At Mentem we focus on offering enterprise training solutions at scale. I want to explore why the at scale part is so important and game-changing – and why it resonates with my own journey.

I have a personal stake in learning at scale. 

My first real job was as a language teacher, working hands-on in the classroom with groups of 5 – 15 learners. It was so rewarding to be able to spend time face-to-face with learners, get to know them, and bring some real personalisation to planning lessons and helping them learn. 

When I had the chance to move into a management role it was genuinely a bit of a wrench – I had the opportunity to hire, train and support a team of teachers, but had to spend less hands-on time teaching. Did this translate to less impact? Was I making less of a difference to our learners?

This is where thinking about scale became important. Rather than just having a hands-on teaching impact on my own classes, I could look at the opportunity to build and develop a better school, in a role that could impact the learning of over a thousand learners. 

As I was fortunate enough to move into national and then global roles managing projects and learning programs used across hundreds of schools, this scale and the overall net impact a small change could make on a huge number of learners and staff always helped guide the decisions I made.

I’ve also seen examples of where scale didn’t work – scaling isn’t easy! In a previous role at another university, I was managing professional education programs and we had run some successful data course pilots with a large telco. The client wanted to scale up from running a few dozen learners at a time to being able to enrol hundreds of learners per quarter. What a great opportunity – but unfortunately one we had to say no to.

Because we were running the courses in such a labour-intensive way – and didn’t have the tools or processes in place to support our teachers or admins – we were simply unable to meet the needs that our client had and offer opportunities to more learners.

Being in a position to prioritise building the tools and processes to support learning at scale – and seeing the impact this is having on our clients and their people – is one of the most rewarding parts of my role at Mentem.

Traditionally organisations have had to choose from the false dichotomy of targeting a large number of people with low individual success rates or focusing on employee development programs and professional development training for a select few who get to benefit from small-group learning which can’t roll out across the broader organisation.

We’re committed to offering programs which result in successful employee skill enhancement and learning outcomes every time – whether our clients want to enrol large cohorts, or consistently and repeatedly run smaller-size reskill programs. We’re committed to helping our clients achieve their upskilling and reskilling for future jobs goals for the hundreds or thousands of learners across their organisation who can benefit from our programs.

This is what scale means to us: high-quality programs which are cost-effective, support large cohorts to succeed, can be run repeatedly at a high quality level, and where we can quickly redeploy existing courses or create new ones.

Running a one-time course for a small cohort is a solved problem. I don’t want to make it sound like learning programs are easy – they always need quality resources, processes in place, and dedicated people working across the academic, operational, and service aspects.

But running a one-off group of 15-20 learners isn’t a particularly new or complex challenge – and doing so successfully doesn’t really move the needle in terms of the number of roles and skills our clients need to develop, or the number of prospective learners whose careers we can help empower.

What are the barriers to successful learning programs at scale?

To get down to basics, you need to be able to confidently and comfortably:

Traditional approaches to doing all this fall short - a hands-off self-study platform results in a lack of engagement and support, and a high-touch service simply can’t scale up in a cost-effective or sustainable way.

The Mentem way brings together the best of human expertise, proven processes, and tech innovation in order to successfully run learning at scale. 

We build scalable LMS solutions and tools to promote programs, manage applications, and assess suitability to recommend the right learners for the right course.

We deliver high-quality learning through a combination of self-paced formal learning topics, social learning facilitated by industry-leading SMEs, and on-the-job application.

Learner and client support is managed by a dedicated team backed up by resources and tools.

And we’ve built a data analytics and reporting platform to streamline the admin for our clients and allow them to quickly and easily view reports on in-flight and completed courses.

From a product perspective, we’re looking forward to continuing to grow with our clients and learners, and to building and improving the tools and platforms that support successful learning at scale.