The unseen drain: why your global eLearning strategy has a blind spot
4 mins
As a Senior eLearning Solution Consultant, I’ve seen firsthand the immense pressure on Learning and Development (L&D) teams. You're tasked with delivering high-quality, engaging content to a global workforce, often on tight budgets and even tighter timelines. You bear the crucial responsibility of helping teams develop and grow, aligning their skills with your organization's business outcomes. Your role, quite simply, is critical.
Yet, for many, there's a pervasive, often unnoticed oversight – a subtle misstep that can lead to costly rework, disengaged learners and unnecessary delays. It’s an eLearning blind spot you didn't even know you had.
This blind spot? It’s the source-language-first approach. Many L&D teams instinctively start by creating eLearning content in their primary source language, getting it approved, and only then moving on to localization – translating text, swapping images, and adapting for different local markets. It’s an understandable approach. It feels logical to perfect one version before expanding. But, as we've discovered through extensive research and real-world experience, it's a major blind spot with far-reaching consequences.
This phased, sequential approach is simply laborious, expensive and can trigger a costly domino effect. It often results in budget overruns, launch delays, compliance risks, significant process challenges, redundant costs and time, and, ultimately, disengaged learners. In essence, it fundamentally undermines the very purpose of your content – to deliver the best outcomes for your L&D efforts, your learners and your business.
The hidden costs of looking away
The most harmful aspect of this blind spot is that its true costs remain hidden until it’s too late. Many L&D professionals only realize the full financial drain when they're already grappling with budget overruns and project delays. As Lenny Grinberg, Vice President of Sales at RWS, puts it plainly in the eLearning Blind Spot report: "Many L&D teams don't realize the hidden costs of a source-language-first approach until they hit budget overruns and delays. A global-first mindset eliminates these inefficiencies from the start."
Our research, conducted with Training Industry, reveals that a significant 73% of L&D teams share this blind spot, instinctively starting with a source-language-first approach. But what does this really cost? Treating localization as a 'second phase' can inflate costs by 20-45% and extend project timelines by as much as 50%. This is because it inevitably forces rework and adaptation changes at a stage when they are most expensive and disruptive. You’re essentially trying to rework your master content in hindsight, rather than proactively tackling individual content needs for different audiences upfront.
Consider a real-world example detailed in our report: one L&D team developed a 30-minute eLearning course in English without considering the requirements of the ten different languages they would later need to translate it into. By doing it this way, they quickly ran into problems which could have been avoided had they taken a global-first approach:
- Embedded text in images required painstaking manual editing across every language.
- The original English course employed multiple voices and characters which exponentially increased recording costs across the ten languages.
- UI design didn't support right-to-left languages.
- Japanese learners, with their unique instructional preferences, required an entirely different instructional approach.
The impact was stark: an additional $40,000 in costs (a 20% increase) and five weeks of delays. This single case study is a powerful illustration of the tangible drain this blind spot creates.
The compliance tightrope: navigating global regulations
Budget and timelines aside, the source-language-first approach pushes L&D teams onto a precarious tightrope of compliance risks and potential legal exposure. It's not surprising that many L&D professionals find it difficult to stay abreast of the multiple, complex international regulations for training content. This can expose their businesses to compliance issues, additional costs and legal risks.
The demands of these local regulations and standards present a wide range of challenges, including accessibility, language compliance and cultural sensitivities. It's therefore important to work with an experienced expert partner who can help you comply with the regulations across multiple countries.
Our report shares another compelling example: a company developed a compliance training course on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for the US market, incorporating numerous references to local regulations and laws. The critical oversight? These references were not applicable in other target markets and had to be replaced with relevant local regulations. Additionally, audio elements, quizzes and assessments were tied to these US-specific laws, requiring significant modifications. As a result, 25% of the course had to be rewritten before or during translation to ensure relevance in non-English-speaking markets.
The financial and operational consequences were staggering: $180,000 in extra development costs (a 45% increase), a four-month delay in global rollout, and the looming threat of potential legal liabilities in non-compliant markets. As I’ve stated in the report, ignoring localization early on can lead to compliance nightmares. The cost of retrofitting training to different legal frameworks is far higher than designing it right from the start.
Productivity lost, opportunities missed
The lack of a global-first plan doesn't just create rework; it creates a ripple effect of lost productivity and missed business opportunities across the organization. Imagine a translation vendor delivering content within 24 hours, perfectly in line with their SLA. Sounds great, right? But what if that translation includes background text on video content that doesn't actually need translating? Or, more critically, what if a language like German, with its longer word lengths, means your perfectly translated words now spill out of the allocated on-screen text boxes?
These seemingly minor details lead to expensive, time-consuming reworking. Employees are left waiting, unable to get the training they need on time. The consequences cascade: lower productivity as teams are stalled, reduced engagement because content doesn't feel relevant and increased compliance risks when crucial training isn't deployed on schedule. This can even adversely impact the reputation of your L&D department for failing to meet deadlines, despite their best efforts.
Our report details a global company that launched compliance training across 12 countries. Because they clung to their English-first development, non-English teams had to wait a further six weeks for their versions. The productivity impact? A staggering 62% increase in development time (from 8 to 13 weeks), resulting in lost productivity across multiple teams and legal risks from missed compliance deadlines.
For L&D agencies, this blind spot directly impacts their profitability and client relationships. If you're consistently reworking poor-quality content due to a flawed initial process, you risk shrinking profit margins and damaging vital client partnerships. Conversely, mastering this early-stage integration allows you to become an invaluable end-to-end partner for your clients – helping them to deliver the outcomes their business needs. You'll avoid losing revenue, shrinking profit margins and damaging client relationships – and mitigate the risk of clients outsourcing localization separately when they discover its complexity.
Confronting the blind spot
The message is clear: the source-language-first approach is a costly oversight that can drain budgets, delay launches and compromise quality. It's time to stop the cycle of rework, delays and missed opportunities. By exposing this eLearning blind spot, we aim to empower L&D teams and agencies to challenge their current thinking and embrace a more strategic path.
Ready to confront your eLearning blind spot and discover the true costs of a source-language-first approach?