The project is funded by the U.S. Department of State under the Emerging Donors Challenge Program Round Seven and by Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the funds of development cooperation and humanitarian aid.
The training program was developed by the Visionest Institute (former Marketingi Instituut) and the Entrepreneurship and Export Promotion Office of Ukraine.
It is an intensive educational program for Ukrainian consultants from private and public sectors, which aim to improve the quality and availability of export consultancy services and to create or mobilize an existing network of national consultants.
61 participants were Certified due to the certification criteria of the Program, which is 91% from all learners and 100% of the teams.
80% of the participants reported that they improved their knowledge for more than 50%.
100% of the participants found tools received during the Train the Trainers Program useful and told that they were already using gain knowledge (34% of the participants) to plan to use it as soon as possible (66% of the participants).
We also were tracking sales growth of the participants and expenditure of the client network. Thus 15% made their first sales of the consulting services and 34% were selling consulting services before the Program but made more sales during the Program. Also, 47,5% of the participants expended their client network, where 14,8% got new clients and 32,8% got preliminary agreements on cooperation.
One of the main goals of the Project is to create an export consulting capacity all over Ukraine and to turn consultants work in consulting services. Thus, 30% of the participants mentioned that they plan to start individual consulting or open a company 26% plan to develop an existing consulting company and 28% plan to consult in parallel with the main work. As a result – 84% of the participants will stay in consulting services further after the Program.
As a key criterion for evaluating the success of the participants’ consulting activity, we asked about their planned sales growth for 2021. Participants indicated that, on average, they plan to increase their sales by 528,741 UAH during the last 6 months of the year after the program.
The participants of the educational program highly evaluated the qualification level of the trainers. Given that the maximum possible score is 10, the average score for all the speakers was 9.4 points.
During the Program’s 60 real Companies, Ukrainian producers from different sectors were involved as a base for the education process. We collected client feedbacks with aim to evaluate gained skills of participant to provide quality consultancy service in market research (see pic below).
Development Program for Export Consultants in Ukraine combines online learning and offline workshops (because of COVID-19 all events were held online) with leading international experts: 7 educational modules, 6 online workshops for 2 days, status-check meetings, mentoring, final presentation defense day and Additional Module. The program helps to gain practical consulting skills and develops an understanding of the mechanism of interaction with companies.
The program is implemented in the form of gamification based on real Ukrainian enterprises and involves participants from the public and private sector within the 10 teams, which helped better understand the needs of businesses in the field of export activities and to form consulting capacity in different regions of Ukraine.
