The first step in developing a Channel Partner Certification position profile is to determine the specific skill set your Channel needs to perform their job in a reliable and productive manner. It’s best to understand what the overall weaknesses of your Channel are prior to building this, but that’s a difficult task to achieve without a thorough analysis and historical reference.

The second step is to build out your Curriculum. You should remember to design clear pathways that will allow partners to achieve the intended education goals. For example, a combination of eLearning, Instructor Led Training, and Hands-on (Virtual Labs) training for may be the required package for technical courseware.

Traditionally companies will build a training pyramid consisting of 3 primary levels. A “Bachelors Degree”, a “Masters Degree” and a “PhD”. The Bachelors Degree is primarily a pure eLearning solution which allows you to “train the masses” in the most efficient and affordable way possible. The Masters Degree is a combination of on-demand, virtual and optionally, Instructor Led training (this ILT can be administered remotely to control cost via WebEx).

The PhD is reserved for individuals and organizations that have taken the time to complete the lower tiers. The PhD traditionally requires onsite training, proctored exams and some level of direct contact with the student. This usually involves the students flying in for several days of training or training being sent out for onsite training.

Third, is to align your training goals with your business goals. Does your company want to expand sales overall in China? Are you introducing new product lines in Portugal? Are you looking to grow your overall Channel size in the US? Channel Training can be used to help recruit new partners or a way to encourage partners to be more involved with your organization. For instance, some Vendors offer both Deal Registrations or Leads to their partners but require them to be trained and certified in those particular products prior to turning on the leads. Training can be used for the “Stick and Carrot” encouragement or what we call “Rank-n-Spank” (Rank-n-Spank does not work well in a partner environment and is usually more successful with a captured audience such a employee training).

An organized rollout usually involves launching quick courses that closely track to product rollouts. Examples could be video’s made of an ILT class or recorded webinars. The benefits of this type of training is that it has a controlled price, can be launched in just days and gives you some quick wins.

Drawbacks are that the content cannot be translated for international use, can sometime be expensive (in the case of video) and has a shelf life of a few months at best. This is a great way to start a Channel Training program, but you will outgrow this in just 4 to 6 months. What this will buy you is time to invest in proper courseware development, translate it into all necessary languages and get some quick wins with both your executive team and your Channel.

Issues to address AFTER Channel Certification program has been launched.

1. Analysis of success of content. (i.e. is the training REALLY helping people improve their jobs/revenue? Or is it just taking up time?)
2. Analysis of the quality of the content developer. Was the content built in-house or outsourced? Did the content developers do a good job or create content that is too simple or not structured well around the original goals?
3. Ensuring the exams have not been breached. Cheating is a big problem in partner training. People can be lazy. It’s important to keep an eye on the results to look for cheating. NetExam has several algorithms that run in the back ground. They help show when an exam has been compromised.
4. Feedback. It is important to get direct feedback from your partners on their learning experience. Is the content confusing? Will this course help them do their job? Was the teacher engaging? Constant feedback helps you grade your content, content developers, teachers and the overall satisfaction with the system. Required Surveys after each course can accomplish this.
5. And most important (I believe) is how do you help point this individual in the right direction for more learning outside of the confines of the traditional Learning Management System. Corporate built courses are not the end all be all. If 80% of learning is done outside of a structured training environment then the LMS will no longer help after courseware is completed. (WARNING: product plug ahead). This is really our motivation for our new Ensemba product which matches users to information based on their historical actions and the actions of their peers. It is the “Amazon-ification” of content that proactively tells the student..”I noticed you took this course…well users that took that course also recommend this white paper, this PPT and this other course. In a sense it is taking the traditional concept of “Talent Management” and making it peer-driven.