Line of business personnel need to stay informed of changes in their vertical industry – and when you run a large organization with thousands of employees, the best way to do this is with a training that will update everyone with the needed information.

For this Fortune 500 company we were asked to create a training that would update employees on important changes that had taken place within the automobile industry.

This project had clear challenges – starting with the budget, which was tight. When a client tells us in advance that they have a budget problem, we really appreciate this approach. Having a client be up front with us gets us on the right track from the start, and actually inspires us to find a creative solution that will work for them.

Here is a bit of inside reality from the vendor’s perspective: Marketing ourselves to and winning new clients is hard. So, when we have the opportunity to meet a new client, we try to infuse that dialogue with the attitude of winning a client-for-life. In general we operate on a small profit margin and starting out with a new client has additional overhead – setting up master contracts, learning how they like to work, the personalities of the team members, the brand standards, the intricacies of their technical specifications and infrastructure and so on. So it only makes sense for us to view the first project as part of a long term relationship.

Also, our return clients understand they can come to us when they need a ‘deal’ on a particular project. We know  the energy put into this project will come back to us over time, as the loyalty we build in this fashion helps foster our client-for-life approach. For this automobile industry training project, this return client needed a deal and we were happy to respond. The client had some written content and research, as well as an audio tape that was previously used for an existing training. Working together with the client's SMEs, we ultimately produced a one-hour online training that provided associates with an overview of the automobile industry.

This client also gave us the opportunity to design a new template for the training. The original design used the main content area for photos; we moved the entire course map to the left side and placed the photos above it. Either design is acceptable within this client’s brand guidelines, but our layout is more web-like, rather then the horizontal PowerPoint approach that the training world is fortunately moving beyond. This new interface was also more scaleable, as we knew we’d be working with this client on related projects down the road.

We are very strong advocates for adding interactivity and increasing the engagement of learners. For this project we added three Flash-based interactive learning games to enhance the training experience. These games were definitely outside the budget, but we chose to subsidize this project as part of our investment in our Learning Game Management System (LGMS) initiative we recently announced. You can read more about the LGMS in the News section.

We utilized our Content Management System to produce this project – by building the new template within our CMS we are ready to produce new projects for this client efficiently. You can read more about this in the Engineering Experts section.

This project went extremely well and the client was very pleased. He received the kind of quality product he needed, we had the satisfaction of enhancing his and his trainees' chances for success – and we won a client-for-life.