How do you ensure quality and consistency in your partnership learning resources and courses?

To ensure quality and consistency in partnership learning resources and courses, utilize a Learning Management System (LMS) for efficient organization and monitoring, offer continued support, encourage collaboration and feedback, and automate certification management to track partner progress effectively.

What are the needs of your partners? What will make living alot meaningful to them? Assess their most critical needs with survey and feedbacks. Create tailored content to answer their questions in need, goals, aspiration, challenges and expectations. The better they become while you solving their problems, the better your relationship with them.

At the beginning of each new partnership, I hold a 1:1 call with my main point of contact to lay all of the cards on the table. On this call, I like to start by explaining that the only way for our partnership to be a success is if we can be transparent and work together on our goals. I explain my top 3 goals, what KPIs would make the partnership a success in my eyes, and any potential obstacles we may face. I then ask them to share the same. I find leading with transparency and trust fosters a stronger long-term partnership.

What do you hope to achieve with these resources and courses for partners? Identifying clear outcomes for each asset along with the value it provides to the end partner (your customer) is crucial in creating content that is relevant, timely and helpful.

Do not rely in the actual "completion" of the "training" or the "certification" mark at the end. Many "shortcuts" can be done to bypass actual learning. So, more needs to be done to actually benchmark proficiency. A cool way is to monitor the various sections of the training where folks are spending most of their time and then do a deep dive to find out how to replicate that outcome (experience) in more areas. Humans retain more of what they like. Many courses are just too boring and fails to engage the "student". AI maybe the ultimate tutor. Welcome to the world of a micro attention span...Good luck!

Measure, audit, survey, update, repeat. Measure every aspect of the learnings. Starts, stops, returns, abandons, time, etc and importantly tie the learning back to a meaningful business impact (capability, capacity, efficacy and ideally some ROI). Audit along the way - sit side by side with the learner to understand what sticks and what doesn’t. Check jargon, acronyms, taxonomy’s, and defined terms that are critical for context. Check to be sure the modalities land and be conscious of different types of learners and modify your content to your audience. Survey when the learner completes the course and survey again a few months later and then a year later. Tie this back to the business impacts for both your firm and the learner.

As most of my partner teams were working professionals who need their own time and space to learn, I choose to publish learning resources across 2 formats: > A book on Amazon - both kindle and paperback versions to address learning for users who want to do self learning. > An online course which can be used to do self learning on how to build strategic partnerships.

Aligning learning resources with your brand identity, values, and vision is vital. Cohesive design, tone, and voice bolster brand reliability and consistency. Align content with strategic goals to highlight mutual benefits, guiding partners toward their objectives. Emphasize authenticity and genuine value for trust. Best practice: Prioritize storytelling over hard-selling to effectively showcase partnership value. Engaging stories resonate more than sales pitches.

My brand objective was to be a success coach to my audience. My Goal was to help my partners and their teams, to learn the Art of building strategic partnerships that will contribute to organization objectives. I built and aligned my content to these goals.

This has been some of the most challenging and rewarding work I've done in the L&D leadership space. And, consequently, when I haven't done it well, it quickly became a problem. Partners need to understand exactly what L&D can and cannot do, and what is and is not possible. I've been on the fun side of sharing cool things we can do that my partners didn't even think were possible. Those were great partnerships and fun work! I've also been on the other side where I've tried to explain to partners why the current L&D team can't recreate an entire school certification program. That was demotivating and soul-sucking. If your partners don't understand the work you do, it can lead to difficult relationships and a lack of trust.

This was an essential part of my Book writing process. I analyzed the instances in the market on the type of strategic partnerships that my target audience was driving. A lot of my content was driven by their feedback, challenges and the gaps to address their learning needs.

This is highly required. Even in my Book, I regularly propose the concept of "Constant Value Add". You have to keep your content evolving with changing times, and changing needs of your audience. This will also keep your learning content relevant to the real needs of your audience, and help in creating better results.

The best reason for this is that when you continually bring new information and data on progress, you're building a brand for you and your L&D team. You become someone people trust, want to work with, and go to when they have a problem. That should be the vision for a strong L&D team - we are problem-solvers who provide meaningful solutions and partnerships to those who don't understand how we do our "magic" work.

One thing we are also ways looking for is finding partner success clues and figuring out how we can put that back into our clients onboarding and learning resources. So we are not just reporting on best performing partners each month, but figuring it out what they did and introducing those strategies with the rest of the partner ecosystem.

You know, seeking outside help is crucial in some situations. Coming clean about your need for it is the first step and the hardest part of being a professional... Creating top-notch content isn't easy and requires skills and experience. Take for example training packages for the change management stage - a crucial stage in creating many strategic partnerships. It's more than just putting together powerpoint presentations...

Too often we fall into the trap of thinking we can handle everything internally. This overconfidence can lead to catastrophic failures in the partnership realm. Always think, "is there somebody who is my superior who could deliver a better result for the right price." If so, you should look externally and see where you can add talent from the outside to further your goals.

Apply Adult learning principles… community, real life scenarios, behavior based programs, and micro learning interspersed! Be careful not to make things too laborious, too rigid, or too theoretical.

You have to be aligned with your partners on priorities. If they want something quickly, it will be minimal; if they want something elaborate, it will take time. You can't have it both ways. I've been part of teams that have stakeholders who want it all but don't provide the time or resources to build what they want. It is a frustrating place to be for all involved.

Make sure all stakeholders are part of the process and with ongoing constructive communication and feed back. Be sure to instill trust and value individuality and as a group(s).

As per my experience in strategic partner enablement here is the most effective dimensions of creating an upskilling strategy: 1. Map available learning content 2. communicate to your partner to collect their requests from available content 3. Agree on a standard payment mechanism 4. plan for training delivery: leverage self learning for efficiency and more audience, add in-person workshops to strengthen the knowledge acquired and relationships between direct sales community and indirect sales. 5. Invest in creation of skill set that will be your reference for future enablement requests. 6. Governance and communication is crucial to achieve the above 7. Feedback is crucial to Elevate your strategy & update available resources and content