Creating Culturally Relevant Training

Creating Culturally Relevant Training

Culture matters when it comes to learning content, says Massood Zarrabian, the CEO of Boston-based OutStart, a company that provides formal, on-demand learning, knowledge sharing and community/expert collaboration solutions. It’s with that belief in mind that the vendor announced a partnership last week with Italy-based Allos, an integrated e-learning solutions provider and consultancy, to offer content specific to regional needs. OutStart’s technology has been integrated into that of Allos to power the creation of tailored learning content. The contract between the two companies allows for OutStart’s solution to be resold by Allos as a part of Allos’ total solution, Zarrabian says. The partnership will begin with the development of specialized content for Italian and South African companies, but Zarrabian says the offering will likely be expanded eventually to other regions as well. Developing learning content particular to each region’s needs is key, says Zarrabian, who points out, for instance, that compliance-training requirements differ by country, as does software usage for tasks such as conferencing. “There are market preferences when you go outside the United States and become global,” he notes, “where the preferences of customers in, say, Italy or South Africa, are different than preferences [in the U.S.] where a lot of people use WebEx, for example. So, when you look at the world, it is really too big, and there are too many products for a single vendor to do everything.” It was for that reason, Zarrabian says, that OutStart and Allos decided to work together. Regionally tailored learning content goes beyond simply translating the material into the users’ language, he says. “Traditionally, when Americans think about localization of a technology, they think about it behaving in a local language, but a bunch of things are way beyond the local language.” Zarrabian notes that a software that only provides content to aid American compliance laws won’t be much use abroad, where there may be no required sexual harassment training, for example, or where the financial regulations are much more stringent, and so necessitate a more rigorous training than that used in the U.S. to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “You all of a sudden are faced with the issue of having features in a product that are features you would not do for a product in the U.S., and if you did would make your product not look normal or standard for U.S. companies,” he says. “But, those features still need to be developed.” Beyond differences in laws, learning content needs to take variances in cultural perspective into consideration as well. “Somebody told me in Italy, people are much more visual in terms of how they get training. If that’s true, then the development of training is very different than what we do here.” That would translate into a need for content featuring a greater number of simulations than would usually be included in software designed strictly for use within the U.S., he says. The simulations allow for a palpable representation of the principles being taught that would appeal to visually oriented learners. “It’s not about translation; it’s about creation,” Zarrabian says of the cultural differences that sometimes require extensive changes or additions to content. “As somebody told me, it has to be developed with the goals that Italians have, by Italians, for Italians.”