In her role as Business Development Manager Team Lead on OpenSesame’s Curation team, Abbie Paul follows a demanding 39-point quality checklist to assess every single new publisher that crosses her desk.

Stringent content standards at OpenSesame maximize learner engagement and drive the best possible customer results. With these standards in mind, Abbie seeks out the globe’s top publishers in each of OpenSesame’s core categories. And, finding the exact content her customers need – as it is needed – has become a priority over the past few unprecedented years.

New workplace topics such as “wellness” and “fully remote workforces” peaked in demand during the pandemic. If a course doesn’t exist, Abbie works directly with trusted publishers to build new content and vet it against OpenSesame’s unrelenting standards.

Describe your role.

My role is to find ideal new publishing partners and bring them into the OpenSesame marketplace. I evaluate training courses, determine if they will be a good fit, and consult with our existing publishing partners to help them improve and expand their offerings to our customers. Every week, we have several publishing organizations reach out to work with us. They range from small independent shops to well-known publishers like TED. All are vetted against the same strict standards and demanding OpenSesame quality checklist. My job is to oversee the quality control of every course we make available to our customers.

What makes your role unique at OpenSesame?

I have to keep pushing the envelope to find unique and engaging courses for our customers. Sometimes it feels like mining for a diamond in the rough.  We’ve built a stringent checklist of Course Quality Standards in the form of an assessment for evaluating each new publisher, and we’re constantly taking in feedback. This allows us to review content in a nonsubjective manner. The OpenSesame checklist tells us what works and what doesn’t work for our customers. Every publisher must meet the same guiding principles: be reputable, innovative, flexible, diverse and inclusive, global, and provide unparalleled support. Our goal is to ensure every learner has a smooth and engaging learning experience.

If a customer needs training on a topic we don’t have courses for; I first reach out to our existing publishing partners. We’ve built a network of strong relationships, and if we don’t have a publisher with expertise in a particular subject, we look to either expand that network, or partner with subject matter experts to create the content in-house. We are fortunate to work with high-quality publishing partners ready to work with us and ultimately help our customers see engagement and results. 

How did hybrid work-from-home workforce models change your offerings and your role?

We strengthened our relationships with our publishers and asked for timely courses — like “virtual onboarding,” “remote employees,” and “mask conflict de-escalation.” Those courses simply didn’t exist before. Believe it or not, a course called “Proper Handwashing” became one of the most popular COVID mitigation courses we offer. As we saw demand change, we reached out to all our publishers, and they were able to jump right in. Wellness continues to be a valuable and critical topic and is produced by many publishers — but finding the most effective wellness content is what we strive for. Within other topics, business skills are forever popular, compliance is critical, and sexual harassment courses are in constant demand. We have all of those courses, and now we also have specialists focused on securing the best courses in DEI, Business Skills, Technology, Wellness, Safety, Compliance. 

What is your favorite TED course?

The Power of Believing You Can Improve by Carol Dweck and The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown.

What is your favorite course in the OS catalog?

Choosing one course would be like picking a favorite child. It’s impossible. I prefer scenario-based courses where videos show the right and wrong way to address a situation. I enjoy humor, so when a course plays like a television show, I stay engaged. 

How has your role grown since starting at the company?

My first role at OpenSesame was as a Senior Curation Specialist. At the time, our team was small, and we wore a lot of hats. Since then, the hats have become roles and teams. In 2019, I started the Business Development team, where the focus was to build-out a process for evaluating prospective publishers in a nonsubjective manner; to ensure a strong partnership with successful onboarding. Since then, we have put several processes into place and expanded the team. Our ratings have improved, and our relationships are stronger than ever. 

To get a better idea of how OpenSesame’s curation team can work with you to help you get the most out of your budget and accelerate engagement, connect with one of our experts for a personalized, guided demo. 

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For many leaders and training professionals, building and launching a successful learning and development strategy is an arduous journey, filled with essential elements and components that demand consideration during the purchasing and planning process. Will my learners engage in the content? Will my program solve the challenges my team is facing? Will I see a return on my investment? There are many ways you can measure the effectiveness of your program, but how do you know if you’re overpaying for it? To help answer that question, let’s examine the biggest antagonist to ROI and a damaging, but sometimes, silent adversary to L&D success: rogue spending, and what areas are affected by it and steps that can be taken to avoid or fix it.

What is rogue spending? And how does it happen?

Rogue spending, also referred to as “maverick or tail end spending,” refers to the unexpected and unpredictable spending that can happen outside of negotiated contracts. With learning and development having such a direct correlation and impact on business success, and with elearning becoming an essential method to drive L&D programs, there are many ways you or your company can easily become rogue spenders. The popularity of elearning reached an all-time high this past year, increasing the accessibility to elearning content while presenting many opportunities to find the right provider and many opportunities to become a rogue spender. One of the main reasons L&D professionals fall into this trap is the lack of time they have to research the value of what some publishers are providing, and how the materials will meet the needs of their team. In many cases, leaders are stuck in the present, focused on immediate needs and trying to find a quick remedy, rather than searching for a solution that can be used to meet both the current and future needs of the organization. 

Perhaps the most common reason for rogue spending is lack of communication and coordination between teams. With HR, I.T., and other essential departments scrambling and searching through the many choices to find training that they believe are specifically related to their different focus areas, it’s easy for a company to purchase multiple learning solutions, including different LMS’, to cover them. The training areas that are typically the root of this problem are usually ones that are used across multiple departments and are intended for a broader audience like business skill development or leadership training. 

The consequences of rogue spending

Companies taking the time and effort to invest in training their greatest asset (their workforce) should be cause for celebration, but no matter how positive the intention might be, taking an unfocused approach could have damaging effects with immediate impact to the learning and development budget. When departments spend various amounts on different providers and systems, it’s difficult to measure the quality of each training. And if the training is in a broad topical area, like sexual harassment prevention, for example, the organization may end up becoming misaligned due to the differences in what is being taught, and how it is being taught. This could not only increase the likelihood that an organization’s compliance would be at risk, but will almost certainly have a direct, negative impact on the learners themselves, restricting both their growth and the growth of the organization.

Three steps to prevent rogue spending

So how can you prevent rogue spending? The experts at McKinsey cite one comprehensive way of solving this problem by recommending that L&D leaders take on a broader role within their organization and establish their vision around a holistic, coordinated L&D strategy that engages the organization and encourages collaboration. But in order to solve the problem, you have to first know where the problem is occurring in the first place. Conduct an audit and uncover what training programs each department is using and for what purposes. If there are similarities in the topical areas, you can choose one based on cost-value or user feedback. 

Speaking of feedback, perhaps the most effective tool is having regular, informative communication between your teams and stakeholders. Building awareness and understanding around each team’s needs, both present and in the future, can help create a strategic approach behind the learning and development program. 

With this knowledge, you can work with your procurement team and leaders to evaluate training technology and content and see if what you currently have matches everyone’s needs. After following these steps, you’ll be positioned to formulate a learning and development strategy that will drive meaningful conversations, build engagement, keep everyone safe and compliant, and above all, keep your budget spending manageable.

What’s next? 

So what steps can you immediately take to get started? OpenSesame’s learning experts are ready to do the work for you by providing a no-cost assessment. Our team speaks with learning managers from different departments on a daily basis, partnering with them to identify where duplicate purchasing is happening, while sharing our customer’s best practices on where our all-encompassing, singular catalog of elearning content can help. 

OpenSesame is ready to do all of the coordinating for you, bringing in all relevant stakeholders, including your procurement team, to evaluate your needs and provide you with a strategic solution that is designed for employees in specific roles, departments, locations, and industries. Above all, OpenSesame works to make sure that our customers are maximizing their budget, mitigating rogue spending, and obtaining ROI by getting everything they need from one source.

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