8 Keys to Building a Scalable Learning Program

Scaling up a company is exciting, but always full of challenges. As organizations grow—and especially when they grow quickly—it becomes increasingly difficult to preserve culture, core values, and organizational efficiency.

Learning and development programs are no different. Our own surveys have found that employees at smaller companies find online training programs more effective than their counterparts at larger organizations:

[Source: 2024 State of Online Learning Report]

Delivering effective learning at scale can put real strain on L&D teams. How can you serve relevant, performance-oriented training plans to hundreds or even thousands of employees? 

No wonder so many large companies rely on prepackaged content libraries to offer training at scale. But you can’t build entire learning programs around one-size-fits-all content and expect extraordinary results.

This is where too many L&D teams hit a wall. But just because the big content investment isn’t working, doesn’t mean nothing will. In fact, there are great ways to build meaningful corporate learning programs at scale, and we’re going to explore these here. 

Learning at scale is a key challenge

As your employee headcount grows and satellite offices emerge, creating personalized learning experiences seems impractical. So again, most companies look to generic content libraries and off-the-shelf courses.

But those prebuilt libraries fall short for several reasons:

• Learners need solutions tailored to their specific challenges and context, something a generic content library—no matter how extensive—cannot provide.
• Courses are outdated, too long, or uninspiring. It only takes a couple of bad experiences for employees to lose interest entirely.
• Programs assume employees are self-motivated to seek out learning opportunities. And in larger companies, there are fewer opportunities to engage people in training.
• Demonstrating ROI is extremely difficult. Even when employees actively participate and enjoy the training, tying those lessons to measurable business outcomes is a significant challenge.

Larger companies do present real L&D challenges. But the approach above isn’t your only option. In fact, you can still deliver tailored, well-crafted training to the entire organization without a massive L&D team—or forgoing your personal life. 

To illustrate, here are some of the best practices that L&Ds follow to ensure their learning and training programs will scale along with their companies. 

8 best practices to deliver scalable corporate learning

1. Set performance goals

The larger a company grows, and the more competing objectives it has, the harder it becomes to show the impact of corporate learning. You’re a smaller fish in a larger pond, and your work can get overlooked. 

Today, the best L&D goals are tied to core company objectives. These could include reducing employee turnover, closing crucial skills gaps, or increasing internal mobility. 

You could also start with pure revenue goals: increasing deal sizes, expanding customer usage of your service, or reducing costly compliance penalties. 

These goals are far more relevant to the rest of the business than course completion statistics or your own NPS score. Those are good to monitor, but don’t speak as much to the rest of the business.

If you can show a tangible business benefit as a result of a training course, the whole company will want to know how you can repeat this success elsewhere. 

2. Prioritize bottom-up learning

Corporate learning has typically been a top-down affair. L&D leaders and managers set the agenda, and the workforce is expected to follow along. 

Scale can exacerbate this issue. It can feel that, with 500, 1000, or 10,000 employees, the most efficient approach is to dictate training courses and push teams to cooperate. 

But bottom-up learning—where employees discover and manage their own learning paths—is one of the best ways to increase engagement and ultimately learning. Your teams play a key role in shaping the company’s L&D approach as the company scales.

Compared with a top-down approach, bottom-up learning is: 

• More democratic
• Always relevant
• Faster
• Continuously improving
• Impact-oriented

When you give your workforce a more active role in their learning journey, it empowers them and gives them a true sense of ownership that naturally increases their loyalty to the workplace. 

As an L&D, get to know your customer—learners in the organization. “Being able to shadow people is the best thing,” says Amazon Knowledge Management, Training, and Certification Manager Jeffrey Nordrum. “You’ve got to get out front and center, put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and observe. I think that observation tells you so much information.”

And this really starts with a bottom-up training needs analysis, where learners identify their own needs.

3. Let learners declare their own needs

Too much learning content is not relevant to employees and their day-to-day work. Per one study, only 12% of employees actually apply what they learn in corporate training to their work. 

As companies scale, the direct access that learners have to L&D teams typically decreases. It becomes “more efficient” for L&D teams or managers to simply dictate learning needs. Which often leads to more content, but much less relevance. 

“Learners don’t really want content (even if they say they do),” say L&D consultants Shannon Burke and Sammi Willden. “What they really want is connection and a realistic tool kit that they can use in their day to day work. The good news is, this actually can mean a lighter content development lift for you and more time to invest in your learners.”

From our own surveys, 70% of respondents want to identify their own learning needs—as opposed to their managers, L&D teams, or executives. Employees tend to know the skills they’re lacking or the areas they’re most eager to learn. The challenge is to find an effective way to ask them, and then implement those responses in new course material. 

This feedback loop needs to be asynchronous and spontaneous—as soon as an employee has a need, they should be able to suggest it. That can start with a one-off training needs analysis, but ideally it will be continual, for as long as your learning program is active. 

360Learning’s Learning Needs feature lets anyone submit a learning need as soon as it arises. Nurture this habit within your teams, and you’ll avoid falling into the cycle of generic content and increasingly disengaged employees. 

4. Leverage your subject-matter experts

Imagine authoring content for thousands of employees across dozens of teams, with potentially hundreds of job titles and experience levels. Does any one L&D professional really have all the knowledge and industry insight needed to achieve that? We certainly wish it was possible. 

When faced with this dilemma, many companies look externally. They invest in large learning libraries, or bring in expert speakers to address their teams. There’s a time and a place for these, but they may be overlooking their own secret fountains of knowledge. 

Most organizations significantly underutilize their in-house subject-matter experts. Per our own surveys, 92% of learners say they have valuable knowledge to share, but only 60% have been asked to share it.

The main issue is that L&D teams haven’t established scalable processes for leveraging SME knowledge. And in the past, course authoring did indeed take days or weeks. But today, the process can be fast, efficient, and largely asynchronous. 

For example, in 360Learning: 

• A learner submits a new learning need
• With just a click, any expert can choose to help solve that need
• Our AI-powered authoring tools help them structure a short lesson or longer program, with helpful prompts and suggested edits along the way. 

Subject-matter experts can contribute content and build courses directly, without scheduling special time. And in many cases, new courses take a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

The best part: team members really love to help each other. For every Learning Need submitted, there’s an average of 1-2 volunteers to help. 

This is clearly a far more scalable way of creating courses and ensuring their value. That’s true no matter your company size, but especially valuable as the business grows. 

5. Capture and promote institutional knowledge

Every company has its own culture, ways of working, and key lessons. The collective expertise, skills, and insights set your workforce—and your company—apart from the rest.

But without a structured system to preserve this knowledge, it leaves with your employees when they depart. Some companies get by, thanks to ad hoc knowledge sharing and the conscientious goodwill of their teams. 

Great companies can distill and then mobilize this information throughout the workforce. 

A collaborative learning management system (LMS) is your best friend here. By gathering employee expertise and making it accessible across teams, institutional knowledge can be retained and leveraged as the business grows.

Once you upload and share your digital learning materials, they become available to employees on-demand, providing them with the resources they need, when they need them.

6. Centralize knowledge with one source of truth

One of the most common challenges for scaling businesses is tech creep—as your teams grow, you add new tools without sunsetting the old ones. In L&D, this often leads to knowledge sources and even training courses spread across project management, sales enablement, LMS, and company wiki tools.

This makes it hard for people to find the information they need when they need it. And worse, it creates knowledge silos between teams. If the engineering team keeps all their training materials in Jira, the sales team will probably never see it. 

This problem isn’t limited to large companies. One Gartner study found that 47% of employees struggled to find the information they needed to do their work.  

Of course, you’ll never be able to avoid this completely. Tech creep is inevitable, and it’s important to let teams find the tools and ways of working that suit them best.

But if possible, centralize training materials and company knowledge in a single source of truth. We recommend using an enterprise LMS with the robust functions and team structures a large company needs, yet still intuitive and easy for any employee to understand. 

7. Consider localization and translation

Companies very often scale by adding new geographies. Which usually means new working languages, and country-specific learning needs. 

You need to deliver the same quality, tailored training to employees no matter where they are or what language they work in. It pays to think of this early and plan ahead. 

To start, choose an LMS that lets you translate courses in a few clicks. Today, multilingual training is core to most good platforms, and users should be able to switch between languages as they need. 

You can lean on your subject-matter experts again here to ensure the translated material is accurate and relevant to each market. Things that seem simple—like a mobile learning app that lets learners read right-to-left—can create real roadblocks if you don’t have the right tools. 

8. Design learning programs to evolve naturally

The final principle is to always think of L&D content as living and breathing. 

As Shannon Burke and Sammi Willden write, “constant evolution is key to effective learning programs. When things are static, they cannot grow. When we are stuck in our ways we are not embracing the mindset of growth that we are trying to foster in our teams. Find the things that strike gold and capitalize on them and at the same time, don’t be afraid to toss out the flops.”

Having employees declare learning needs is one way to achieve this. They’ll keep making new requests, which gives you ample opportunities to add hyper-relevant content to your library. 

But you should also use the metrics and measures built into your LMS to see what’s being used and what isn’t. The goal isn’t to build the largest or most “complete” learning library. You want to see high engagement rates and real progress towards the goals you set at the top. 

If courses aren’t delivering these, it’s probably time to archive them.

Deliver corporate learning at scale

For L&D professionals in fast-growing organizations, the ultimate goal is to provide high-level training that continues to meet individual employee needs. Naturally, it gets harder the more employees and teams you need to manage. 

But it’s certainly not impossible. In fact, with the right tools and smart strategies in place, it’s entirely achievable. And we’re confident that 360Learning is just the tool for the job. 

Companies with thousands of employees have built scalable learning programs. As just a few examples: 

• Michelin empowers 530 champions and subject-matter experts to deliver learning to more than 130,000 employees.
• International unicorn Aircall uses 360Learning to onboard dozens of new employees every month.
• Malt built upskilling academies that let employees declare learning needs and share institutional knowledge.

And there are countless more to add to that list. 

If you want a collaborative learning management system that empowers subject-matter experts and is built to scale, 360Learning should be top of your list. We’d love to show you how easy it can be.