For an orchestra performance to be successful, every musician must play their instrument harmoniously with the others. If one performer plays the wrong notes or isn’t on the same level as the others, the entire orchestra’s performance is impacted.
Businesses and their non-employee partners function similarly. Just like orchestra members playing different instruments, your partners, suppliers, and customers have different roles and responsibilities. However, your business is negatively impacted if they aren’t all on the same page or operating at the same level as the rest of the ecosystem. On the other hand, if they’re all learning and growing together, using a unified learning platform, they’ll do their jobs better, and your business will reach a higher level of success.
Employee learning and development have become crucial to attraction and retention. Yet in today’s increasingly competitive and complex business environment, the most successful companies extend their learning beyond their workforce to those who work with them – or will in the future.
Why Extended Enterprise Learning?
Extended enterprise learning means providing L&D opportunities to anyone who uses or sells your products or services. The idea is that if all of your vendors, customers, clients, and other non-employee partners are trained using the same playbook and have the same knowledge as someone who works at your company, it’ll lead to better outcomes.
And this notion bears fruit: According to a recent Brandon Hall study, 58 percent of companies say extended enterprise learning has reduced their training costs, 55 percent say it has improved customer relations, and 41 percent report it helps maximize customer retention.
What’s more, it takes a relatively small investment to make a big impact. The study found that while extended enterprise learning takes up a relatively small chunk of companies’ L&D budgets (60 percent of companies say it accounts for less than 10 percent), it presents a great opportunity for organizations to build their brand, improve customer relationships and generate revenue.
Who Benefits from Upskilling?
Think of all the people and businesses your company works with outside of your own organization. Consider how powerful it would be if they all had the same knowledge and skills as your employees regarding your mission, values, and products/services.
For instance, upskilling your contractors, partners, and suppliers ensures they have a consistent level of baseline knowledge around your products and best practices and can serve as a trusted proxy when doing business on your organization’s behalf.
Providing your alumni with an opportunity for continued learning and growth might increase their chances of returning to your organization. And if they do, they’ll have the up-to-date skills needed to jump right back into their role.
On the other hand, up-skilling candidates can provide a pipeline of talent equipped on day one with hard-to-find skills. Moreover, providing learning programs to employees in the purgatory between accepted offers and start dates makes them more readily onboarded with an existing understanding of your company culture and processes.
Upskilling consumers can be beneficial to B2C companies. Take, for example, Alexander Forbes, a large financial institution in South Africa. To address their customers’ general tendency toward making poor financial decisions impacting their long-term well-being, A. Forbes created a client-facing training program to promote financial health. The goal is to help their clients expand their financial knowledge and ultimately increase customer retention, investments, and satisfaction.
5 Tips to Jumpstart Your Own Extended Enterprise Program
If you’re on board with implementing extended enterprise learning at your organization, but don’t know where to start, here’s how to lay the foundation for a successful program.
- Set your intentions. As with any new initiative, start by identifying your business objectives, needs, and goals. Which partners are crucial to your business’s success? Where are your organization’s areas of vulnerability? From there, determine which skills need to be built into your extended enterprise to close these gaps.
- Get leadership buy-in. The idea of reskilling and upskilling people outside of your organization may initially seem superfluous to your C-suite or leadership team. When broaching the topic, come prepared with data that show the power of extended learning and the substantial ROI anticipated. Offer to run the program on a trial period, and if that proves successful, you can discuss ways to extend the initiative to reach more audiences.
- Consider customization. Like any good learning plan, the content included in your extended enterprise program should be personalized based on each audience’s needs, interests, and preferences. Instead of assuming you know what your partners want, involve them in the set-up process. If they have internal L&D teams, tap their knowledge, or go straight to the individual employees for insight.
- Establish benchmarks. When developing your extended enterprise learning plan, build periodic checkpoints to gauge the program’s success. Gather data and feedback to ensure it’s working as planned. If the goal is to increase product knowledge, has this improved in the six months post-launch? If it’s about ensuring a ready talent pipeline, have onboarding and ramp-up times decreased? Based on these assessments, you can make adjustments that will better suit your partners – and your business – moving forward.
- Consider outsourcing. Most HR teams have enough on their plates, and adding more L&D initiatives to their growing list of to-dos can quickly lead to burnout or underwhelming results. While it requires additional upfront investment, partnering with a learning and upskilling platform with expertise in the extended enterprise will help you reach your goals more quickly and with greater success.
