Custom Training Design and Development Services

New Hires: When it comes to onboarding initiatives, time is either your friend or your enemy. The sooner new or transitioning employees are up to speed and productive, the more agile, flexible and stable your organization becomes. Over 30 years, Allen has designed and developed new hire training initiatives for dozens of the world’s largest companies. By tapping into our expertise, you’ll be on your way to effectively transferring key knowledge to employees in ways that help them adapt, adopt, and apply it soon. We’ll help you scale your efforts around:

• Retention
• Cultural Acclimation and Adaptation
• Speed to Productivity
• Employee Transitioning
• Knowledge Transfer
• Organizational Orientation and Navigation
• Alignment

Staff/Employees: For three decades, Allen has helped some of the world’s best organizations become even better as they invest in their employees via learning. Whether focused on “dry” topics, performance issues, or essential job functions, Allen will help your team achieve greater results in your training programs as you gain access to a depth of experience around designing and developing programs that address:

• Motivating Learners
• Change Management
• Knowledge Transfer
• Boosting Productivity
• Improving Efficiencies
• Eliminating Redundancies

Executives/Management:
Today’s leaders have more responsibility and more of the organization’s success rides on their shoulders. Successfully motivating, coaching and mentoring leaders is often the first and most important step to impacting company performance. Having consulted on, designed, and delivered numerous leadership and management training programs, Allen knows the language, psychology, and instructional strategies that work with this audience. Together, we’ll help expand your team’s ability to identify and design to motivating factors around initiatives that address:

• Organizational Change
• Leadership Transitions
• Fast-tracking
• Policy and Procedure
• Leader Development
• Improving Performance Levels
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Self-study and Evaluation

Sales and Marketing: Rolling out marketing and sales programs quickly, helping employees ramp up efficiently, and disseminating product knowledge in a way that it becomes second nature are the promises that training can deliver to your sales and marketing employees. At the bottom line, implementing successful learning programs for this audience can have direct and immediate impact on revenue generation and your bottom line. Because each organization is unique, Allen’s customized approach to learning program development is the best method for hitting your objectives. Whether you need to implement simulations to train enterprise software sales reps or design a blended approach to help store associates better up sell, our expertise with this audience is found in the following:

• Compliance and regulatory (for pharmas and biotechs)
• Productivity
• Product Knowledge
• Sales Skills
• Soft Skills
• Activity Management
• Cross Selling

Customers: If you’re looking to better leverage your customer training, it’s time we talk. Allen’s set of competencies in this arena have been recognized with numerous awards. That’s because we’re able to help augment our partners’ approaches to their customers as learners. We help design training around cost-effective methods and exploit emerging technologies that improve customer engagement and retention. Over three decades, Allen has developed L&D programs for some of the world’s largest companies that address:

• Customer Engagement
• Customer Satisfaction
• Lower Loss Rates
• Support Costs
• Product Evangelism
• Higher Adoption Rates
• Recurring Revenue Streams

Finance: Whether you’re dealing with risk management, GRC issues, or onboarding new tellers, employees in the finance sector have complex learning requirements. Designing and developing successful training programs means ensuring learners reach high levels of synthesis and evaluation. Allen’s experience around developing high-impact, high level, customized learning initiatives for these audiences has been recognized by the industry with awards, but more importantly, our clients have seen measurable, positive results.

Programs: Affordable, engaging custom compliance training is more than just checking boxes to just "get it done." While “off the shelf” courses offer initial savings, when it comes to GRC programs critical operations and organizational effectiveness, you want to turn to Allen. Our specialty is in helping you discover best methods for motivating and moving employees in ways that ensure your organization's compliance.

Our customized GRC training programs have helped some of the world’s most complex businesses hit and exceed their compliance goals. That's because we work from the ground up to research, analyze, develop, create, deliver, and implement high-level, highly effective learning programs that actually work and deliver measurable results.

We don’t sell you a box with software. We help define and deliver on strategies that effect change in employee behavior, resulting in a conforming, aware and compliant-positive culture for areas like:

• Ethics
• Operating Regulations
• AML
• Code of Conduct
• Antitrust
• Environmental Safety
• Privacy
• Criminal Statutes

Business Process: From Network Centric Operations to Value Stream Mapping, Allen has built custom business processes training programs for a wide variety of global corporations. We know what’s at stake and understand the realities you face around performance and ROI. Whether you’re a training team tasked with rolling out a blended learning solution for Six Sigma or a compliance team looking for an efficient GRC e-learning solution, the Allen team can develop a solution that fits your organization perfectly. Key expertise lies around:

• SOPs
• OJT
• Six Sigma
• Process Optimization and Outcomes
• Workflow
• Organizational Dynamics
• Lifecycle Management

Product Knowledge: From updating Sales and Marketing to onboarding new employees, training engineers to informing customers, Allen has helped a variety of companies to develop effective training for improving product knowledge. We can help you connect the dots between representatives’ improved effectiveness and organizational bottom line. The results our programs have garnered for our customers the past 30 years speak for themselves. Triple digit ROI, double digit retention rates, higher levels of adoption, cross selling and up selling, these are the impacts Allen’s customized product knowledge training programs have.

Leadership/Soft Skills: Whether you are trying to improve management techniques or instilling key leadership values, Allen can help you create training initiatives that work. Our work with specialized, limited groups of key senior executives to training programs designed for tens of thousands employees of all stripes have received accolades from our clients, their learners and industry analysts alike. In all our approaches and solutions, we work with you to engage your learners through proven instructional strategies combined with creative and emergent delivery methods that work.

Systems: Over our long history, we've had the opportunity to help numerous clients get the most from their software systems, whether proprietary or third party. From simple software applications to engrained, complex systems that combine several software applications with solidly defined policy, procedures and processes, Allen’s set of competencies in systems training are the key to your success. While we’ve developed a wide variety and number of systems training programs, we specialize particularly in:

• Pharmacovigiliance Software
• Financial/Banking Systems
• Insurance Claims Management
• Internally Developed/Proprietary Client Systems
• Retail Associate Systems
• Customer Facing Training
• HRMS, CMS, Performance Management, etc.

Safety: As you well understand, your organization’s safety needs are unique. We appreciate that. It’s why every training program we develop is created from the ground up based on your unique challenges, goals and culture. Whether it’s creating flight safety programs or safety systems training, drug and alcohol policy courses or food handling instructions, hazmat/lockout, tag out or safety policy, we know what’s at stake: liability, public relations, employee morale and most critical, worker safety.

Orientation: Whether onboarding new employees, or teaching managers soft skills, educating employees and keeping them informed is crucial to your business. Over our long history, Allen has helped hundreds of training departments effectively reach employees and positively affect their behavior. Our custom orientation training services have helped our clients improve human performance for all types and levels of employees.

Pharmaceutical/Healthcare:
Over our long history, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of organizations involved in the medical and healthcare fields, from pharmaceuticals to healthcare to biotech. In fact, we’re proud to say Pfizer and five other of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are clients.

Because we have so much experience developing custom training for these industries, our team of designers, writers, and developers are able to easily communicate with your subject-matter experts (SMEs) to convert technical information into effective, compelling learning interactions.

In recent years, we’ve developed custom pharma, healthcare and biotech solutions for:

• Instructor-led training (ILT) and blended courses
• E-learning
• Learning management portals
• Performance support systems
• Simulations
• Performance and needs assessments

Manufacturing: Whether trying to improve efficiencies or protect workers, top corporations involved in manufacturing understand the power effective training has to positively impact the entire organization. Allen helps you develop and implement a training program customized to your business objectives. Our solution expertise lies in the following areas:

• SOPs
• Safety/Hazmat/Lockout Tag out
• Line Management
• OJT
• Equipment and Processes
• Technical Aptitude Development
• Product Knowledge

Retail: Over the years, we’ve had the privilege to develop custom training solutions for a wide variety of corporations serving the retail and consumer markets. Whether seeking to improve performance from customer facing employees or senior managers, we understand the challenges and unique nature of business to consumer organizational learning. Programs we’ve custom designed and developed for our clients include:

• Employee Orientation
• Customer Service
• Sales and Marketing Training
• Governance, Regulatory and Compliance
• Consumer Product/Service Education
• Business Processes/SOPs

Finance: From customer service to compliance to new employee training, Allen has developed a wide variety of custom training programs for global banks and financial institutions. Since our start in 1981, we’ve been privileged to help such venerable institutions as American Express, Citibank, BankOne, CapitalOne, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, the Risk Management Association (RMA), and a many other of the world’s largest global financial institutions whose privacy we’ve agreed to protect.

The fact is, when it comes to creating training that works for the financial industry, it’s tough to find anyone with more experience than Allen. A short list of program areas custom developed for our banking and financial clients includes:

• AML
• Risk Management
• Lending
• Credit
• Marketing
• Compliance, Governance and Regulations
• Real Estate
• Trading
• Code of Conduct

Insurance: Whether you need to train your Sales team or are working to solidify governance, regulatory or compliance (GRC) policies, you can rely on Allen’s experience creating training programs customized to the insurance industry.

For three decades, Allen Communication Learning Services has helped insurance organizations of all types identify where learning can significantly impact their businesses. Our competencies around assessments, curriculum development and learning management for the insurance industry have been recognized by industry analysts, while garnering numerous awards for our approach and design. Clients like Farmers, Farm Bureau, The Risk Management Association, Aon, Aetna, Unum Provident, Cambridge, and Wausau, have benefited from our design expertise specific to programs like:

• Agent Onboarding and Orientation
• Risk Management and Assessment
• Claims Systems
• Employee Conduct
• Product Knowledge
• Compliance, Governance and Regulations
• HRMS and CRM

Energy/Utility: Whether you’re honing in on Governance, Regulatory, and Compliance (GRC) issues or just looking for an effective method for improving worker safety, Allen can help you meet your objectives. We’ll work with you to develop a custom training program that meets your challenges and brings success.

Direct Selling: When the world of direct sales looks for training, more and more, they turn to Allen. That’s because over the past decade we’ve delivered dozens and dozens of custom designed learning initiatives to millions of direct seller learners in dozens of countries all over the world. In just the past five years, our programs have won nine awards from organizations like the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), Brandon Hall, and the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA). Areas of high competency and importance to direct sellers include:

• Ethics
• Managine the Downline
• Increasing Revenue
• Compliance and Regulation
• Product Knowledge
• Sales Skills
• Retention
• Associate Satisfaction

ILT: We’ve all been to through the training sessions that rely on an instructor reading the PowerPoints hour after hour, day after day, until we think we will implode from boredom. Get a better set of curriculum from Allen. We engage learners with activities, group work, and role play activities that illuminate your business objectives in a memorable way. Learn more about our custom instructor led training services.

E-Learning: Custom E-Learning from Allen is more than whiz-bang technology with neat graphics. It's highly effective, motivational training delivered to learners at their point of need. It's easy to mention the hundreds of companies we've teamed with to develop e-learning initiatives (more than 100 of the Fortune 500 over the past decades alone). It's simple to point to the numerous awards and recognitions received (57 since 2000). And touting ratings from independent analysts is a joy.

In the long run, though, what really matters is how well the custom e-learning we develop works for you. That's why we dedicate ourselves to every project and partnership, no matter how big or small. With decades of combined experience, our team of designers, artists and programmers develop engaging and, arguably, the most instructionally sound e-learning courses in the industry. From simple to complex projects, we offer the right solution for you. Learn more about our custom e-learning offerings.

Blended Learning: When you look at your blended learning program, do you still see unrelated, disconnected clumps of ILT and WBT? Allen helps you move beyond that by implementing highly effective instructional strategies that result in the perfect blend of training for your learners. We move your program beyond a simple mix of delivery modes to a more relevant and learner-centric blend of instructional strategies. Find out how our custom blended learning design and development services will help you achieve the results you’re looking for.

Needs Discovery/Pre Sales:
From the moment we being working with you, you’ll notice a difference. Rather than trying to sell you on what’s best for us, we’ve created a proven “Needs Discovery” process for identifying the optimal solution to meet your objectives on your timelines and within your budget. Additionally, we know how important “fit” is to a successful project, and we are always up front about projects that we may not be the perfect partner for.

Our team of Directors of Learning and Senior Design Consultants have instructional design backgrounds and have spent significant time in positions just like yours. Consequently, as your colleagues, they’re able to consult with you to fully understand and define the scope of your project, including challenges, budgets, timelines, learners, and your organization as a whole.

Project Management: We’ve seen it too often: corporate training teams soured by bad vendor experiences. Our philosophy? Never let a client down. At Allen, we’ve dedicated ourselves to the client experience. We want to make your life easier. Key to that is our Office of Project Management, a combination of a dedicated team of project managers and technology that together, the sole purpose is to ensure your training initiative is a success.

As practitioners themselves, you’ll find our PMs are your colleagues and do all in their power to make the project a success. From keeping all the internal and external players on the same page to ensuring best practices to proposing new ideas, approaches and strategies, our PMs are renowned by our clients for their skills and acumen. The objectives of our Office of Project Management are:

1. Increase overall readiness and agility
2. Gain efficiency by building a team of talented and trained resources
3. Improve quality of all client deliverables
4. Develop functional excellence in project management

Additionally, our Project Management Portal is a collaborative technology that facilitates communication during our projects. As a web-delivered tool, the Portal gives both internal and external project participants access to project development at any time and in any place. The Portal provides a one-stop resource for regular project status, milestones and timelines, online deliverables, document sharing and transfer, feedback tracking and reporting, team member information, production decisions, and technical troubleshooting.

Instructional Design: The Allen team uses methods proven to help learners gain the knowledge and skills they need to solve work-related problems and improve job performance. All initiatives designed and developed by Allen encourage active learning and real-world integration. Allen has always been committed to and known for our sound instructional design principles. While we are influenced by many of the top instructional design philosophies and frameworks, we’re also extremely pragmatic, rather than academic and theoretical in our approach. For more details on this approach, select from the following:

• Design Philosophies
• Discovery
• Development
• Collaboration
• Review

Instructional Designers: Our instructional designers each have many years experience under their belts to augment their advanced degrees from institutions renowned for their ISD programs. Most importantly, they understand adult learners as well as the mechanics of working on and designing a variety of projects from simple knowledge capture courses to large, complex, blended evaluative projects. Designers apply their creativity and body of knowledge around teaching, writing, multimedia, and art to make each project successful.

As full participants and members of organizations like ASTD and ISPI, Allen’s designers are skilled in:

• Needs Analysis – Curriculum analysis; gap analysis; job task analysis; evaluation.
• Content Analysis – Systematic approaches to existing material analysis; Client interviewing; SME interviewing; full grasp of client content; development as Allen in-house project SME.
• Design – Aligning business and learner needs with course objectives; Creative and innovation leadership; design (DSD) vision management; art and programming team collaboration; quality assurance.

Graphic Artists: The ability to visually implement great instructional design is crucial to the success of your project. Our graphics artists have years of experience designing top notch artwork for a variety of industries and companies. Their creative yet practical approaches to interface design, photography, navigation, and look and feel have won awards from industry gurus and organizations like the International Academy of Visual Arts and many others. You can be sure you’ll get a visually appealing and compelling graphic design with every project Allen produces.

Programmers: Whether implementing programmatic best practices or consulting with clients on industry standards like SCORM, our programmers and technical team ensure smooth implementation of every technical aspect of our projects. They’re known for taking challenges encountered and even created by other vendors and not only fixing them, but finding better long-term solutions. From the backend architecting of courseware development and delivery to hosting strategies to working on simulation engines to creating proprietary in-house software for improved authoring and development efficiencies, our programming team’s talent and skills in a variety of environments, languages and implementations make every technical project smooth and successful.

Sales: In most organizations, sales representatives are concerned with one thing: closing the sale, no matter the costs or fit. Not at Allen. The majority of our representatives have actually been where you are. At one point, they were designers or organizational managers tasked with improving learners. Further, many have decades of experience in the industry, and they use the gained knowledge to consult with you to discover the best solutions to your challenges. On the Allen team, sales aren’t driven by wins, but by the successes of our clients. To that end, about 68% of all our clients have been with us for multiple years and projects, demonstrating a loyalty of our clients to Allen, and Allen’s loyalty to them.

Project Managers: Our project managers have proven themselves over their many years dedication to client projects. As practitioners themselves, you’ll find our project managers are your colleagues and do all in their power to make your project a success. From keeping all the internal and external players on the same page to ensuring best practices to proposing new ideas, approaches and strategies, our PMs are renowned by our clients for their skills and acumen.

Assessments: The key to any successful project is the upfront planning. Allen’s experience conducting assessments over the past 30 years has allowed us to hone down best practices and processes, regardless whether you’re looking for a complex, long-term, in-depth engagement or a quick and simple consultative review of gaps and potentials. Typical types of methods we use to help in that upfront analysis and planning include:

• Usability Testing
• Course Conversion Strategies
• Curriculum Redesign
• Job Analysis
• Performance Gap Analysis
• Learning Program Evaluations

Learn more about our Assessment and Analysis methodologies.

Design: Allen's content analysis matrix helps define roles and expectations when creating custom content. The Allen instructional design approach gives focus and discipline within our flexible framework of content gathering.

For content levels 1 through 3, clients frequently contract with us to assess the current state of their content vs. stated objectives, to recommend content scope changes and to validate existing content or needs assessment results. For Level 4 content, we can create content on virtually any topic thanks to the experience and aptitude of our designers. Our design teams frequently:

• Conduct onsite visits
• Lead focus groups
• Review industry literature
• Gather data through questionnaires
• Interview executives
• Conduct beta testing
• Work with partnering SMEs

Development: Allen’s proprietary process for developing all our projects is derived from proven models like ADDIE, but tweaked and customized to match the lessons learned over 30 years of design and development. One thing is certain, the efficiency of our method helps speed project development while cutting costs and ensuring delivery of the optimal solution.

Learning Portal: At Allen, we believe your dollars are best spent on actual learning, not on the technology that tracks it. That’s why we developed the Allen Learning Portal years ago in response to the bloated LMS sector. The Allen Learning Portal is a low cost, custom solution to learning management. With all the core functionality of the best LMSes, but without the exorbitant pricing, our typical implementation of the Portal is done in conjunction with courseware development. That way, we can customize the interface and features to work the way you need them. To give you a quick idea of the revolutionary approach we’ve developed for learning management, the Allen Learning Portal charges a single, low, one-time licensing fee plus the one-time cost to customize the system to your project.

Get all the details about this solution by visiting the Allen Learning Portal section of this website.

Development Technology: Allen’s beginnings date to the emergence of learning technology. From authoring software to SCORM and AICC standards development to learning management to learning 2.0, Allen has been there the whole way, often leading and guiding the direction of where technology takes learning and development and vice versa. Because our experience in this area is so vast, we have an entire section of our website dedicated to it. Why not visit it now?

Translation and Localization:
When your learning program needs to be rolled out internationally, Allen will help you through the translation and localization process. Having translated hundreds of courses into dozens of languages for delivery in multiple countries across the world, we have the experience to know how to successfully roll out these types of projects. Thanks to our proprietary process and technologies like the Project Management Portal, we make it easier, faster and cheaper to collaborate with multilingual/national SMEs and translation partners.

Courseware Conversion:
When you’re ready to move current courses and content to more robust, sophisticated and up to date levels of training, Allen’s courseware conversion services help. We transition your content using learning strategies and roadmaps that outline the best method for delivery of the new content. Our methods make it possible to not only quickly convert your content, but to make sure we don’t lose anything in the process. Whether transitioning from ILT or Powerpoints or dated e-learning, we’ll help you get your program to the level it needs to be to impact learners.

Rapid Development: Need a quick turn-around? Have a particularly tight budget? Allen’s Rapid Learning Development services deliver high-end courseware for projects with the leanest parameters. At Allen, we work hard to save you time and money without sacrificing quality. That’s why we’ve created internal, proprietary technologies like authoring tools and project management portals that speed up development and cut costs. As a result, we’re able to help clients get the highest-quality e-learning and blended learning even when they have strict budgetary and timeline constraints.

Allen’s rapid learning development services are perfect for projects like:

• Compliance courseware
• PowerPoint conversions
• Legacy courseware conversions
• Conversions of disparate content into e-learning
• Tight budgets
• Time crunches

Consultative Services: As part of the design and development of all learning and development programs, a considerable amount of upfront work is requisite to their success. That’s why we have a full array of consultative services around analysis, assessments, performance consulting, and discovery. Please visit our Consulting Services section of this website to learn more.