Rolling out a course library: a 90-day plan

Online training often fails in the same way. Licences are bought and links are sent round. A few keen people finish everything in the first week, and most people start one course and never come back. Six months later nobody can say what the team has learned.

None of that is the fault of the content. It comes from treating a launch as a single email. A course library works when someone owns it, people know what is expected of them and by when, and learning carries on after the first push. Here is a simple plan for the first 90 days.

Before day one: decide three things

Who owns it. One named person, usually in operations, risk or HR, who chases completion, answers questions and reports progress. Without an owner, the rollout stalls the first time something urgent comes up.

Who takes what. Not everyone needs every library. Start from the role, not the catalogue:

• Detecting & Preventing Fraud is for everyone who touches a client’s ledger.
• Effective Credit Control is for credit controllers and collections teams.
• Understanding Financial Statements is for client managers, risk, new business and auditors.
• Credit Control for Clients is for the people who run the ledger you lend against, at your clients.

Our courses for your role page sets out which libraries are core and which are useful for each role.

How it reaches people. Share your logo, colours and fonts, and the courses arrive in your branding. Then either load them into your own learning management system, or send learners a link, which needs no LMS at all. Either way, progress and scores are tracked.

Days 1 to 30: the core library, for everyone

Start with one library that everyone takes. For most financiers that is Detecting & Preventing Fraud. It applies to every role that touches a ledger, it gives the whole team a common language, and nobody argues about whether it is relevant.

• Launch it in person. A short team meeting, ideally opened by a senior manager, saying why it matters and what is expected. Ten minutes in a meeting does more than any email.
• Set a pace, not just a deadline. “Part 1 by the end of week two” works better than “everything by the end of the month”. People leave a distant deadline until the last week.
• Use a case scenario together. Pick one of the library’s case scenarios and work through it as a team. People learn from each other’s reasoning, and it shows the material is about real work.
• Report weekly. The owner shares completion by team, not by name. Nobody wants their team at the bottom of the list.

Days 31 to 60: role libraries

With the core library under way, open the libraries for each role. Credit controllers start Effective Credit Control. Client managers and risk start Understanding Financial Statements.

• Put managers in the first group. A manager who has done the course can coach from it. One who hasn’t will struggle to make it part of how the team works.
• Connect it to the work. When a credit controller handles a dispute, their manager points them to the course on disputes that week. Training linked to a real case sticks.
• Watch the scores as well as completion. If a whole team scores poorly on one course, the gap may be in how the team works, not just in what they know. That is worth a conversation.

Days 61 to 90: refreshers, and your clients

By now most people have finished their first courses. This is the point where most rollouts stop, and where learning starts to fade.

• Start the refreshers. Release one every two weeks for each library, so the learning carries on all year without another training day. Use them in team meetings as well as alone.
• Plan for new joiners. Make the core library part of induction, so new staff take it in their first weeks.
• Offer Credit Control for Clients. Once your own team knows the material, offer the clients’ library to the people who run your clients’ ledgers. It arrives in your branding, which makes it a service you provide rather than one more request.

At day 90: review

The owner reports on three things: who has completed what, how the scores look, and what has changed in the work. Has the team raised more queries on suspicious invoices? Are disputes logged sooner? Have month-end reports from clients arrived on time more often?

The third is the hardest to measure and the most important. It is also the best argument for keeping going.

The short version

• One owner, one core library, one clear pace.
• Role libraries next, managers first.
• Refreshers every two weeks from month three, and the core library in every induction.

A library that is planned for three months tends to be used for years. One that is simply switched on tends to be forgotten by spring.