During my tenure as Enablement Manager for the Avalara support team, the EM for Implementation and I were often individually asked to develop new e-learning courses for each of our lines of business. Instead of creating two separate courses, we collaborated to design a course template that worked for both audiences. 

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The template we created could be quickly adapted to any content, and since we combined our efforts instead of working individually, we significantly sped up the course production process. Each course followed the same general sequence, leveraging existing content from marketing, partner certification, customer training, and other internal teams. We supplemented this content with learning assets designed to promote understanding and retention: active listening guides to accompany videos, workbook questions highlighting key concepts, hands-on interactive activities that simulate real on-the-job tasks, and learning assessments to measure impact.

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Using a single course to teach both lines of business also clarified the responsibilities of the implementation and support teams, enhanced interdepartmental communication, and streamlined the customer experience. Drawing on pre-existing content sometimes led to unexpected cross-functional collaboration. While building our courses, we occasionally discovered inconsistencies or errors, so we notified the appropriate team that updates were needed to avoid customer frustration.