The Business of Learning

We know how to help you get return on your learning and development investments. We collaborate with learning leadership to design initiatives by clarifying the desired outcomes, suggesting options and innovative approaches, and helping you understand the costs in terms of people, resources, time, and money. This detailed, client-centric approach is the reason our clients say that we are truly one of them, that we understand the deeper issues.

Determining the Needs

Solving the right problem is just as important as solving the problem right. We invest in up-front discovery because we know that understanding the true nature of a problem, challenge, or opportunity gets you half way to the winning solution. We spend our time gathering the data, ferreting out the hidden dynamics, and then presenting the issues as they really are. Our clients value our approach because they are generally too close to the issues–their day-to-day responsibilities make it difficult to focus deeply on the complex problems–and they want the credibility of a well-respected, external third-party perspective.

Developing the Learning Budget

When it's clear that learning and development is the solution to a problem you have, we partner with you to create innovative methods and approaches to learning and training. One of our strengths is our ability to leverage our client's resources, and combine them with ours to design the most effective and efficient programs. Period.

Selecting the Vendors

Finding cost-effective, high-caliber talent is tough and time consuming. You can rely on us to broker relationships with new and exciting vendors and make sure you get the most for your money. As part of your team, we will find the best vendors, screen them in advance, and then give you real options. When required, we can take responsibility for hiring, managing, paying them, and replacing them, if necessary.

Managing the Vendors

We understand that most companies don't have enough people to manage all of their vendors while keeping employees happy too. From brokering relationships with vendors to managing existing ones, we can function as part of your team to act as a buffer between you and the vendors. We can keep the amount of time you spend dealing with vendors to a minimum so you can focus on your employees.

Evaluating Programs

We understand that you want Business Impact metrics (Level 4) to assess the ROI of your training and development expenditures, but most companies and training organizations stop at Attendee Satisfaction (Level 1). Beyond simple satisfaction surveys, we can assess the degree to which real learning has taken place: that knowledge has successfully been transferred; that new behavior is taking root, and business results are being achieved. We help you build accountability into your initiatives so you can determine the effectiveness of your training programs.

Build and Implementing Training Programs

We help you deliver the highest quality content to keep program attendees focused on what's most important–your learning objectives. We collaborate with you to create new content or refresh existing material because we understand that content gets old fast, and attendees benefit from accurate, timely material. This includes curriculum, instructor guides, e-learning, videos, games, simulations, websites, or any other methods to ensure the learning happens.

Managing the Implementation

Most companies don't have the bandwidth, capabilities, or resources to deal with all the details related to implementing learning and development initiatives effectively. Accelerate does the "pick and shovel work" to implement training and development initiatives successfully. We believe it's important to get all the details of implementation right to ensure that program management and delivery are efficient and effective.