Chief Learning Officer - April 2008 - (Page 44) behooves learning to ask, “What is the defining factor or reason that you want to engage with us to help you meet your business objective?” Perhaps they’ll say, “It was that story you told us about how you saved manufacturing $300,000.” Think about how when you go to a Web site and fill out a company’s contact form, they frequently ask, “How did you hear about us?” THERE’S NO PLACE QUITE LIKE IT Q Center built by training professionals for training professionals The Premier Destination for Meetings, Conferences & Executive Learning. GROUPS OF 2 TO 2000 STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGY EXQUISITE CATERING 1,042 GUEST ROOMS Marketing professionals like to know which products are the hottest, and which are not. Their measure of success typically is product sales. In the learning space, the measure is utilization. Think about your large catalog of courses, and which ones are being leveraged and which are not. Learning organizations can easily produce a top 10 report of the most utilized training resources or even expand that to the most utilized by business unit or department. Utilization can help you determine a shelf life for your learning resources. Do you really need to keep those resources around forever? Do they deserve or need to be updated on a regular basis? How about that large library of e-learning content you subscribe to each year? Do you really make use of all that content? Do you really need the “all you can eat” buffet, or is a smaller menu right for your organization? Knowing the utilization rate of the resources across the library may help you reduce your costs by narrowing your subscription to only those that your organization really needs and uses. Resources for Marketing Learning Many resources exist to help you better market your learning initiatives to employees, including consultants, marketing courses, books and communities of practice. If your budget allows, instead of pressing your learning staff into service to plan and implement marketing outreach, hire a marketing pro on a part- or full-time basis to position and promote your initiatives to your optimum benefit. If funding precludes doing that, partner with your organization’s marketing department to make sure your efforts are on target. CorpU’s study notes that 46 percent of learning functions now are doing just that, with 9 percent even accessing the organization’s advertising agency for planning and expertise. Marketing consultant Gordon Johnson has been working with internal training departments for more than 10 years on strategies to improve their reach and impact. “It’s not all about tactics,” John- CHICAGO QCENTER.COM 877 774 THEQ http://QCENTER.COM http://QCENTER.COM
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