Why Your Training Company Should Have Domain Expertise

So, you’re ready to call in a training company or consultant to support your new employee onboarding training development and/or upskilling programs. Have you set your must-have standards for the organization you’ll choose to partner with? Can you name the criteria, processes, and vision they should have to collaborate effectively with your organization?

In previous articles, we’ve shared guidelines to help you vet and select a training company, consultant, or vendor. We’ve covered the importance of having the right process, credentials, and team experience. To that list we’ll add one key item: domain expertise. Your team must have domain expertise available internally, or you must choose a consultant with domain expertise to share. That level of mastery is needed to assure a successful project.

What is domain expertise? Let’s define our terms.  When we talk about domain expertise, we’re discussing a level of mastery that goes beyond knowledge and credentials to include a wealth of experience and problem-solving acumen, and the curiosity, aptitude, and passion to be motivated to achieve best in class results.

Which skills demonstrate that a training company (or consultant) has domain expertise in employee onboarding training or upskilling program, for example? Here are a few ways in which an individual instructional designer, L&D team or training company with domain expertise would approach the development of new training, or even to update an older training to increase relevance.

The Approach to Training Development with Domain Expertise

What is the difference in training development when conducted by an expert with domain experience? You’ll notice the following mindsets, strategies, and best practices.

1. Knowledge of the latest learning methodologies to engage busy adult learners, and experience with the design and use of those methods to inform which ones will have the greatest impact on learners in a variety of contexts. Many of us are dealing with packed schedules, competing demands for our attention, and pressures that impact the learning process. There are also unique requirements that come with any organization to meet business objectives for the training and individual employee performance. The best, most effective employee onboarding training, upskilling and reskilling programs, and other corporate training programs are developed with the learner experience centered; are measurement-driven; and make use of the right learning experience to increase engagement, retention, and confidence. 

2. An experience-based understanding of how learning may be used to build confidence and capabilities during the process, as opposed to simply offering content without complementary support to enhance performance. Your training company should have data gathered from their collaborative efforts with clients that demonstrate increased productivity results, fewer employee performance errors after training, and even approval from learners expressed in feedback on feelings of training relevance, plus increased confidence and sense of competency. For example, during AllenComm’s collaboration with Delta Air Lines, the resulting onboarding training reduced time to competency by involving the new customer service agents in taking calls much earlier in the process. This additional practice time, plus the message that they were trusted to handle real calls, motivated the service agents and instilled confidence.

3. Outstanding communication and collaboration processes to guide development and an iterative approach to building the training. Does your internal team have dedicated project managers? A perfected process to guide iterative designs that include feedback during development? An established method for effective communication with subject matter experts, take feedback from learners, and the agility to flex with changes to the design… without going taking your project off the (proverbial) rails? A training company with domain expertise will have all of these things, plus the ability to thoughtfully and respectfully challenge you to come together to reach the best results you can accomplish.

Having these three capabilities will provide an obvious advantage as your team develops its desired learning solution.

More Helpful Information from a Training Company

If you would like further examples of training created with domain expertise, please do visit our portfolio page. There, you’ll find examples of how AllenComm accomplished transformative results for clients including Delta, PNC, BD, and Kraft Heinz.

In each case, you’ll find information about what they needed to accomplish and how our team developed the right training to get measurable results. We also get specific with our methods, so that you can get ideas of how to the pieces fit together to produce an effective program. Our portfolio page also includes more information about Onboarding Training, Leadership Training, and Reskilling and Upskilling programs.

Our website also provides detailed information on custom eLearning development, our approach to instructional design, and how we get results with upskilling and reskilling programs. You can use these resources to get thinking about how to choose a training company or consultant or get design inspiration for your next training development or content update.