Week 2: In Pole Position - Exploring the Drivers and Cars of the Extended Enterprise Learning Race

✌️ Welcome back✌️

Glad you're here, going down the rabbit hole of corporate learning with me.

I post this newsletter weekly on Wednesdays 15:00 pm GMT/16:00 CET/17:00 EET.

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👇 So... What are you waiting for? 👇

Week 1 recap: Extended Enterprise, the Formula 1 of Corporate Learning -

• i) Intro to Extended Enterprise Learning (including the audiences)
• ii) How external differs from internal training in the corporate learning realm
• iii) What tools do external training teams’ need to be successful
• iv) Why is the extended enterprise learning landscape so interesting

I will continue the EE race for some more weeks, before diving into a new rabbit hole of corporate learning (let me know what I should research) 🕳🐇

This week, we are in pole position, exploring the drivers/audiences that make up the EE race: customers, partners and a third category I called misc 🤔

Then, we are going under the hood of the F1 cars 🏎 and reviewing what components are needed in their cars to compete in this race.

Part one will review the drivers/audiences, while part two reveals the engine room/what functionality is needed from a learning system to build a successful program 🚀🚀

👇 Join me on week two of this newsletter, "In Pole Position"👇

The prelude: 

The external audience side is vast, and in this article, I am focusing on the three audiences:

1. Customers
2. Partners
3. Miscellaneous (the best of the rest).

Then, we are diving into the F1 cars 🏎, seeing what makes up the engine, and what functionality is needed to run a successful external training program 🚀

Part 1 - Pole Position - let's explore the drivers: 

1.1 Customer Education (CEd)

This is often the most common audience in external training, and in many ways the driving force behind the surge in external training programs (first in the US, not in Europe). It has been traditionally led by SaaS companies, but has shifted to be more prevalent in many industries. Some of the most common ones are:

• SaaS - improve CS KPIs like NRR, upsell, ramp times or decrease support tickets or training time spent by CSMs or PS teams. Sometimes driven by marketing too to drive brand loyalty, awareness or evangelism to your software.
• Consulting - wide category, could be running managed service programs or educating clients on specific programs. Large consulting companies have built business units based on EE programs, McKinsey Academy (powered by Docebo) is a perfect example.
• Medical/pharma - evangelism play, often driven by marketing teams. Goal is to drive adoption and loyalty of set product/drug, so it is preferred and sold over competitors.
• Manufacturing - often an adoption/implementation play, how can they set up your product more effectively to scale 

CEd is used to attract and educate customers. It is a competitive differentiator and something that is highly measurable, often tied to KPIs like Net Revenue Retention, upsell, CSAT and support tickets. The audiences can be several, from the general public/evangelism play, to enable prospects in the pipeline and to current customers about the product.

1.2 Partners 

These are individuals and organisations selling, servicing or supporting another organisation's products or solutions. They typically are an extension of your brand, or acting as a reseller of your product or service. Some typical partner types include: Franchises, Dealers, Resellers and Distributors.

Typically, the business driver for partnership training is to drive revenue for your product or service from a set partner. This is usually the north star for partnership training, but partnership training can also expand your brand and attract new partners.

1.3 - Miscellaneous 

Under the misc category, there could be numerous audiences listed, but the two main ones we will focus on are i). Training companies (TCs) and ii). Associations 

TCs as the name suggests are companies where selling training is the core business. This can cover selling business to consumer - 1 course to 1 user (B2C), B2B - sell training to a large number of users at a business and more intricate versions too - B2B2C, B2B2B and so on.

For ACs, the e-commerce functionality and integrations are key, as it's the way you get paid for the programs. As you enter down the rabbit hole of complexity, the need for detailed e-commerce functionality and integrations follows. Sometimes, companies here will use other software like training management systems (TMS) or specialist tools for ILT management like Training Orchestra as well. 

Association training will typically involve the training of members external to an organization, and can be either non-profit or for-profit focused. This can be very niche and specific, but in general focuses either on outreach related to a program (i.e volunteers - free training) or the e-commerce/profitability/revenue angle similar to training companies.

Part 2 - The Engine Room - key features to build an external training program

So we’ve seen the drivers in the race, typically stemming from a customer, partner or the misc audience variation. Let’s explore the cars, and what they have under the hood, or in other words, what is needed to drive the formula 1 race → 

In my opinion, these are the key features needed for the engine room of your F1 car, your learning platform:

• 1. Learning programs / eLearning, vILT and ILT training. Learning pathways. 
• 2. User Experience - UX/UI of your platform - your platform design reflects your brand, and is a key part of your program. Therefore, it has to land well with your audience(s), to be on-brand and look good enough that it drives people to your program. This includes both the UX/UI of your initial login page and the landing pages in the system.
• 3. User management - how to organise your users in the LMS platform. This can follow a branch or a group structure, and it's crucial that this has a high degree of automation to reduce manual workflows related to user management. Another big one in user management is delegated rights/power user roles to give the right permission sets to the right users, i.e CSMs, instructors, partners, enablement, trainers, end customers etc. 
• 4. Content management and versioning - supporting learning object standards like SCORM, xAPI, AICC and sometimes LTI is leveraged too. Content creation in EE moves at the speed of light, so easy creation and versioning of content is crucial to ensure that programs are run efficiently and without too many manual bottlenecks involved. Here, every company is different, some want authoring tools included and some not. - pros and cons of each. It is also important to have a central library/repository to version content across courses.
• 4. Certifications - crucial to certify external users on your products. This includes both native LMS certification functionality and ability to integrate to 3rd party certification/proctoring tools.   
• 5. Gamification - this is becoming a bigger and bigger part of EE, badges (in LMS and sharing externally on LinkedIn and other places), points, competitions, awards. Integrations to external tools like Credly is also requested frequently.
• 6. Mobile - both free app and fully white-labeled branded mobile app experiences, i.e X Academy App launched in the App/Google Play stores. 
• 7. Embedded Learning - embedding the LMS into an external software, i.e CRM, or your own software product as a SaaS company for example. Here, DAPs are also often used, either separate. or jointly with an LMS.
• 8. Reporting/analytics - to demonstrate the ROI & impact of your programs. This needs to be both visual and detailed enough to prove the programs viability and success.
• 9. Integrations, integrations, integrations. Your program will die on this hill if you do not have the proper integrations, see the needed tech stack in article 1 for details. This is usually to CRM systems, but also support tools like Zendesk, CS tools like Gainsight, Slack for community or specific community platforms like InSided, payment gateways to sell training (e-commerce), proctoring tools etc. Minimum is open APIs, ideal is native ones.
• 10. Automation - of actions in the LMS, i.e automatic enrolment to courses based on user management settings, or automation to or from an external software system - saves external training teams a ton of time and effort.
• 11. E-commerce, B2C, B2B and B2B2B/B2B2C. See section on TCs above.
• 12. Multiple domain functionality - the ability to run multiple portals linked to one main portal, and to provide a unique login page, URL, branding and permission structures to set domain. Crucial to personalise experience per audience, or per client, partner or program. If you want to scale your EE program, multiple domains is a must-have.
• Any organization should do an audience and program analysis before they select their criteria for their EE LMS. Recommend consulting an analyst as well, with my humble recommendation being Talented Learning w/John Leh, arguably the most knowledgable guy about all things extended enterprise.
• Other helpful sources of info from my own perspective is SaaS Academy advisors, Pam Micznik w/Zenya Learning, Learning Outcomes w/Brian Childs, and CELab (Adam Avramescu and Dave Derington). Or if you're keen to learn about Docebo, reach out, or enroll in Docebo University (link on docebo.com) to learn all about the learning platform in our own external training program (which Won Gold by BHG for best customer education program last week - Congrats Adam B and team!)

Preview - Week 3:

Next week, we are continuing the race and will explore "The G-Force" - how extended enterprise can help you grow your business and improve bottom line. In the current economic climate, you can't afford not to look into EE as a path for your learning team.

Sneak peak - how customer education will grow your business 👇👇

This will be a tactical guide to achieving business growth via extended enterprise learning, whether, customer, partner or other categories.

The extended enterprise race continues, as we week by week, dive into new topics 👇👇

Tom, chill out, we're only getting started ✌️Buckle up, this will be a wild ride! 👇

As always, thanks for joining me down the rabbit hole, really appreciate it! 🙏

As Max Verstappen (cover photo), give week 2 - In Pole Position, a 👍 👍

Join the race, share which topics you want me to write about next ✍️📝

From one learning nerd to another,

--Harald ✌️