SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
It's a Small World (with Big Training)
January 03, 2008
But it requires a big training effort and investment if your Canton, OH-based company opens a factory in Canton, China.
By Holly Dolezalek
These days, we're bombarded by articles that refer to
China as the Awakening Dragon or the Next Frontier. The conventional wisdom is that China, with its vast population and resources, will become the mother lode of new customers and new products as state control over the economy becomes more and more open to outside investment and other business dealings.
But other stories point to a trend that’s larger than the next big customer base. India is cranking out software engineers who demand smaller salaries than American employees. Companies are establishing call centers in India and Singapore and other countries on the Asian subcontinent, hoping to take advantage of cheaper labor costs, and then deciding to relocate those call centers in the U.S. again. Lower costs in countries with less elaborate health-care systems are driving medical tourism, in which patients from the Western world head east to have elective surgeries where they cost far less—in Thailand, the Philippines, Cuba, or Colombia, for example.
Dual Approaches
KLA-Tencor is a manufacturer of equipment and systems for semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel and AMD. Based in San Jose, CA, KLA-Tencor has approximately 5,500 employees and has customers wherever chip manufacturers have their chip factories. Much like a copier company, it both installs the machines and provides service for those machines.
As trade shifts and flows all over the world, KLA has to flow with it. "The company has had some overseas presence since the merger of KLA and Tencor in 1997, but it's been steadily growing since that time, and now some of our customers are moving their factories to Asia," says Efren Lopez, senior director of learning and knowledge for KLA-Tencor. The company now has a presence in China, Taiwan (or "greater China" as China prefers it to be called), Singapore, and India.
That means the company has to have employees in the countries where those factories are starting up, and those employees have to be trained in installing and servicing KLA-Tencor's machine tools. They also have to know how to get the most productivity out of the machine, so they can educate customers on how to use it most effectively for their operation.
But they also sometimes need the same kind of management or professional training that U.S.-based employees get access to, so KLA-Tencor has to provide training in those overseas locations both in technical matters and in professional training, such as how to hire new employees, solve problems, and manage those employees.
The company takes two different approaches to the two types of training. Technology training is expensive for KLA-Tencor, because the machines on which trainees must get hands-on experience cost $3 million. So training is handled regionally, wherever one of the "practice machines" is available.
"First, we find a local instructor and make sure he or she is qualified to teach in the local language, and then we conduct train-the-trainer sessions for those qualified instructors," says Lopez. "The instructors learn how to deliver training on the tools, and then they co-teach one class with our trainers, so we can make sure they're able to deliver; after that, they teach solo."
On the professional track, Glenn Hughes explains, the approach initially was different but has changed over the years to more strongly resemble that of the technical track. "We've been offering our professional learning for 10 years, and someone from headquarters flies to the location to deliver that learning," says Hughes, director of global learning for KLA-Tencor. "The trainees on location wanted that, despite the language issues, because they wanted to learn more about corporate culture, so they could build that culture there. Now they're getting more interested in having the training delivered in the local language, because there's less need to build that culture."
A couple of years ago, Hughes says, they began to use local learning partners for training centers for KLA-Tencor employees. "We have a Taiwan-based learning partner who has been with the company for 20 years and now leads the learning there, and we have another in India," he says. "We've learned that we need a critical mass of about 500 employees, and even more if those employees are in field operations, for the learning partner to be fully engaged and cost-effective."
Modular Training
Hunter Douglas takes a different approach to its overseas training. Based in Broomfield, CO, the company manufactures window coverings at U.S.-based fabricators and sells them through retailers. These retailers are located in the U.S. and all over the world—Asia, Europe, Canada, and so on.
Donna Keeler is the director of training for Hunter Douglas' Retail Alliance Program, and her team builds training to help the retailer or end seller be better equipped to sell the company's products. They've built a customer management program of learning that is made up of several modules, and the selling module is available online for these retailers to use.
Keeler explains they've avoided many of the difficulties of translation and adjustment to local culture, because the company's training is built in English, and it's left to the local Hunter Douglas affiliate to translate it. "We considered [translating] it, but it's too expensive, and we couldn't make sure it was correct once it was translated," she says.
"Correct," after all, has different meanings in different parts of the world. For example, Hunter Douglas' module suggests that it's important to shake hands and make eye contact when dealing with a customer. But eye contact or handshakes aren't viewed the same way everywhere: In some cultures, it's a positive, while in others, it's a breach of propriety. "We're just not in a position to know all the ways and means of every culture where our products are sold, so we leave it to the local people to make it meaningful and useful for the retailers," Keeler says. The selling training isn't required for retailers, either, although Hunter Douglas offers incentives to encourage them to take it.
In years past, Hunter Douglas used more face-to-face training to deliver this learning. Trainers were on the road constantly, using 400 slides worth of training material. But they often cut their presentations down, using only 125 or even 75 of those slides, and Keeler says she couldn't be sure what these trainers were saying.
"We started building in more media elements, such as a video or a game, so trainees would get a little bit of similarity in training from place to place," she says. "Then we figured that if we just built the training online, we might get less participation, but we would have more control over the content, and we would save money and stop burning out our trainers who were always on the road."
The selling system has been online for three years, and Keeler's team plans to add other modules soon, such as a module about selling in the home (as opposed to a retail storefront) and another about how to hire and train people effectively. With each module, they beta-test the training with a few retailers to make sure it makes sense before they make it available to all retailers, and they encourage the local translators to do the same.
Training Paths
Network Appliance, a data storage technology company in Sunnyvale, CA, is based in the U.S., but much of the company is in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Through NetApp University (NAU), training is delivered to account managers, systems engineers, technical support employees, customers, and third-party maintenance suppliers. Each role has an integrated learning path specific to that role, including those for customers. "We have paths specifically for people who use our software, such as a storage administrator, an engineer, or a technical architect," says Rusty Walther, senior vice president of global support for Network Appliance.
For the last 6 years, the company has been opening training centers in overseas locations and integrating training partners with those centers. Its strategy is to have good training that is available in English, and then have that training executed at training centers in English. Some courses, such as the company's customer training, is available in any of 23 languages, but not all content has been translated into other languages.
Participants in all of Network Appliance's training immediately are surveyed about how they felt about the course, and some students also are contacted 6 months after for follow-up on whether the course was useful. In surveys of customers, there are questions about the value of Network Appliance's training, and Walther says he runs analytics on the gathered data to see if any anomalies that suggest a need for improved training pop up.
Ultimately, the efforts of developing overseas training operations can yield benefits beyond simply getting overseas employees trained. Overseas manufacturing operations offer opportunities for leaders to expand their skills and hone their leadership abilities, and overseas training operations can do the same thing.
"Sending someone overseas to establish or maintain training operations is a way to develop that person, as well as get the training done," says Lopez. "By getting experience in regions they're not used to, people are seen as mentors and leaders and gain insight into how business is done in other countries."
Sidebar: Things to Consider
Obviously, no two companies are likely to pursue their overseas training operations in the same way or face the same challenges. In fact, given the array of countries where any company might find itself in need of training operations, and the range of languages, cultures, and customs that might affect those operations, specific advice about training overseas is close to meaningless. But there are a few pieces of advice from experts that might help you to think about your overseas ventures more concretely.
• Think before you translate: Hopefully nobody will end up in a position of having to pull together complex technical training for employees who speak Arabic in a matter of days or weeks. But business moves faster than logic sometimes, and if you find yourself rushed to get this kind of training on deck, the best thing to do to slow it down is to ask questions. Why are we doing this? What do we hope to accomplish? Where are our customers, and where does it make the most economic sense to do this?
"Your primary reason for [starting training operations overseas] should be to deliver a better product or service, not to save money," says KLA-Tencor's Glenn Hughes. "There are ways to save money by moving certain operations overseas, but you can't make that your focus. We began training overseas because we realized we can't compete and win if we don't."
KLA-Tencor's Efren Lopez agrees, noting that just because others are arguing for it doesn't mean it will work. "You don't have to go where everyone else is going, and just because it works for manufacturing doesn't mean it will work for learning."
It's also just plain difficult. Whether you send U.S. employees to the location or try to find local instructors whose English skills qualify them to deliver the desired training, there will be logistical issues you never even thought of. You'll have to resolve issues such as how to communicate with people in different time zones, which might mean adjustments to your schedule or working from home so you can talk to someone in China at 10 at night.
How will you maintain the quality of the program? Harvey Singh of learning technology and training outsourcing company Instancy warns it's easy to underestimate how long it takes to get the right people hired and then train the trainers before the actual training goes live—and it's difficult to make sure they'll follow the guidelines you lay down. "Say you're starting up a training operation in India," he says. "How do you make sure that you know the people you hire are qualified? You can bring them to the U.S. for training, but you're still going to have to stay in constant contact with them. Your process is key, because the oversight has to be good or the quality won't be manageable."
Finally, what method of instruction will you use? "The challenge is that if you rely too heavily on classroom instruction for overseas operations, you will struggle," says Network Appliance's Rusty Walther. "It's much harder to take local classroom instruction and translate it into different languages, then try to find instructors who can deliver in those languages. It's much cheaper to localize computer-based training than to do so for classroom training."
• Quality control: KLA-Tencor sends each of its overseas instructors through a formal train-the-trainer session, where their familiarity with the material and their ability to present it is tested before they're allowed to conduct training. The company also instituted a co-training process, where HR business partners attend the training to give feedback on instructors. "We do course evaluations, as well, to monitor their success from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective," says Lopez.
That might sound like a no-brainer; who doesn't monitor the effectiveness of training? But you may need to be far more detailed about your measurements in an overseas operation than you would in the U.S. "When you're operating overseas, their sense of good criteria and measurement, as well as their preferred method of receiving feedback, might be totally different from yours," says Singh. "You'll need to carefully define the criteria for success with your trainers, and you'll need to maintain constant communication with them to stay on top of how they're doing."
The need for that measurement and communication is paramount, and it's also the reason any new training operation overseas ought to be set up slowly, with testing and feedback and without trying to push all possible training overseas at once.
In fact, Network Appliance's Walther says taking it slow and building each piece accordingly will save your company from overdoing its overseas endeavors. "You want to get the content right in English first and then localize," he says. "But there is such a thing as too much content in too many languages. You don't have to do everything in every language, because you might end up crippling yourself under the weight of your own training."
• Money and the law: What's all this going to cost? Your hardest job might be to help your leadership understand that it might cost more, not less, than it would in the U.S. That sounds counterintuitive; after all, labor costs are considerably lower in some parts of the world, and when everything from manufactured goods to surgery is cheaper there, too, it doesn't make sense that training would cost more.
"You will have to manage people's expectations about cost," says KLA-Tencor's Hughes. "Once you have a trainer on-site, they often believe the training costs will drop. But the cost of Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership II class doesn't go down just because it's being delivered in Thailand or Singapore."
Instancy's Singh agrees. "Your staff costs will vary depending on where you hire them," he says. "In Hong Kong or India, the chances are that the cost of trainers might be lower. But the up-front setup costs will be significant, since you might have to fly trainers to or from the U.S., or both. Plus, the need for process monitoring and project management will add some costs that you just wouldn't face in other situations."
Consider, too, all the different categories of costs. Will you be using online learning, classroom instruction, or a blend of the two? Either will mean translation costs, and classroom will mean physical space and instructors to deliver it. What kind of infrastructure will you require? How will it be supported, and by whom?
There are legal issues to consider, as well, and the main one is that of intellectual property (IP). IP laws are in place and working in the U.S., but that's not true everywhere you go in the world. In some countries, what we would call piracy, they might call common sense.
"The safeguarding of IP isn't the same in every country," says Singh. "If you bring in contractors for a year to do training, how do you maintain confidentiality?"
Some industries are also more or differently regulated in other countries, so some training might require compliance or have to abide by different requirements in other countries than in the U.S.
And how do you pay the people who are doing the training for you? That raises issues of currency exchanges, money routing, and tax implications.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Training Index |
|
|
