Choosing the right employee education solution to address your business’s skills needs can be an overwhelming prospect. To make the buying process even more complicated, you also have to consider how a new solution will fit alongside any existing learning tools or services you might already have in place.

For some businesses, one solution is all that’s needed. For others, a combination of solutions may be necessary to address their particular context. 

At InStride, we understand that figuring out how all of the parts of your learning and development (L&D) toolkit fit together can be difficult to navigate. That’s why we make it as simple as possible to fit workforce education into your existing suite.

Let’s break down how.

There are three possible approaches to integrating a new workforce education solution into your existing L&D strategy. 

The first approach is to determine where workforce education can fill in any gaps in your existing L&D initiatives. If you already have programs in place that target some skills needs but not others, it’s possible to introduce workforce education alongside these programs to round out your offerings.

For example, one manufacturing organization found a gap in their L&D offerings when they acquired a new company and had to onboard hundreds of management-level employees. Although they did already have a standard onboarding program in place, it was missing key components, such as continuing education options, that were critical for the learning needs of this employee group. 

To fill this gap, they approached InStride to help introduce workforce education alongside their existing onboarding program. This allowed them to access specific courses and degree programs that supplement the learning content they already had.

The second way to approach a new addition to your existing L&D suite is to determine if there’s a need to fully replace one or multiple solutions.

Sometimes an organization needs to phase out programs that are no longer serving their needs. But doing this in a way that is strategic and timely can be tricky. 

Let’s say that you’ve got a tuition reimbursement program and you want to replace it with career-aligned workforce education that offers upfront tuition coverage. If you have any employees who are currently using tuition reimbursement, it’s critical to wait until all enrolled employees have completed their course or degree program before sunsetting tuition reimbursement entirely.

At the same time, you can launch and start promoting your new direct bill workforce education program to employees. You’d just need to confirm that any new employees are not able to enroll in reimbursement during this transition period and are pointed to the new program instead. This phased approach ensures that interested employees always have access to education and existing learners are able to complete what they started.

InStride works flexibly and takes your timing and needs into careful consideration when supporting you in your process of phasing out existing initiatives.

A third possibility is to implement workforce education alongside one or multiple existing L&D initiatives to address different talent needs. This is a plausible scenario if you have distinct use cases for each tool.

One of our healthcare partners did exactly this. They had an existing tuition reimbursement program that targeted director-level and above employees. While this program served its specific purpose, this organization also had a desire to extend education opportunities to the remainder of its workforce. However, they were aware that tuition reimbursement has limitations. Since employees need to cover tuition upfront, it excludes individuals from participating if they don’t have the financial means to pay out-of-pocket.

Instead of replacing tuition reimbursement altogether, they approached InStride to implement workforce education as a more accessible additional solution that would serve the needs of the rest of their workforce. That way, they could keep their tuition reimbursement program and its suite of courses that served their director-level employees (who could bear the upfront costs of tuition) and also introduce a broader catalog of courses through our direct bill solution, which relieves employees of the cost burden. They ended up with two programs that complemented each other while serving two distinct use cases.

One benefit to this complementary approach is that InStride can shoulder some of the administrative burdens of your existing program. We may, for instance, act as the administrator for an existing tuition reimbursement program, or we can work alongside your existing provider to administer the program. Additionally, integrating with InStride can help unify your internal messaging and communication about your education coverage offerings, which should help boost overall participation and enrollment rates.

Finding the right mix of tools to meet your L&D needs doesn’t need to be hard. InStride is your strategic partner in helping you develop a workforce education solution that effectively addresses your most pressing skills needs and fits seamlessly alongside your existing efforts.

Book a discovery call with us to learn more.