Brian Childs, a customer education leader with experience at Moz, TapClicks, and more, has developed a Maturity Model that emerging Customer Education teams can use. In this interview, he describes how you can use the Training Maturity Model to scale your customer education team faster. Brian Childs has been building customer and adult education programs for over 20 years. In 2020, he developed the Training Maturity Model to understand the common challenges faced by training team leaders and what drives scale. The secret is something many training practitioners know inherently but don’t have articulated into a repeatable framework. The secret is: Scaling a training program relies on capabilities across the whole organization. 

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Said another way: The success or failure of a mature training organization depends on what capacities the organization has developed both within and outside the training team directly. These four primary capacities come together to define the four tiers of training team maturity. 

The four capacities are: Prioritization, Data Architecture, Team Structure, and Content Development. Together they either advance or inhibit a team’s ability to deliver measurable outcomes while also remaining agile in training content production. 

Prioritization refers to an organization’s use of data to make decisions and how competing priorities are managed. Without a clear understanding of how to set and measure business goals related to customer adoption and retention, a training team will struggle to prove its value and obtain the necessary resourcing to be successful. 

Data Architecture refers to the degree in which systems are integrated and analysis is conducted. To unlock the full potential of training goals and measurement, an organization needs to integrate several systems and conduct sophisticated analysis to illustrate the success or failure of behavior change in customer cohorts. 

Team Structure and content development refer to the systems used to create, manage, and update content. As training teams grow, they require project management systems to track multiple contributors. The absence of these systems directly impacts the team’s ability to develop agile methods of delivery.  

The Training Maturity Model describes each tier of organizational maturity and the four factors that drive scale in your training team.