Upskilling a Global Sales Team for Accessibility
Introduction
If accessibility isn’t a hot topic at your company, it should be. At one multinational technology organization, their company-wide accessibility culture is integrated into every product, office building, and meeting. For this key initiative, Prime 8 helped them to build an upskilling solution for their entire Sales organization to increase their understanding of accessibility needs of potential customers and the assistive technologies in the software products they sell.
For this large-scale international upskilling challenge, they turned to Prime 8 as a trusted partner to build a corporate MOOC (massive open online course) to meet their committed business goal of promoting the innovations in access and inclusion for customers with disabilities in their products and tools.
The Problem: Accessibility in Software Not Well Represented
As part of our client’s commitment to expand access to technology for everyone, they wanted to better equip their sales representatives in a more comprehensive and dedicated way, to expand their understanding of accessibility and to better educate them in navigating accessibility conversations with customers.
The global sales team is widely dispersed with thousands of employees, locations, and time zones, which can make scaling an upskilling initiative in a consistent way challenging. Getting the sales reps engaged with the topic of accessibility and integrating their new skills as a regular part of their workflow was also an issue our client wanted our help with.
The Solution: A Learning Experience that is Both Global and Personal
As their trusted partner on this important upskilling initiative, we knew the solution required global impact, while also being relatable to a culturally broad audience and inclusive on a personal level.
The Prime 8 Digital Learning team worked closely with the client’s internal Accessibility team to ensure accuracy in content, perspectives, and specialized technologies. We conducted discovery and needs analysis interviews with 20+ accessibility experts from Singapore, London, and the US to hear their stories, insights, challenges, needs, desires, and recommendations.
We designed and developed a Virtual Academy, an eight-part 200-level learning experience MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), hosted on Intrepid’s user-friendly learning platform. Prime 8 delivered on our client’s accessibility business goals through five modules, as well as additional assets to enable a successful launch. The modules covered topics ranging from the company’s approach to and policies about accessibility, to their accessibility development standards, to stories about how customers are using accessibility features to be successful in their lives.
The Result: Scalability, Accessibility, Consistency, Compliancy, and Innovation
The upskilling MOOC has had a positive global impact. Sales representatives around the world are better equipped by learning:
● Why technology accessibility is important.
● What accessibility enablement tools and features exist in the client’s product offerings and how to use them to model best practices.
● How to effectively weave the innovative accessibility tools in product sales and solutions to design more trusted and inclusive customer experiences for better business growth.
This effort succeeded in meeting our client’s goals:
Scalability. By leveraging an innovative, flexible, and scalable learning platform, Prime 8 ensured that the client would have no trouble launching this course at global scale and updating it with ease over time.
Global availability . The MOOC-hosted academy was available to employee learners across the globe from nearly any device.
Consistency and Compliance. The course met the industry and client accessibility compliance standards by leveraging the accessibility-compliant development from Prime 8 and the MOOC platform’s inherent accessible design.
Innovation. The MOOC featured sophisticated capabilities that drove both learner engagement and outcomes, including videos with relatable stories, social elements including badges and learner community connections, and certifications.
