Strategies to secure stakeholder buy-in for corporate training

Incorporating a robust corporate training program into your business is a highly effective means to upskill your current employees, attract new talent, and foster a strong company culture. However, it can be challenging to build an eLearning program from the ground up as doing this to a high standard requires significant stakeholder buy-in across your organization.

There are, though, several strategies that can help to secure this support from the key figures across your business. Above all, by taking the time to understand their perspectives, showcase the benefits of training, and align with your business goals, you can build a compelling case for investment in employee development.

Any new product or process brought into a company needs to be able to prove its value, now more than ever. Hence, any onboarding process should include a well-defined value proposition.

Historically, training programs, especially those based on eLearning, encountered challenges in proving their value. It can be hard to guarantee – and measure – a team’s involvement when they are watching a slideshow delivered over a video conference!

However, modern corporate training programs should effortlessly measure and acknowledge learner results. At Skill Dynamics, for example, our insight module allows us to take a data-driven approach to the progress made by our learners, tracking the development of their competencies, their course progression, and even how applicable the training is to their day job. This also lets us regularly communicate each learner’s progress against their KPIs to all stakeholders, which helps to promote transparency and accountability throughout the training process.

This, coupled with our internationally-recognized certification process, gives you the ammunition you need to demonstrate the tangible effects of a training program to stakeholders who could otherwise be reluctant to implement it.

Effective and persuasive communication is pivotal for engaging stakeholders in your business. To secure their buy-in, you will need to be able to establish an engaging vision for the training program you want to introduce, and effectively communicate its benefits to the members of your team.

Ewellix – the leading global manufacturer and supplier of linear motion solutions – worked closely with Skill Dynamics to build a full communication plan that included buy-in from all senior stakeholders as well as their active engagement with the rollout of Skill Dynamics’ training programs throughout the business. This effective communication plan includes making the program – as well as additional support – available in all of the languages Ewellix’s team uses to ensure their global team all has equal access to training. In addition to this provision, all employees who have access to this training program were invited to attend onboarding webinars to get them started on their training journey. This process ensured that Ewellix’s employees were quickly made aware of the training options available, and actively encouraged to take advantage of this additional benefit.

Once the members of your team are aware of the training available to them, you must secure their active participation. At Skill Dynamics, each learner within a business that partners with us undergoes a skills gap assessment. This is the foundation of their journey, securing their active engagement from an initial stage, and allowing us to give each learner a personalized training plan.

Additionally, we provide learner engagement plans to continually support learners throughout their time with us. This program includes launch events, awards, skill clinics, and many other events, and ensures they remain in close contact with us throughout their training program. This ensures they fully understand what they’ll be expected to do as part of their training program, and will also allow them to share any feedback directly with us. This detailed communication process is a crucial – and often overlooked – part of the training process which can signal the difference between success and failure.

Large-scale eLearning programs can face roadblocks in their implementation. Often, these are related to the alignment of learning goals to learners’ expectations, particularly around a program’s relevance and its impact on their professional growth. To allay these concerns, a training provider must be able to demonstrate how a training program can make each learner’s job simpler, as well as provide evidence of how undertaking training can support their career goals as they progress their career.

We worked to overcome this challenge by working closely with Ewellix’s international learners to deliver training materials in their native language alongside a transcript for those needing additional support. Throughout this partnership, learners have also been encouraged to share their feedback and openly discuss their training programs. This open, adaptable approach was extremely successful, with 89% of Ewellix’s learners expressing a high level of satisfaction with their training experience.

As evident from this example, the capacity to embrace flexibility and innovation yields significant advantages for upskilling programs, particularly in a globally expanding business landscape.

While introducing a comprehensive upskilling program to your business can be challenging, when executed effectively, it can be highly rewarding for your teams. The key to doing this is to communicate effectively how a training program will support your team in achieving their wider business goals. Indeed, with the range of insights and data available to businesses nowadays, they can also measure each team’s effectiveness within the context of their goals to assess exactly how training programs can be used to help the business hit its targets.

To delve deeper into successful eLearning implementations, explore our case studies showcasing how Skill Dynamics empowers businesses in upskilling their workforce.