Education Strategy Consultation: An Intellum service

Intellum now offers education strategy consulting, an additional service you may purchase to assist you in achieving your goals. This article will outline what education strategy is and isn't, and what you can expect from the consultation.

What exactly is education strategy?

To best answer this, let's start with the definition of strategy:

Strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making. ~ Michael D. Watkins, Harvard Business Review

So strategy is a framework for making decisions, or a set of guiding principles. If we focus this definition on the topic of education, then education strategy is simply the framework for making decisions about the content, delivery, and marketing of an education program based on desired goals and learner needs.

Education strategy consulting

Education strategy consulting is designed to help you launch a new education initiative, expand your current program, or improve your program's performance.

We begin with a complimentary exploratory session to review questions such as:

• What is the desired business goal that is expected to be supported by education?
• When was the last training needs analysis conducted? And what does that data show?
• Who is the audience(s) and what are the learner personas?
• What are the expected competencies per persona or certification?
• Are those competencies directly supporting your business goal?
• Are all courses written with objectives that support the competencies?
• Are you measuring and reporting the right competencies?
• Are you reporting on business impact demonstrated by education?

Using insights gathered from the exploratory session, we'll proceed to develop a custom consulting package to address your specific needs. And if you don't yet have answers to the questions above, we can help with that too!

Who is consulting?

Intellum's education strategy initiative is owned by Vicky Kennedy, VP of Education Strategy. Vicky has over 20 years of experience in developing and growing educational programs, in both academic and corporate environments. She developed and launched the Amazon Advertising global education and certification program for advertisers and agencies, and developed internal technical training programs at Facebook. Vicky's passion is in merging the demanding needs of corporate environments with the skill of effectively educating learners toward meeting their professional goals.

What education strategy consulting is NOT

Education strategy is not platform strategy; it's actually platform agnostic. We may reference platform features in the conversation or suggest content structure and delivery methods, but the focus is on the education program goals and ensuring all moving parts are aligned toward meeting those goals. Therefore education strategy consulting is not going to replace a platform strategist who is focused on the platform UX and technical integrations.

Education strategy consulting is not a managed service, meaning, we are not directly conducting your needs analysis, developing your learner personas, or owning your content strategy and development. Instead, our goal is to guide and assist you in these tasks. We may use consultative sessions to provide instruction or feedback, depending on what is required.

Sample packages

The following are sample packages only. Please note that all consulting packages will be customized and quoted case-by-case.

Ground-Up

This package is for organizations or teams that are new to corporate training and customer education. The Ground-up package includes onboarding, training, and strategic consulting that will empower teams to identify their training needs, target audience, training modalities, tools. methods of measurement, roles and responsibilities, and external vendors. Included in this package:

• One onboarding session to help the client develop a foundational understanding of requirements for developing and managing corporate education programs.

• Virtual training sessions that cover training needs analysis, instructional design basics, and assessment and measurement methods.

• Strategic consulting, once a week for 12 weeks or twice a week for 6 weeks.

• Access to on-demand resources related to managing corporate educational programs.

New Initiative

This package is for organizations and teams that have an educational program in place but are embarking on new initiatives, such as moving to scaled delivery, building an onboarding or certification program, or expanding target audiences. The New Initiative package offers training sessions and strategic consulting. Included in this package:

• Virtual training sessions custom designed for the initiative(s)

• Strategic consulting, once a week for 8 weeks or twice a week for 4 weeks

• Access to on-demand resources related to managing corporate educational programs.

Performance Improvement

This package is for organizations and teams that have an educational program in place and want to improve the program’s performance. The Performance Improvement package offers content review, performance evaluation, and strategic consulting. Included in this package:

• Program review and evaluation completed within two weeks

• Performance Improvement report - emphasizes areas for improvement with suggested strategies and quick wins

• Strategic consulting aimed at improving performance

Pricing

Each project will be scoped and quoted after the initial exploratory session. Please reach out to your Intellum contact to learn more.