Differentiators
What sets us apart from other training companies? Take a look …
A unique approach
At RLS, we’re staffed with experienced consultants from top business and performance consulting firms such as Accenture and McKinsey. This means that we never force-fit a learning solution to your organization. Instead, we act as consultants to your business by assessing your needs, goals and competencies, and delivering programs that are aligned with your organizational strategy—while also leveraging and improving upon learning programs that you already have in place.
Our business consultants approach learning as a program (rather than as an event) and work with clients using our 5D Model—define, design, determine, develop, and deploy. Each step of our building process includes checkpoints and requires client sign-offs, so there are never any surprises. As part of the implementation of any solution, we also put metrics in place to evaluate learning successes and determine where there may be room for improvement.
Above all, we strive to create value for our clients by creating learning programs that are:
- Instructionally sound
- Audience sensitive
- Cost effective
- Well maintained
- Strategically aligned
- Goal driven
- Results based
Our engagement lifecycle is built on the following principles: trusted relationships, transparency, consistent communication, client satisfaction, quality, and fun.
Patented SimPort™ technology
SimPort™ is the industry’s first simulation portal and was designed by RLS to help executives overcome the “Four Fears” they typically encounter when considering the implementation of customized business simulations: cost, time to develop, deployment and ongoing maintenance.
The award-winning technology enables our designers to input a company’s unique information into an already established framework and rapidly develop customized, interactive business simulations. As such, SimPort™ greatly reduces the cost and time required to create, deploy, and maintain immersive, enterprise-scale business simulations.
Developed based on MIT’s systems modeling research, as well as thinking research made famous by Peter Senge and our own responsive modeling technology, SimPort™ ensures that any decision a learner makes within a SimPort™-driven simulation affects and is affected by a wide variety of inputs. This responsive model takes the whole system—your entire organization—into account when determining results generated by the actions of learners, so that the number of potential business outcomes is, in effect, nearly infinite.
SimPort™ also allows us to deliver simulations that far surpass the two-dimensional financial spreadsheets and branching-tree tools used by our competitors. Competing simulations typically rely on a single decision process. RLS simulations, by contrast, are capable of incorporating a number of different decision processes into a single simulation (e.g., exploratory, analytical, branching, spreadsheet, scenario-based and procedural). This allows learners to see the impact of their decisions on a complete system of key indicators (such as morale, communications, project performance, customer retention and financial statements) that are projected over time. In so doing, SimPort™ reduces the time it takes employees to understand the interdependencies of a business and gives them the opportunity to experiment and explore the cause-and-effect relationship between operating decisions and business outcomes.
Over the last year, RLS has built 15 unique simulations using SimPort™ and our responsive model. These simulations are being delivered globally to some of the world’s best companies and include topics such as project management, managing global teams, running a business, managing the economics of a business engagement, on-boarding new employees, strategic sales, and more.
In 2007, Bersin & Associates named RLS a Learning Leader in Vendor Innovation in recognition of the launch of SimPort™ and the positive impact it has had on the development of experiential learning solutions for companies worldwide.
Our SimPort™ technology, coupled with RLS’s proven learning methodology and design and development processes, enable us to quickly and cost-effectively create an array of simulations for our clients on a wide range of topics. To learn more about our ready-to-deploy simulations, click here. For more information about our custom simulations, click here.
Global reach
At RLS, we understand how important global awareness and the ability to navigate in an international economy are for today’s organizational leaders. Our key differentiators in this area include:
- Extensive experience in global deployment and implementation of large-scale learning programs for Fortune 500 organizations, governmental agencies, and others.
- Deployment experience on five continents.
- Longstanding partnerships with language conversion experts.
- A deep bench of international facilitators—both virtual and physical.
Extensive leadership and management development expertise
Our team possesses extensive expertise in leadership and management development, and we know that when it comes to leadership training, it is not enough to teach individual topics or focus on isolated actions. Our patented SimPort™ technology makes it possible for us to address all critical hard and soft leadership competencies—from financial management to strategic and critical thinking and beyond—within a single simulation. In each instance, we use our responsive modeling technology to place leaders in an realistic environment where they are challenged to respond to interrelated issues—just as they would be in the real world.
Two of our founders have published books on leadership development and learning design. One founder, Dr. Steve Kirkpatrick, wrote the book Hard Truths and Costly Lies, which examines the eight key areas in which business leaders typically fail. (And many of our leadership development programs and simulations provide opportunities for leaders to learn how to avoid them). Together, our founding team brings more than 40 years of collective experience in the industry to each and every client project.
Competency database
We maintain a database of more than 4,000 competencies and job profiles. As a result, RLS can supplement or create job profiles, development plans, and assessment banks to complement any learning or performance program.
Performance support system
Most learning management systems focus on managing individual learning events. But at RLS, we believe that learning should be incorporated into a learner’s job, and that training should be designed as a program, not just a standalone event. For those companies that want to begin to manage a performance process rather than sponsoring individual, disconnected learning events, RLS provides a powerful, fully customizable performance support system to extend trainees’ learning over time, facilitate on-the-job performance planning, and deliver formal and informal performance feedback.
E-learning player
To reduce the costs and development time associated with creating customized e-learning programs, RLS offers HTML- and Flash-based players that are SCORM-compliant and can be used for rapid prototyping, content development, and deployment of online courseware.
Standards compliance and learning management expertise
The RLS team has extensive experience working with Section 508 requirements and standards such as the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), and Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) standards. We also have extensive experience working with most learning management systems. Depending on an organization’s requirements, RLS leverages this in-house expertise to build standards-compliant courseware.
Worldwide university network
Regis University, a 131-year-old Denver-based Jesuit school, is a major investor in RLS. Through the Jesuit university network, RLS routinely leverages faculty, facilities, and research from some of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Scalability and lifetime value
Because our simulations are built around our award-winning SimPort™ engine, they are designed from the ground up to be easily and cost-effectively maintained, updated and enhanced over time. Most RLS clients, in fact, find that their investment in an initial RLS simulation provides them with a resource that can be cost-effectively scaled over time. Our customers typically use their first RLS simulation for a period of time, and then refocus it to address more advanced issues as learners become more proficient in the knowledge and skill areas targeted for development within the initial simulation.
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