How much time should your Learners have to complete courses?

How often do you hear from your reps that they “don’t have time”? Whether it’s to send that last email on a Friday afternoon or complete coursework in Showpad Coach, it’s a phrase that seems to pop up again and again in our tech-savvy, productivity-focused world.

With time being one of the most valuable resources in our personal and professional lives, how do you find a balance of providing enough time for users to complete their work but not too much time so they can procrastinate?

The short answer is that it depends. It depends on the rep’s style, the point at which they are in the quarter, and the length of the content they’re consuming - among a long list of other things. Given how dependent adoption and completion percentages are on a series of outside factors, we have a few guidelines on how to roll-out Learning Paths and Courses that get you close to the 100% completion that we’re all after.

Apply a Rolling Due Date

First, a rolling due date is designated as a specific number of days after the assignment of the course to a specific group.

If, for example, you have a course that is part of a rep’s on-boarding, you’ll likely want to apply a rolling due date between +1 and +5 days. During on-boarding, the top priority is getting a rep up to speed on the company and their role, so they’ll have more time and energy to dedicate to their Learning Paths and Courses.

Conversely, if you’re launching a new product certification course, you may want to consider applying a rolling due date between +5 and +14 days. This will allow reps to have time to practice their pitch multiple times as well as ask questions to their colleagues or managers.

With our new “time to completion” setting in course creation, you’ll be able to give learners a better idea of how much time they need to dedicate to completing that course. If you can let a Learner know that the course will take them 15 minutes, and their commute to work happens to be 15 minutes by train, you’ve just given them the perfect time to fit training into their day! If time allows, the most accurate way to estimate a user’s time to completion is to take the course yourself, using preview mode.

Engage your Managers

The key to rep completion is having manager buy-in to the importance of the initiatives you’re rolling out. If you can get a manager to send reminders to their team and communicate how valuable the Course or Learning Path is to the rep being better at their job, then reps won’t have as many reasons to procrastinate.

Bonus points if you can get managers to complete the Course or Learning Path before their reps. If managers, who are also stretched for time and may have varying travel schedules, can complete their work on time, this gives reps something to aspire to and communicates that there is no excuse.

I’d love to hear any tips you all have or rules of thumb you follow for rolling out new courses.