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What is country coverage

When working on a Global Training Model the reach of this model is key. Selling hardware or license without driving skills can’t work. This is a proven fact. IBM changed its model in 2013. Looking back one reason was a country coverage which was not big enough. Reason for this was that we only covered big countries that were big enough for a direct presence. We did very few with partners. The question is now: Does this model still make sense? Did it achieve its purpose?

How to judge on coverage

Everybody was monitoring the model quite close during the last years. And as expected the pure numbers are impressive: Country coverage did more than double. Overall we went to more than 202 countries covered during the last 4 years. But lets take a close look. Which measurement was used? Is the comparison fair? Do we have reliable growth?

When working on this Blog entry I did not expect that this is such an interesting topic. I did look into lots of data. And my decision is clear: I’ll not put all data into this article, this would be too much (and the article would come out next month earliest). So I was thinking: what was important in 2012? We had classroom training and InstructorLeadOnline (ILO), very few Digital Learning (DL). People may think it is easier to grow Digital than Classroom and ILO. So lets focus on the question: Did IBM create reliable additional country coverage on Classroom and ILO Training?

Reliable interactive training country coverage

As mentioned above: I’ll focus only on Classsroom and ILO (both interactive) Training. When looking to the data my thinking was: We pushed a lot into new countries in 2013 and 2014, so lets take 2014 as the measurement point. From 2012 to 2014 the coverage of countries increased by 30%.

Lets measure how many of those countries that we reached in 2014 are also covered in the time 2015-2017? If there is training in more than one year then we can treat the numbers as reliable. If there was just a peak in 2014 then this would not be a good sign. The interesting fact: more than 95% of the countries that we covered in 2014 took also training in the years 2015 and afterwords.

This is speaking a clear language: There is a significant increase in country coverage alone by classroom and ILO from our view, and the new model did grow a steady and reliable coverage. There was not just a peak at the beginning. From today’s view the new model created a constant and reliable change.

Next? There are the questions around Digital Learning, Coverage growth over the years etc – I’ll see if I’ll highlight those facts step by step for you in this blog – or if I’ll go and create a bigger analysis.