Elsa Solorzano, President; Lalo Solorzano, Vice-PresidentIn an interview with Manage HR, Elsa Solorzano, president of GTC and Lalo Solorzano, vice president, share their insights on how the company has evolved to stay relevant and competitive in today’s trade compliance training space.
Making a World of Difference in Online Corporate Training
GTC is the result of our passion for trade compliance and doing our part to educate shippers on different trade matters helping them eliminate (or reduce) factors that cost them time and money. Adhering to this, we’ve started our journey by offering comprehensive trade compliance seminars across 25 cities in the United States. However, our team soon realized a gap in our seminar model, as most clients find it hard to get access to these sessions due to travel or budgetary restraints.
That’s when we took a strategic turn and introduced webinars over 14 years ago and e-learning soon after, helping clients train multiple employees at a time without keeping them out of the office for days. It also allows them to create a better international trade compliance culture within their organizations. The online model is ideal, as companies can include more people from different departments that are not directly responsible for trade, but need to be part of that process. By including some of these departments such as; HR, IT, finance, engineering and procurement, and management in the training programs it helps them understand trade functionalities and build stronger, more efficient trade practices.
Continuing our innovation streak, the team at GTC has recently added new online training platforms to our portfolio, making our offerings more relevant and relatable for clients through eLearning. Today, we provide clients with 24/7 on-demand online classes without the need for them to wait for classes to come up on the schedule. An exciting area that we started offering because of the pandemic and the surge of remote workers is hybrid online programs that are partially eLearning, partially live and partially community learning. Attendees can also benefit of electronic textbooks whenever needed. Committed to providing an interactive learning experience for candidates, we always keep the class sizes small, offering a classroom-like ambiance. They can ask questions to instructors or peers using live audio rather than most webinars that only provide interaction via a chat box.
A Walkthrough of the Offerings
At GTC, we cater to companies of all sizes. The majority of our clientele is medium to large companies that often have a significant number of imports and exports.
We’ve also expanded our capability to send learning materials to home addresses to align with the new normal of remote work. Another crucial aspect that we take care of is, ensuring the constant availability of instructors throughout the course. Attendees can ask follow-up questions and get answers post-training. Moreover, our community format of training allows participants to help each other in clearing doubts or answering questions.
Glimpses of Success
As a customer-centric company, we always believe in nurturing long-term relationships with clients. We also take the time to provide content that applies to real world transactions. For example, we have been collaborating with a department of the government for the past few years, providing training to over 350 agents who enforce trade regulations. The agency wanted its employees to learn about the public sector and understand ‘what’ or ‘who’ they are dealing with when it comes to regulating trading compliance. We helped them achieve that learning goal in several areas.
In another instance, we collaborated with two companies facing challenges associated with Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) compliance. The U.S. trade compliance industry has been following this program since 9/11, which was created to keep supply chains or inbound cargo safe from terrorism. For example, if a company is manufacturing products abroad, the program allows the shipper to ensure that its cargo is secured and safe to enter the mainland while shipping them back to the U.S.
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We’re committed to the service of providing training and education to clients to make them aware of importing rules, regulations, and laws
Complying with CTPAT, however, requires companies to fulfill several requirements, one of which is providing their employees yearly training on the security measures covered in the program. We help ed these clients carry out this task through several studio-produced recordings of CTPAT online courses. We also translated the courses in Spanish as many of the workforce is located in Spanish speaking countries. Both clients were able to train their staff through a learning management system (LMS). One of them leveraged their corporate software while the other used our web-based LMS on our website.
Standing Out from the Crowd
While many others provide international trade compliance training as a lead generator for their core business, we have it at the heart of our business model. We’re laser-focused on investing in the latest learning trends and understanding how people adapt to lessons and what is the best method to gain attendees’ attention. Our programs are extremely interactive and provide a real-time platform for people to ask questions. In addition, we conduct quizzes and scenario-based workshops where candidates can apply their skills. All our instructors are subject matter experts who have been in the shoes of our clients and propagate experienced-based teaching methods instead of theory-based teaching. Also, for our eLearning courses, we don’t straightaway record our live sessions to sell later but spend enough time producing and remastering the lessons in the studio for candidates.
To expand on our commitment to education, we are constantly looking for more ways to provide resources to the trade community. Recently, we started an international trade podcast. We’re committed to the service of providing training and education to clients to make them aware of the rules, regulations, and laws of importing and exporting. GTC takes the time to build courses with curriculums that are focused on the topics that matter for trade compliance and eliminates the hassle of researching and trying to decipher conflicting information overflow. but need to be part of that process. By including some of these departments such as; HR, IT, finance, engineering and procurement, and management in the training programs it helps them understand trade functionalities and build stronger, more efficient trade practices.
