As you kick off a new year and focus on what your internal strategy is going to be for 2020 and beyond, it’s vital to consider the type of tech and software you will need to help you achieve your goals as a business. You need to make sure you have the right EdTech in place to help you produce visible business results. Otherwise, you could be doing your internal training department a disservice, and not providing your team with the tools they need to succeed.
Don’t Be Limited By Your LMS
If you’re already using a learning management system (LMS) to manage elements of your internal training, you may think you’re all set for the year ahead. But the truth is, an LMS isn’t enough to manage all components of your training. Chances are, you’re probably already using spreadsheets and other systems to keep track of your training operations, including schedules, vendors, spending, course documents, and more. What if you could manage all of this, comprehensively, in one tool? With a training management platform like Administrate, you can.
Manage Complex Schedules and Automate Reminders
Keeping track of your instructors can be a very demanding and admin-heavy task, so obviously, you’ll want to look for a tool that can help you manage the whole process smoothly. An LMS just isn’t built to handle your instructor-related admin because this type of software is more geared towards online learning, as opposed to blended or classroom-based sessions.
A training management platform like Administrate makes managing your instructor schedules simple and straightforward in several ways:
- Assign instructors to your course as you set them up in the course management system.
- Never double-book your instructors every again. Only available instructors for the course times you have selected with be available to assign to that course.
- Get a complete overview of all your instructors from the instructor availability screen. This gives you a calendar view of all your instructors for any given month and blocks out any time where they are already teaching.
- The instructor holiday screen can also give you an overview of all your instructor holidays, so you are always aware of what staff you have available and when.
Simplify Course Communications
Sending emails always seems like a quick and trivial task, but when you have to send hundreds of emails every week to learners, team members, vendors, instructors, and anyone else you deal with regularly, it can quickly become a massive time drain!
LMS-generated emails help with eLearning courses, but a more comprehensive tool is required to cover automating all of your training-related emails.
A training management platform will enable you to send emails with ease. Since all the contact details for everyone you deal with will be stored in the CRM portion of the training management platform, it will be straightforward to create email lists based on who you need to receive the email. You can also send emails to all the learners and staff assigned to particular training courses from the course’s event screen, meaning you can be confident you’re sending each email to everyone who needs to see it.
Ready to make it even easier to communicate with your employees? Use email templates and triggers to send emails that learners need to get at particular times, such as when they first sign up for a course, or when they have an upcoming assessment. All your email templates will be stored in your training management platform, so you can select the one you need, and all the personalized fields will be populated. You can also set up as many emails triggers as you need depending on your needs as a business, meaning your team can sit back and relax as your training management platform handles all your repeating emails.
Organize and Centralize All Course Documents
Unless they are related to your eLearning courses, chances are your LMS won’t give you the ability to organize all your course documents in one place. This is where a training management platform is the better option because no matter what the delivery method is for each of your courses, you can manage them all from one place.
This means rather than having separate systems for all your different courses, and therefore having to store course documents across different locations, you can save and organize them all in the same place. This means they are easy to find, edit, and update for your team, and you can be confident everyone is working from the same version of a document by simply uploading them all to the document management system (DMS).
By working from one system like this, you can also do things like attach documents from the DMS to emails or events without creating any additional manual work for your team.
Transform Training Reports into Business Intelligence Data
An LMS may be able to help you report on some elements of your learning offering, but in order to produce business intelligence reports, you need a platform that will allow you to report on everything training-related that your department is doing.
A training management platform is the perfect solution for this because all your training data will already be loaded into it, and therefore creating reports will be much easier and more in-depth than you are used to.
Administrate’s reporting system lets you customize your reports to display precisely the data you need by picking the exact fields you need to see. Reports are then saved in the system and will be updated in real-time, meaning every time you open the report, you are presented with the most up-to-date version of the data – all without recreating the report from scratch. You can also download and email reports to people quickly and easily.
Your 2020 Success Starts Now
We’re already on the downhill side of January; it’s time to get the tools you need to support the success you’re ready to create.
[Guide] Do we Need a Training Operations Platform?
Download our free guide, created by Administrate’s training management experts, to get the right conversations started in your organization. In the guide, ‘Do We Need a Training Management Platform?’ you’ll find five key questions to ask in determining whether your team is ready for the next
level of EdTech infrastructure before you invest.
We’re Also a Great Sounding Board
If you’d like to meet with one of our training management experts, no-obligation consultations are available. Schedule a meeting today
