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What does it take to deliver impactful learning in a global, highly regulated industry? Tim Greiner, Senior Director of USP Education at the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a global nonprofit that sets quality standards for medicines, food, and dietary supplements, shares how USP delivers education at scale to ensure those standards are applied effectively across industries and regions to improve quality and protect public health.

 

Show Notes:
Senior Education Director Tim Greiner explains how USP delivers training that improves quality and performance. Key takeaways from the conversation include:

• Impact over completion: In regulated environments, training success is measured by behavior change and improved quality practices—not just course completion. 
• Design for diverse, global audiences: Effective programs balance modalities, regional preferences, and roles (regulators, manufacturers, students) without overcomplicating delivery. 
• Blended learning drives stronger outcomes: Live and live-virtual experiences tend to have the highest impact, especially when paired with self-paced resources for reinforcement. 
• Operational discipline matters at scale: Managing global training requires strong processes—centralized content, regular reviews, and alignment with evolving standards. 
• Microlearning in the flow of work is the future: Delivering targeted learning at the exact moment of need can significantly increase retention, application, and overall impact.

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Transcript:

Susan Cort: [00:00:00] What happens when training moves beyond the classroom and into the flow of work?

Tim Greiner: If you can get the information, the training to the person executing that process at the point in the process they're doing it, they need it, it's gonna have a lot more impact. I really think we've got an opportunity, how do we get those things to the point in the person's daily routine that they're accessible right there from that routine?

Susan Cort: That's Tim Greiner, senior director, USP Education at the US Pharmacopeia Convention. Tim joins d'Vinci's Angeline Evans and me to explore how highly regulated global organizations like USP can design and deliver training that drives real-world impact. Next on Powered by Learning.

Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive.

d'Vinci's approach to learning is grounded in 30 years of innovation and expertise. We use proven strategies and leading [00:01:00] technology to develop solutions that empower learners to improve quality and boost performance. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Joining me today is d'Vinci client solutions consultant Angeline Evans, and Tim Greiner, senior director, USP Education. Thanks for being a guest on Powered by Learning, Tim.

Angeline Evans: Hi, Tim.

Tim Greiner: Glad to be here. Good to see you guys.

Susan Cort: Good to see you too. Tim, d'Vinci's worked with you and your team at the US Pharmacopeial Convention, or USP, for many years.

Just take a few minutes to explain what your organization does and what your role is there.

Tim Greiner: Sure thing. USP is a international nonprofit, originally based in the US, publishing standards and solutions for pharmaceutical and dietary supplements and food quality, basically. Um, their role in US law is they are the standards by which medicines are, uh, evaluated for purity, um, and correct dosage [00:02:00] and so forth by the FDA.

But there are 140 or so other countries that leverage USP standards to evaluate their own pharmaceutical markets as well. Uh, my role in the organization is under USP Education to basically ensure that the standards that we produce and the solutions that USP offers to help make sure the medicines are of quality have the proper impact in the market so that, uh, standards are being implemented correctly.

We hold training courses for manufacturers and regulators who are evaluating medicines for quality and purity.

Susan Cort: Influence over all of us, for sure.

Angeline Evans: Yeah, what an important role. So I'm so curious, so when you think about the role of education at USP, how do you define success? And I imagine it's in a lot of different ways, but are you looking more at optimize for knowledge transfer or behavior change or something broader tied to public health outcomes given, um, what you just shared about, about your organization and your role?

Tim Greiner: Yeah, I mean, you could go as broad as you want. Um, [00:03:00] ultimately, our goal is to ensure that the products and solutions that USP offers do have their intended impact on public health, right? So the goal is to make sure that the medicines that we're taking are correct and don't have things in them that they shouldn't have.

So the training is a, it's an element of ensuring that that quality exists and is implemented correctly by the people that are evaluating the products going into the market. But if you localize it more toward the training program itself, what we're looking to do is to understand that those people who are taking courses from USP truly are finding that that material enables them to improve their quality practices in their organizations.

So we use that self-reporting to determine that the courses are having the intended impact to improve quality in their operations and thus have, have those standards have the intended impact in the market.

Angeline Evans: Working with a wide range of learners, from regulators to industry professionals, how do you approach [00:04:00] designing experiences that truly meet the needs of all of those audiences?

Do you tailor things to certain professionals? Or talk to me a little bit more about that.

Tim Greiner: Yeah. There's several ways that you can kind of explore that, and one is in the way that- Your students will say want to consume content. So having all of the modalities that are necessary that meet those, uh, preferences.

Mm-hmm. But the other thing is just think about your audience, right? So a regulator may have a slightly different need for training on the same subject as a manufacturer.

Angeline Evans: Mm-hmm.

Tim Greiner: They're, they're similar, but there are times where you need to tailor, and, and, and our audiences also include university students, so we have faculty that have their own interests on how to prepare students for the regulated workforce.

And so it's, it's all about the audience needs- be they, you know, what their needs are as far as how to understand the topic and how they like to consume.

Angeline Evans: And do you typically uncover that through [00:05:00] surveys or just, you know, through your years of experience in this industry?

Tim Greiner: We do conduct surveys on all of the programs that we host, and we do outreach independently of the courses themselves.

Of course, USP does a wider outreach, uh, on its stakeholders regularly, so we get feedback from all of those avenues. But most, most importantly what we learn is from our engagements with people that are using USP content.

Angeline Evans: Absolutely. And you, um, mentioned modalities, so when you consider something should be live or virtual or self-paced, especially in your environment where it's highly technical and regulated, how do you decide, and, and what do you c- what considerations do you make?

Tim Greiner: The short answer is we do it all. Oh, okay. We kind of do it all every time, really, because-

Angeline Evans: Yeah ...

Tim Greiner: because you're, you're also talking about a global audience, like you said, right? Right. So people in different regions have different sort of levels of comfort with various modalities. Mm-hmm. So everything that we do live, we [00:06:00] also package as self-paced offerings.

In fact, in the past we've built things where we intended initially to build it only as a self-paced offering, and we deployed it in the market, and we realized that the people in other regions wanted us to be on campus teaching this live. So we've had to actually pull back from e-learning only models and have that ILT version available as well.

Angeline Evans: Do you find one to be more effective than the other in your industry, or I mean, as we know, it's, it really depends on a lot of factors, but I'm just curious your take on it.

Tim Greiner: Based on the self-reporting, people say that the highest impact courses are live in person. Yeah.

And slightly behind that, live virtual ILT. And then, of course, self-paced is the furthest distant from interaction with an actual human being, a subject matter expert, and those have the lowest of the three scores- Right ... regarding the impact of the [00:07:00] material.

Angeline Evans: Do all of your sessions, do learners tap into resources or refreshers or anything like that afterwards?

Like, if they take a live training, what sort of... Talk to me about some of the materials you have.

Tim Greiner: Yeah. There's a couple things. One is available to everyone who comes to a USP course, is a module that's basically very introductory about what USP standards are how they're used. This is completely optional, 'cause a lot of people already understand this content that come to us, but not everyone does. Right. So that's available to them before the live session happens. And then after the live session, they of course have access to the materials themselves through our learning management system. But the self-paced modules will also become available to those learners who attended live.

Angeline Evans: Awesome. Gosh, so, like, running a global education program is probably pretty complex if I'm, if I'm putting it, um, modestly for you, and I'm, um... For some of our listeners who are not working with a global audience, can you [00:08:00] talk to us just about some of the operational and technical challenges you've had to solve to just make that work, and make a curriculum work at scale, right?

Without reinventing it across different areas.

Tim Greiner: Yeah. We could talk at length about this. This is probably one of the more interesting things, but it's, it's like you said, it's really complex because you have to-

Angeline Evans: Right ...

Tim Greiner: you have to think about those operations in terms of we're, we're a commercial program, so- people are interacting, they're transacting financially with us, and our global operation is through independent organizations that are sort of USP subsidiaries in those regions. So in South Asia- and Latin America and China. And the commerce packages are different in each region as well. So people in China are used to one way to transact business, and in South Asia, it's a completely different set of services that they go through. So we needed different platforms in each area to, to manage this, which is its own challenge, because now you're managing- [00:09:00] Right ... four learning management systems with their own technology platforms- Yeah ... and so forth. Uh, we were hoping to avoid that. We were hoping to have one stack that could serve all of it, and we just didn't, we didn't find, find that... I mean, maybe we could have waited forever for that to happen, but, uh, we, we decided to- Yeah ... go ahead and pilot some, some options, and those pilots have just stood up and stand in place today. So that's one of the things that's really interesting. And then because you have different platforms deploying the content.

You gotta think about how do you manage the content, right? And how much localization is going to be- Yeah ... appropriate or cost effective. Um, one of the things that we did Probably about five years ago was we, we reached out to our stakeholders in the regions to determine from their point of view how much language localization they need.

And initially we were thinking, "We need to translate all of these courses in multiple languages. The, th- the deck needs to be de- delivered in the local language, and we need to have instructors who speak in the- Yeah ... local [00:10:00] language and so forth." And what we found is that- That's what I'm picturing they don't- Yeah, so ... they didn't need it. Okay. I think in part because our constituency is basically professionals in pharma or regulat- regulatory, right? So many of them go to universities that are, that have English at least partly. Um, and they work in organizations that are often multinationals, so that they do business in English a lot.

So what was sufficient for, I'm talking mostly about Latin America, Asia Pacific, China, was as long as they had subtitles in their local languages, the content could be in English, even the audio content could be in English. Okay. And they didn't really have that big of a problem with that. So that turned out to be super cost-effective way to, to deploy also quickly, right? We don't, when we update a course, we don't have too much concern about the changing of the language because it's just- rerun the, the-

Angeline Evans: Mm-hmm ... the subtitling

Tim Greiner: process.

Angeline Evans: When a course does need, like, need updated, you then update it across the [00:11:00] four versions or languages and then upload it to those four platforms.

Is that, am I following that correctly?

Tim Greiner: Yeah, and what we've done is centralized our catalog.

Angeline Evans: Okay.

Tim Greiner: 'Cause our primary focus is on USB standards implementation- the proper application of quality practices. The catalog is true across the world. Um, and that way we basically have a centralized, in the US we have a, a- an asset management system that has all of the master content, and then the sites will pull from that master, uh, catalog into their local LMSs for, for their regions.

Angeline Evans: Okay. Sounds like a lot to manage. It does. I'm, like, hyperventilating over here. I'm sure I sound calm, but I, I'm not. Um, so you mentioned maintaining this catalog of courses, so what does it look like when you're evaluating what's working, what needs to evolve, what might need to be retired?

How on earth do you keep track of it all and-

Tim Greiner: Yeah ... and keep it up

Angeline Evans: to date? [00:12:00]

Tim Greiner: A lot of processes. Um, we're a quality organization, so we're quite used to having SOPs around these kinds of things- Sure ... and, and we certainly do. Uh, twice a year, one, one of the processes is that twice a year we... Each one of our courses has an, a staff owner, right?

Mm-hmm. So a subject matter expert who can evaluate the content that's being developed against the standard to make sure that it's- appropriately teaching the implementation of that standard. But we also reach out to those people twice a year to ask them, "Is this content still valid in its current form?"

"And should it remain available?" We really look for an up or down answer on that because the purpose of that review is to say, this, this thing can stay available for, for access from our stakeholders, or it needs to be immediately pulled down because there's a risk that it's gonna give somebody the wrong information or data- out of date information.

Separately from that, we'll decide, do we update it? And that's based on what impact is this course having for our [00:13:00] stakeholders? What is the popularity of it? I- in what regions is it important? And from those things, we'll decide whether we want to invest in an update to it or- leave it inactivated.

The other thing that we keep track of is that the standards themselves continually evolve, so we have, uh, a body of about 1,000 volunteer experts across the globe who help us make sure that the standards produced reflect, you know, current industry- quality practices and will result in better medicines.

Those changes go through a publication cycle that we track very closely. And as, as they get near the publication that will become official, meaning enforceable by law- we start preparing updates to courses or new courses in the case where they have, uh, these are high impact standards that are gonna affect a lot of medicines or a lot of patients.

So we keep track on the current catalog twice a year, and then we keep track on the incoming content for development ongoing as those standards [00:14:00] evolve.

Angeline Evans: Wow. And now I'm just really curious, how many do you think get changes to them annually or biannually, I guess? If you, if you happen to know that off the top of your head.

If you don't, we can we can move to the next question. I'm just curious. Too,

Susan Cort: Too many might be the answer .

Tim Greiner: Just curiously. Well, I guess we've got about 250 titles.

Angeline Evans: Okay. We

Tim Greiner: stay around that. Out of those titles, probably a little more than half of them are very short, informational- Right ... you know, consumable things.

Those, those come and go quickly. And when they go, they just go because we have new ones coming in as, as we evolve our- Yeah ... you know, end thought leadership. But the courses, around 100 or 110 actual delivering learning objectives, robust courses- I would say each time we do a semi-annual review, we probably inactivate about two of those.

Angeline Evans: Okay.

Tim Greiner: And each [00:15:00] year we update or develop about eight or 10.

Susan Cort: Okay. Tim, talk a little bit about your team. You mentioned the thousand volunteers around the country- Yeah ... and it sounds like you've got partners in certain areas of the world that, that help with captioning and maybe other, other things. What does the staff and the, the process look like for getting all this done?

Tim Greiner: It's interesting 'cause the brain trust, right, the people that know the standards and, and help us teach them are USP staff, around 1,200 globally. Of that, the science group is, I don't, I don't know what percentage, but some percentage are scientists. So those are people that help us. You've got the 1,000 volunteers, and then the team that actually runs the program is seven people in the United States and two in South Asia, two in China, and two in Latin America.

Hmm. And the rest of it is really just distributed across many, many people in the organization. Wow. [00:16:00] But the actual program really is about 11 staff. That's incredible.

Angeline Evans: In that case, instructor quality, um, probably plays a pretty critical piece of the experience, and it sounds like we know as trainers, right, you wanna have c- as much consistency as possible across what you're delivering.

So what have you learned about what makes an instructor effective beyond their subject matter expertise, and how do you ensure they're delivering the training consistently?

Tim Greiner: Yeah. Certainly, I mean, as I'm sure your audience knows, quality training is not just subject matter expertise, right? The ability to facilitate engagement and convey learning-

Angeline Evans: Yeah ...

Tim Greiner: is a diff- it's a completely different skill set from- scientific expertise. So we have a process by which we will evaluate incoming candidate instructors against both of those facets, right? So do they have the subject matter expertise?

And it's of particular interest to us, not that just they're good in that science, but they understand application [00:17:00] of the standard in its current form, because quite often it's important for our standards that they are widely applicable enough that everyone can access these medicines, right? So we don't wanna have some new technology required that only the most, you know, advanced countries have access to.

So often you'll have scientists who are very, very steeped in science, but they have to really talk about how do you apply the standard, not what's the coolest-... new science. So they have to have- that understanding of the m- of the purpose of the training, and of course, they have to have the ability to facilitate.

So we evaluate on, on both those facets, and then once they're in the program as an instructor, uh, we use the feedback from the students. Uh, there are really three main KPIs that we pull out of the, the feedback from our students, and one is the impact that the course has on that quality behavior. The second is the course content itself, its value, and then the last one is the instructor's ability to [00:18:00] teach.

Mm-hmm. That ability is those two facets. Do they understand the content, and can they convey? It's, um, even more interesting because you have a lot of people who are steeped in the science and have a lot of expertise teaching, but now we're teaching almost exclusively online. I mean, at least-.. 80%.

Just online. Yeah. So we've employed all kinds of technology to make sure the engagement remains effective, even for an online-only audience, or quite often for a blended audience, where you've got 30 people in a room with the instructor and 100 people engaging through a live virtual experience, and the tools are basically used in both those student cohorts at the same time so that you kind of- Mm-hmm

equalize that across. So getting the instructors used to that is also something that we have to focus on.

Angeline Evans: Interesting. This has been so insightful, Tim. Thank you.

Tim Greiner: Oh, my pleasure.

Angeline Evans: If you zoom out and you look at the future, what do you [00:19:00] think organizations in regulated industries should see as their biggest opportunity to rethink how learning drives real impact?

Tim Greiner: I think one of the things that we've forgotten about that we should start remembering is that if you can get the information, the training, to the person executing that process at the point in the process they're doing it, they need it, it's gonna have a lot more impact, right? That's so true. We send people off to training, or they, you know, they'll attend a, a virtual course for a day, and there'll be specific things about that course that apply more directly to their work than others.

They'll have to retain it over time. But I, I really think we've got an opportunity, especially, you know, micro-learning is a big sort of trend- Mm-hmm ... that's been going on for several years. How do we get those things to the point in the person's daily routine that they're accessible right there from that- learning routine? USP's thinking about that in terms of, so our standards are published into an online compendium, right? And there are chapters and monographs that [00:20:00] have the sort of scientific test methods that you're supposed to run to make sure the medicine meets the right, uh, quality attributes. In that online tool, we'd like to go from what we have today is where you're in a chapter that talks about a particular dissolution test.

You can come out and see our dissolution training from that chapter. But we'd like to drill that- Yeah ... down even further to say within the particular part of the method where you're executing one 10 or 12-minute portion, how do we build- Mm-hmm ... training on that portion right into that part of the interface?

So I think there's a lot of opportunity for organizations to do that.

Angeline Evans: Absolutely. Especially with AI, we've been seeing, you know, more and more of our clients working with them on, like, AI-powered assistants and onboarding coaches, and you name it, just to try and help them more in the flow of work, even if it's just to the degree of pinpointing the training video that exists and pulling it to their fingertips- not necessarily feeding them, you know, content like a language model, so.

Tim Greiner: [00:21:00] AI is also gonna change the nature of the jobs in a lot of cases, right? Totally. So we're gonna have to teach people how to do their job with AI as the partner.

Susan Cort: Tim, speaking of AI, tell us a little bit about how you're using that right now at USP from an L&D standpoint.

Tim Greiner: For the most part, it's, it's, uh, it's an accelerator for us, right? So it's a tool set that we use. For example, we can take... If we're gonna write a, a course on a particular standard, we'll plug in the standard, the audience that we intend to reach, and ask it, "Give me a set of learning objectives that you recommend for course content against this AI."

And then we'll use that as the straw man that we give to the subject matter experts and refine. Uh, it's very good at taking that input. It's got learning objectives, and course materials, and the chapter itself, and you can ask it, "Give me 10 knowledge questions that I can use as the online quiz or the post, pre/post assessment."

So it's really an accelerator of some of the work that the [00:22:00] instructional designers are doing.

Susan Cort: Well, Tim, that's great. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. We also appreciate your partnership here at d'Vinci. We're very pleased to be a small part of the work that you do.

Tim Greiner: Happy to do it, and a pleasure to see you again.

Very fond of the d'Vinci team, and really appreciate the time.

Angeline Evans: Thanks, Tim. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Tim Greiner: Take care.

Susan Cort: My thanks to d'Vinci's Angeline Evans, and our guest, Tim Greiner from USP, for joining me today. If you have an idea for a topic or guest, please reach out to us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

And don't forget that you can subscribe to Powered by Learning wherever you listen to your podcasts.