue to grow and provide better systems and services based on the trainer network. It’s a true case of extended network where a group of companies, customers, and end users come together as well as fund this effort to provide the best training in the industry.

Success Parameters for Extended Enterprise Training

It’s important to measure the success of your extended enterprise training to know where your training stands based on multiple factors and whether it is really producing the results you’re looking for. Some of the success parameters for extended enterprise training are:

• Flexibility of the training delivery
• Easy adoption, consumption, and distribution of the training
• Increased outreach to new potential users
• Fully meeting the training needs of customers
• Positive feedback from customers, trainer network, and other stakeholders
• Growth of the trainer network and community of partners and customers
• Increased brand visibility or word-of-mouth brand recommendations

Success Parameter of Credentialing

Partner audiences are not homogeneous. There are a lot of different types of partners, and most of them are competitive with each other. They like to showcase their expertise on how much and how well they are doing as opposed to the other companies. Therefore, it makes sense to consider credentialing as a key success parameter for extended enterprise training.

Now, credentialing can be done in two ways. The first one is at the individual level where partner individuals earn certifications and accreditations. Today, professionals like to announce the completion of training programs and display badges on LinkedIn.

So, being able to offer credentialing and deliver badges and certifications is a crucial parameter for designing successful extended enterprise training. Alternatively, it becomes a business outcome for you, in that you can determine how many certifications and individual trainings or credentials were achieved in a particular month, quarter, or year.

In the second way of credentialing, a collection of certifications becomes a way for a partner organization to showcase an expertise and claim they’re an expert in a particular capability. Be it individual credentials or collective credentials earned by a partner organization, they can really drive the success of extended enterprise training. This is partly because:

• Individuals want to hit their professional goals at a personal level and showcase their credentials
• Organizations have a necessity to complete partner trainings or earn certifications to come at par or surpass their competitors that have already earned these accreditations
• There is a need to stay competitive in the market and win more business

Success Parameter of Transparency

Transparency is another parameter of success for the extended enterprise training you design. Take the example of billable consultants. It can be a challenge for organizations to persuade these consultants to stop working on their day-to-day tasks and complete an extended enterprise training program. The utilization rates can get affected.

Today, organizations and learners need more transparency on the time commitment required for a certain training or learning journey. Is it going to take 2 hours, 5 hours, or multiple days to complete the training? Organizations and learners also demand transparency on being able to easily search trainings and get the training content in the fastest way possible. They’re not going to spend time searching for courses on a training portal.

So, while it’s important to maintain extended enterprise training content quality, enabling learners to get to that content quickly and easily is a success parameter that’s equally crucial. It could be a softer success parameter for extended enterprise training, but one that’s continuously evolving.