3 Ways eLearning Assists Training and Development in Multinational Companies

From the end of the 1960s to 2006, the number of multinational corporations grew from 7,000 to at least 80,000.¹ For this type of steadily growing corporation, training is key to success.

Multinational corporations have geographically widespread workforces often comprised of huge numbers of individuals of varying cultures. This can make designing, delivering, tracking, and reporting on training a challenge. Because the reach of online learning is global, eLearning is the ideal mode of training and development in multinational companies.

Benefits of eLearning for Multinational Corporations

eLearning is more than merely valuable to multinational corporations. According to Training Industry, it is also “inevitable” in the sense that these organizations will eventually adopt eLearning out of necessity.² A contributor to Training Industry named three specific reasons why online learning benefits and is indispensable to multinationals:

1. “eLearning analyzes and automates worldwide knowledge levels.”

It’s possible that no other mode of training has this ability. eLearning lends itself to the automation of a multicultural and geographically separated workforce’s knowledge levels. This automation process may take a relatively short amount of time when eLearning is implemented and can give company leaders the insight needed to standardize training.

2. “eLearning provides a central overview of soft skill levels per region, department, team, or individual.”

This allows organizational leaders to accurately assess a global workforce’s soft skills and adjust training accordingly to make it more cohesive and individualized to learners’ specific needs. The more an L&D program is tweaked to meet the needs of individual learners across a global workforce, the better a multinationals’ ROI in training will be.

Learn More: 3 Ways L&D Professionals Can Use LMS Reports to Prove Business Value of Training Programs

3. “eLearning promotes the representation of core values represented consistently in the style and communication of all employees worldwide.”

This is important since every multinational corporation has a brand and wants that brand to be represented consistently throughout the entire organization. eLearning makes this possible by standardizing training in ways that live, classroom-based training can’t due to variables that don’t exist in the eLearning realm.

eLearning is the ideal vehicle to deliver benefits like these. Likewise, a learning management system (LMS) is the perfect tool to deliver eLearning, standardize training, and ensure consistency of brand representation across multinational corporations.

“...multinational organizations cannot afford to ignore the new-age methods to upgrade the knowledge and skills of their geographically dispersed workforce. E-learning is certainly the first step in this direction.”³ 

An LMS Delivers eLearning and Standardizes Training for Multinationals

A learning management system is a tool designed to deliver, track, and report on eLearning. An LMS is built to meet the needs of multinational corporations with features that standardize training, promote collaboration, and represent a company’s brand to every employee, no matter what continent they work from. One of these features is language localization.

Language localization features are designed to help employees access the same training and collaborate with one another no matter what language they speak. These features facilitate collaboration and standardization of learning by delivering training in languages learners understand most.

1. Harvard Business Review. Are multinationals becoming less global? https://hbr.org/2013/10/are-multinationals-becoming-less-global. October 28, 2013.
2. Training Industry. Benefits of eLearning for multinational corporations. https://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/the-inevitability-of-e-training-for-multinational-organizations/. May 11, 2016.
3. CommLab India. 3 reasons why multinational organizations cannot ignore eLearning. https://blog.commlabindia.com/elearning-design/elearning-in-multinational-organizations