In recent years, we have seen substantial changes in the corporate environment. In particular, advances in communications together with deregulation and the removal of international trade barriers has made access to global markets much easier.

As a result, there has been a seven-fold increase in the number of organisations operating beyond their national borders, with an estimated 79,000 businesses producing £31 trillion annually. Never before has there been so much competition in the market and never before has it been so important to stay ahead of the game.

With instant access to more information than ever, well-informed customers, want better, faster, cheaper products and solutions. Yet in meeting these demands, suppliers also have to cope with the pressures of an especially tough economic climate.

To meet the challenges of this fast-evolving commercial environment, businesses have recognised the need to focus on new markets, new technologies and new working practices. Change has moved from an optional ‘nice to do’ to become a fundamental principle of the organisation. 

To achieve this, businesses need to develop their people. As a result, forward-looking companies no longer perceive training as a departmental backwater, just one element of the HR team’s many responsibilities. By contrast, it is recognised as one of the keys to achieving a broader change objective.   

More and more organisations are turning to external training providers to equip their people with the knowledge and skills that they need to fulfill their roles. Yet herein lies a problem, as larger businesses with international reach have found the search for suitable potential suppliers to be a less-than-easy task. 

Why is this proving such a struggle? Successful global organisations replicate best practice working methodologies across multiple geographies, cultures and languages. This is essential for cross-border collaboration, whether by department or country, to implement global solutions for customers who demand consistent results enterprise-wide.

However, finding training providers who have both the appropriate intellectual property (IP) and the international deployment capability is difficult. Many training companies have developed a limited international presence, for example, but not enough to be taken seriously by the major blue-chip multi-nationals. 

Consequently, training providers are often selected on the basis of who offers the best coverage rather than who has the best solution. It's possible for training providers to resource freelance trainers where required, yet this is generally insufficient to win the confidence of clients who expect training providers to be referencable.          

When choosing a training provider, prospective clients need to be sure they are working with a ‘safe pair of hands’. Here, the commitment of time and money is usually significant, for the benefits of performance improvement will only be properly realised if consistent, high quality training delivery is provided. 

Without a proven track record, such trust is hard to establish. Specifically, prospective clients need to be sure that training partners can evidence a number of key attributes, including world-class IP, a history of success, international capability (both cultural and linguistic), consistent quality delivery and proven results. 

Faced with the apparently insurmountable difficulties in meeting all of these criteria, the ideal solution is replaced by what will be to varying degrees an unsatisfactory compromise. 

In doing this, the organisation has to ask itself the following questions.

• Do we select our first choice training provider plus other suppliers, accepting that each will deliver different solutions in different regions?
• Do we choose from the limited number of suppliers with international capability that we need – and perhaps compromise on the absolute level of training content quality that they can deliver?
• Or do we simply shelve this for now and revisit the idea at a later date?

Like the majority of industries, training has benefited greatly from technology advances. Blended learning solutions now provide options including the convenience of remote learning. Yet while this undoubtedly represents an important step forward, the virtual classroom remains a distant aspiration – a ‘holy grail’ out of reach for the vast majority of training providers.

Clearly an alternative approach is required. This must be one which allows clients to choose the solutions that they want, by providing in-house departments or third party training companies with the breadth and depth of international capability that they need. 

Very few organisations have the capability to carry out consistent worldwide training for their staff. Training providers that lack international capability and credibility need access to the resources required to provide clients with the peace of mind that their preferred training solution will be delivered consistently across the enterprise by local people in the local language and understanding local cultural and business issues. And, equally importantly at a time when cost control and environmental performance both sit high on the corporate agenda, access to state-of-the-art blended and virtual classroom solutions will also complement this training delivery.        

By offering training providers access to a delivery network with global presence, international organisations will no longer have to rely on the ‘best available option’ and instead benefit from ‘best practice’ deployment of training content that best fits the business.