FrieslandCampina’s Global Mobility Team prides itself on the personal attention and care it provides to each assignee and their accompanying family. Assignees on short and long-term assignments are often moving to remote, rural locations in unfamiliar countries such as Myanmar or Pakistan.

Often, the assignee may be the only assignee in that location with few amenities for foreigners. As a cooperative, which puts its farmers at the heart of its business, it is essential that all staff can maintain excellent, trusting and equitable relationships with local customers, producers and other suppliers.

This outsourcing project was the first time that FrieslandCampina had appointed a non-Netherlands based training provider, so it was very important to be confident that Learnlight’s global trainer network could cover not only existing markets (and demand) but also potential future markets as well.

An additional challenge presented to the Learnlight team was that many of the assignees travel with partners and children. The FrieslandCampina Global Mobility team were very keen to ensure that children were involved in the training to minimize the risk of assignment failure and maximize the return on investment in the assignment.

As FrieslandCampina stressed the importance of including families in all intercultural training programmes, it was also important that there was a sufficient pool of Dutch-speaking trainers to be able to support children who did not speak very much English.

The key deliverables for the training were to:

• Provide detailed cultural and practical support to assignees and families
• Provide an eLearning support platform for all mobile employees
• Support the Global Mobility team proactively with best practice and training