Upside Learning won 13 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards® in 2026: four Gold, seven Silver, and two Bronze awards across Learning and Development, Sales Performance, and Talent Acquisition.

The recognized work spans custom content, competency and skill development, innovative learning programs, sales training, games and simulations, compliance training, extended enterprise learning, and new hire onboarding.

The Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards recognize organizations for excellence and innovation in Human Capital Management. The program has recognized HCM excellence for more than 30 years and uses independent evaluation of award submissions.

Submissions are evaluated by an independent panel of Brandon Hall Group analysts, industry experts, and experienced practitioners using criteria that assess business need, program design, innovation, adoption, and organizational impact.

Upside Learning provides enterprise eLearning and corporate training solutions across areas including custom eLearning, workforce skilling, AI-powered learning, managed learning services, mobile learning, microlearning, simulations, gamification, performance support, video and animation, and scenario-based learning.

Branch managers need coaching, performance management, delegation, and strategic thinking skills. Operational training builds process knowledge, but it doesn’t teach how to manage people, handle difficult conversations, or connect daily decisions to broader business goals.

Start with scenarios drawn from their actual role, not generic case studies. Use scenario-based learning and coaching to build confidence in conversations they haven’t had before, like performance discussions and team motivation.

Tie the investment to measurable outcomes like retention, engagement scores, and branch performance. Showing the cost of manager-driven attrition usually makes the business case stronger.

Expect improved employee engagement, stronger customer experience, lower manager turnover, and better succession readiness.

Track engagement survey scores, team turnover, customer satisfaction, and manager-led performance reviews before and after training. Pair these with manager self-assessments and direct reports’ feedback for a fuller picture.

Yes. While core leadership skills overlap, the scenarios, compliance context, and customer situations differ enough that custom content built around each industry’s realities works better than one generic program applied across all three.

Start with the business problem rather than the learning solution. Show the capability gap and its operational or financial impact. Explain the proposed investment and the cost of leaving the gap unresolved. Then define the business measures that will show whether the investment is working.

Use a combination of learning, capability, application, performance, and business metrics. Depending on the initiative, these might include skill proficiency, time to proficiency, behavior change, productivity, quality, sales performance, retention, safety, customer outcomes, or risk reduction.

Set longer-term capability priorities, then review them against business needs quarterly. L&D can adjust audiences, investment, sequencing, and interventions without rebuilding the whole strategy. This creates stability in direction while allowing the learning portfolio to respond to changing priorities.

It should identify the capabilities required after the change, assess current gaps, prioritize affected roles, define how new behaviors will be developed and supported, and connect learning measures to transformation outcomes such as adoption, productivity, process consistency, or time to proficiency.

Consider internal expertise, capacity, urgency, scale, technology complexity, and the size of the change. Keep core business ownership internally. External consulting is most useful when specialist expertise, additional capacity, an independent perspective, or experience with large transformation programs is needed.

Connect simulation to outcomes the business already tracks, such as operational errors, safety incidents, compliance risk, time to proficiency, or decision quality. Establish a baseline before implementation so you can show what changed.

Simulation-based training is particularly useful where mistakes are costly or real-world practice is difficult. This includes healthcare, manufacturing, energy, financial services, aviation, and other regulated or operationally complex industries.

Look for a partner that understands your business context, not just simulation technology. They should design realistic scenarios, work with subject matter experts, connect simulations to measurable skills, integrate with your learning ecosystem, and explain how AI responses will be governed.

It gives employees a safe place to practice recognizing risk and responding to difficult situations. Organizations can identify where judgment breaks down before those gaps cause real problems.

Compare simulation performance with relevant workplace measures, such as error rates, incidents, escalations, time to proficiency, or manager observations. Look for consistent changes over time rather than relying on completion data alone.

Compare current development time and cost per module against video production costs, then tie the difference to a metric leadership tracks, like ramp time or error rate. Pilot one program first. A small, measurable result outperforms a large budget request with no baseline.

Faster time to competency, lower error rates, reduced support tickets, and shorter onboarding cycles justify the spend. Completion rates don’t. The strongest cases connect video training directly to a performance metric the business already reports on, not to how many employees watched the content.

Track performance changes before and after rollout across regions, including ramp time, error reduction, and task accuracy, not completion percentages. Compare results by location to spot gaps in localization or delivery. Consistent gains across regions signal the training is working, not just reaching people.

Require clear data handling policies, defined content approval workflows, and version control for published videos. Ask how subject matter expert review fits into the vendor’s process. Confirm accessibility standards, including captions and alt text, are built in by default, not offered as an add-on.

They reserve interactive video for training where judgment matters, like negotiation or de-escalation scenarios, and use standard video for straightforward demonstrations. The deciding factor is whether the learner needs to make a decision within the content or simply watch and absorb a process.

Structure training around active obligations rather than the federal rule alone, since it is currently being withdrawn. Focus on California’s SB 253 and SB 261, the EU’s CSRD, and ISSB standards, layering leadership, compliance, and frontline modules by role and jurisdiction.

Inadequate sustainability training for employees creates gaps between disclosed commitments and actual behaviour, which auditors, investors, and regulators can flag as inconsistent reporting. This exposes the company to reputational damage, disclosure errors, and potential penalties under state or regional climate disclosure laws.

Enterprises tie sustainability competency to existing workforce development programs and performance frameworks, rather than running a standalone annual course. Role-specific scenarios, tracked through the LMS by department and region, make sustainability part of ongoing work rather than a separate obligation.

A useful framework connects training completion to measurable outcomes like reduced disclosure errors, faster audit readiness, fewer supplier compliance incidents, and improved employee survey responses on ESG understanding. Boards should expect quarterly reporting that ties learning data to these indicators, not attendance alone.

Behaviour change is measured through applied assessments rather than quiz scores alone: scenario-based evaluations, audits of actual decisions like supplier selection or waste handling, and manager observation checklists. Tracking these alongside completion data shows whether training translated into different day-to-day choices.

Channel partner training teaches external resellers and distributors what employees already learn through onboarding, but partners aren’t paid staff. Training must be shorter, less mandatory in tone, and tied to incentives partners actually value, since you cannot simply require attendance the way you can internally.

Tie completion to something partners already want: faster deal registration, access to co-marketing funds, preferred lead distribution, or public recognition within the partner community. Training framed as a benefit that helps partners close more deals performs far better than training framed as an obligation.

Short video walkthroughs, interactive product simulations, and scenario-based quizzes tend to outperform long, text-heavy modules. Partners engage best with content under fifteen minutes that mirrors real sales conversations, objection handling, and competitive positioning, rather than generic corporate-style onboarding built for full-time employees.

Effective localisation goes beyond subtitles on a single master video. It means adapting examples, currency references, and compliance details to each market, translating rather than dubbing where nuance matters, and accounting for regional selling norms that a single global script often misses entirely.

Track deal win rates, average deal size, and time-to-close for trained versus untrained partners, alongside completion data. Comprehension assessments and manager or partner feedback on confidence in the field matter more than course completion percentages alone in proving real impact.

Employer surveys consistently identify communication, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and feedback as some of the most important workplace skills. But the more useful question is which gap is hurting your business right now: escalations, stalled sales conversations, or manager avoidance. That should drive priority, not a generic list.

Start with a real skills assessment, build scenarios around actual job situations, give employees repeated practice with feedback, and reinforce the skill after the first session. A single workshop creates awareness; repetition with feedback creates habit.

Tie the program to a metric the C-suite already tracks, such as churn, sales cycle length, attrition, or CSAT, and show the cost of the current gap. Research linking soft skills training to ROI, paired with your own baseline data, makes a far stronger case than a general appeal to culture.

Go beyond completion rates and satisfaction scores. Track pre- and post-training performance on real job metrics, use simulation data to see behavior change directly, and check whether managers observe the skill showing up in actual work weeks later.

Realistic, repeated practice under pressure works best. Scripted role-play helps early on, but scenarios that mirror actual objections and escalation paths, with feedback after each attempt, build judgment faster than any lecture-based course.

Product knowledge gaps show up in longer ramp times, lower win rates, and smaller average deal sizes. Analysis of enterprise sales interactions has linked product knowledge directly to deal size, with reps who demonstrate strong product expertise closing meaningfully larger deals than those who don’t.

Build modular, self-paced content that new hires can move through without waiting for a scheduled cohort. Pair it with quick knowledge checks and a mentor or buddy system, so ramp doesn’t depend entirely on formal sessions that high-turnover teams often miss.

Rather than choosing one format, combine several. Use short digital modules to introduce product knowledge, reinforce it through live or simulated practice, and give reps quick reference materials they can use when they’re on customer calls.

Separate your content into modular units tied to specific features, not one long course. Assign clear ownership for updates, and build a lightweight “what changed” format for fast releases, separate from the deeper training modules that explain how to sell the feature.

Reducing rep ramp time takes more than delivering product knowledge. Many Sales VPs introduce role-play and real deal scenarios early in the onboarding process, giving reps the confidence to handle customer conversations sooner. The result is a faster time-to-first-deal.

Asynchronous learning meaning: employees complete training independently, using recorded videos, modules, and assessments, without a live instructor or fixed schedule. It decouples access from availability; content stays open, employees progress at their own pace, and systems track completion and performance automatically in the background.

Enterprises track completion rates, time-to-competency, and post-training performance data rather than just views or logins. The strongest signal is behavior change on the job, error reduction, or faster ramp time, tied back to specific modules through LMS and performance system integration.

It’s more effective for stable, high-volume content like compliance, product knowledge, or systems training, where employees benefit from pausing and applying material immediately. Live training still wins for negotiation, role-play, or troubleshooting, where real-time feedback meaningfully changes the outcome for the learner.

Programs need version control, accessibility compliance, consistent instructional design standards, and regular content audits tied to policy or product changes. Governance should also define who owns updates, how often content gets reviewed, and how completion data feeds into audit reporting.

They build short, self-contained modules with clear deadlines, manager visibility into progress, and built-in accountability like nudges or milestone tracking. Completion is driven by structure and relevance to the employee’s actual role, not by mandatory scheduling or compliance pressure alone.