“Business and human endeavors are systems…we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system.
And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.”
Peter Senge | The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
“You can have great content, great instructors, great technologies, great classrooms and facilities, great materials, etc., but if the fundamental processes associated with the experience a learner goes through before accessing the training and after the training is completed are not done properly, the student’s perception of the quality of training could be negative.
Doug Howard | The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Managing the logistics of training operations is a problem as old as learning and education itself. And in prior centuries, it was refined to an art. Qing Dynasty bureaucratic examinations featured compounds that would host more than 20,000 scholars for examinations lasting a week to ten days. One can only imagine the backend logistics needed to correctly double-blind grade tens of thousands of long-form essays, without the benefit of computers.
But more recently, training management has taken a backseat to a focus on learning management. The industry has over 1,200 LMS solutions available on the market, which bears witness to the priorities of training teams today.
Making sure learners get great content and a well-designed learning experience is critical, yes. But can you execute on that planned experience if your backend management isn’t keeping up with your content?
If you have complex courses that require instructors, classrooms, specialized equipment, or any kind of specific operational requirements – what’s your system for making sure that everything ends up in the right place at the right time? Can that system be scaled if you had to run more courses? How much visibility and insight do you have into all of the moving parts that have to come together to create the learner experience?
It’s all fine and well to have a good LMS that helps you deliver courses to learners and keep track of activity metrics like attendance and grades. But for tackling the backend logistical problems of complex training operations in a sustainable and scalable way, you need a different kind of training solution – a training management system.
Organized Operational Excellence
A training management system provides a foundation for managing training operations: software infrastructure that provides a clear and consistent organizational hub for all of the components that go into delivering successful training.
The learner is just one part of this puzzle. In many ways, the learner is the easiest part to keep track of. But a well-organized training organization has to harness lots of resources to drive towards its goals in a clear and logical manner. Everything from people, to physical assets, to software, and even your data itself – it all has to be organized and accessible.
It’s a good rule of thumb that for a training organization to be managed successfully and scalably, less than 10% of the administrative team’s time should be spent on activities like scheduling, reporting, awareness building, or communications. That time should also be “capped” – after a certain initial investment, it shouldn’t require much (if any) further investment to add additional courses or sessions to the calendar.
When we started there were two people running Ping Identity University – myself, and I had one person doing the curriculum. We’ve since grown to run a global training team delivering millions of dollars of training with very few heads, and nearly everything is done by tools.
Kevin Streater, Vice President | Ping Identity University at Ping Identity
If creating and tracking courses is a process that requires manual effort from your team, then your team can’t scale with the business without constantly adding more staff. If you’re running your training operations off of spreadsheets and manual data transfers, you’re going to struggle to gain visibility into your operations. And when learners have to interact with a training team that’s overworked, struggles to communicate key data internally, and is swamped by the effort of administering training, they’re going to run into frustrations that will negatively impact their training experience.
You can have the best instructors and the best content in the world, but if some administrative error or oversight means that a learner is scheduled for an incorrect course, or a key piece of equipment is unavailable during a training session, the learner experience will not be fulfilling.
Changing The Narrative On Training Management
Many training departments are caught in a fatalism about administrative overhead and training management. It’s easy to believe that these are inevitable expenses, yet increased investment never really translates to better outcomes. Frustratingly, we’re caught between two dueling forces: we’re constantly trying to defend the efficiency of our administrative overhead to budget influencers, but at the same time, we have to harp on the need to do more with less.
Ironically, only 23% of the respondents in our research viewed administrative services as a critical process capability for training organizations to be viewed as high performing. Instead, they view administration as a support function that helps facilitate the more critical and core elements of training. Yet our experiences tell us that administrative services are the bedrock of a great training organization, providing feedback and making sure programs are scheduled and delivered as planned, with little disruption to the student or instructor.
Doug Howard | What Makes a Great Training Organization?
Training management platforms exist because they provide a missing link for training management – infrastructure that can manage the back-end of training logistics. Fundamentally, training teams need to be well-organized, well-run, and have visibility into their own data.
The best systems were created by training organizations frustrated with the lack of attention given to these fundamentals in an LMS-focused learning technology market. These systems exhibit a strong focus on the operational imperatives necessary to ensure exceptional training delivery.
Benchmarking a training management system means stepping outside of the realm of learning management and into a landscape that involves not just how your team works, but how your entire department interacts with the rest of your organization. Let’s discuss some core functions that a training management system can help to provide and streamline.
Course Management
Most training programs at scale will have a rich catalog of offerings, segmented by audience. There may be different courses and materials for employees, customers, partners, and the general public, for example. And within those audiences, there may be further segmentations by business unit, job role, supplier, and market.
That level of fine control is an excellent tool for providing the richest experiences possible, but these different offerings often end up fragmented and distributed across multiple systems. Software accumulated over time, such as in a merger, contributes to a patchwork of content that’s difficult to get a birds-eye view of.
Even worse are all of the secondary functions associated with a course. How can you create standardized procedures for course enrollment when there are three or four different systems hosting the courses, each with their own unique constraints and requirements? How can you standardize and automate course-related communication with learners when the data needed to populate a single email might be distributed across multiple, disconnected databases?
A training management system provides a centralized repository for all of your course information, eliminating the unnecessary and often counterproductive duplication of functionality and fragmentation of training data seen in so many modern learning tech stacks.
User Management
The main focus of any training operation is typically the learner. And learner management is an area where the LMS-focused market has kept up relatively well. But there are so many other actors involved in L&D operations, from instructors, to management staff, to vendors and partners (both within and outside the organization).
Keeping track of a modern training operation requires a database that can manage all of these individuals, not just learners. And by managing the interactions between all involved parties, deeper user management capabilities also provide a deeper layer of insights into learners that the most advanced LMS can’t provide.
For example, in a training management system with powerful user management capabilities, it should be easy to do things like automatically send badges and certifications to learners completing their course, while also linking those certifications to a system like an HRiS to ensure that the rest of the HR department has full visibility into employee certifications. With custom data fields and integrations between key training/HR functions provided by a training management system, it’s possible to build out any number of powerful automations that make user management much simpler for the team.
Resource Management
One of the primary challenges (and a key shortcoming of the traditional LMS) with managing training, particularly training at scale, is the coordination of required resources.
For some, that means tracking textbooks, meeting rooms, laptops, and audiovisual equipment. For others, that might mean multi-million dollar simulators, specially qualified personnel, or training rooms that require equipment to be specifically configured for a course.
A training management system provides the logistical capacity to automatically track these resource requirements and simplify the task of ensuring that all of the pieces fall into place for a training event to run successfully. A good training management system should provide:
- Automated scheduling and conflict-avoidance tools. A training event can be derailed from the start by something as simple as a double-booked classroom, and it’s often difficult to notice such errors when events are being planned on immense spreadsheets. Automatically generating and checking schedules for resource conflicts saves a tremendous amount of hassle.
- Custom resource definition capabilities. If your training program needs some highly bespoke equipment with unique requirements and restrictions, you should be able to specify those requirements. Generally, resources can be broken down into two types:
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- Resources we don’t want to run out of (classrooms, laptops, instructors, etc.) which need to be scheduled so that there are always enough.
- Resources we want to maximize the use of (a multi-million dollar simulator where downtime represents a serious opportunity cost).
You should be able to identify and appropriately schedule around these two different requirements within your training management system.
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- Reporting and visibility. Believe it or not, most training teams have a very poor degree of visibility into how they utilize their resources, or even how many resources they have available. Making scheduling and resource management decisions based on an ad-hoc framework and limited data is a recipe for disaster. Effective training management helps to eliminate that problem by comprehensively reporting on resource use and availability.
A huge waste area for training organizations is to have low capacity of classrooms, thus wasting dollars on instructors not being fully utilized or materials that get thrown away. An even worse area of waste is students showing up for training and the materials or facilities not being ready.
Doug Howard | What Makes a Great Training Organization?
Reporting and Business Intelligence
Reporting on resource availability is a microcosm of a bigger training management problem most training teams face – typically, training teams have a very poor system in place for reporting on their operations and drawing actionable insights from training data with learning analytics. And that’s largely a technology problem. An LMS is designed to collect some learner activity data, such as grades, but it’s just not intended to support the kind of comprehensive data model that a modern training operation demands.
A training management strategy that makes accessibility, transparency, and visibility a top priority provides benefits to every stakeholder in the training process.
For Learners
Learners benefit from easy access to the catalog of training that’s offered, including learning paths tailored to specific job roles, departments, and other criteria. They also benefit enormously from being able to track their own progress through a training course.
The experience for the learner should be as frictionless as possible. For example, implementing Single Sign-on policies makes it easier for learners to engage with content without needing to remember yet another username and password.
For Managers
Management at all levels depends on visibility into how their teams are progressing through the learner experience to make key decisions about scheduling employees and coordinating their teams. When managers aren’t given insight into how their employees’ training is progressing, they struggle to stay accountable and engaged with the training function. Employees are first and foremost accountable to their direct bosses, not to training leaders who they don’t interact with in their day-to-day. Ensuring managers have full visibility not only allows them to make better decisions for their teams, it also encourages them to participate in the training process and feel more empowered to request training if their team needs it.
For Partners And Suppliers
Partner success is highly correlated with the effectiveness of their training, and therefore, training partners and keeping them well-informed on training operations is a key component of a successful training management strategy. This is especially true when onboarding a new partner or launching a new initiative with an existing partner. However, despite this, partner accountability and visibility is often difficult to achieve. Empowering partners should be a top priority and a key success indicator for training teams.
This is especially true for suppliers, who have their own unique concerns that need to be addressed. Do they know how they’re doing? Does your team have data to illustrate how your suppliers are engaging with your operations? Ensuring visibility into supplier operations can only help improve those relationships.
Integrating Management Functions
Powerful automation functionality is off the table for most training teams because they don’t have a data model that can support it. It’s all fine and well to have tools that can automate scheduling problems, for example, but it doesn’t do any good if that tool can’t easily pull all of the data that it needs to align learner, instructor, resource, and course calendars.
That means trimming the learning tech stack and integrating the software that makes the cut with a training management system and with the rest of the business.
The tech stack is the first target. Existing LMS’s should be consolidated down to as few systems as possible – unfortunately, many enterprise teams are running their operations on several disconnected LMS’s that make coordinating their data difficult. Then, with a focus on improving developer experience, integrate mainline CRM or HR systems to help share learner, administrator, and manager data with all stakeholders. Most learning management systems just aren’t capable of that level of deep integration.
The important goal here is to avoid situations where your team are human data loaders armed with stacks of spreadsheets that they manually transfer back and forth between systems. Integrations take time, planning, and configuration, but they set a foundation for scalability and data integrity in the long-term. And by using a training management system as a central hub for your team’s learning technology, it becomes much easier to replace other pieces of software because there is planned and functional infrastructure to easily unplug systems from and plug replacements into.
Accountability Drives Efficiency
Providing accountability and ownership to stakeholders outside of the training team tends to lead to an immediate increase in training volumes. With data in hand to tell them what training is available, what requirements it has, and what impacts they can expect, managers and employees are more likely to engage with the training team proactively to seek out training.
Raising training volumes might sound imposing, especially for a team that currently struggles to scale. But recall that with an effective training management system in place, and the right administrative procedures and automations, the administrative work of adding more courses and learners should be minimal.
Raising training volumes while lowering the effort required to put each learner through the system is a shot in the arm for efficiency and ROI. And with effective reporting tools in place, the team can communicate that increased impact and efficiency to the C-suite more effectively than ever.
Organizationally Relevant and Operationally Excellent
Properly implemented, a training management system will help training teams achieve a much greater relevance within the organization because of their ability to provide access to metrics that are meaningful and can apply to challenges that aren’t just training related.
A great example is Ping Identity, a fast-growing multinational software company selling identity management solutions. Their training team has helped decrease customer churn and predict which customers were at risk of not renewing, simply by providing training data to their internal renewal team.
Customers who continued taking training and engaging with L&D offerings were much more likely to renew, and the inverse was also true. This helped the renewals team identify and target customers who might be at risk and dramatically cut their churn, a key metric for the business at large. Without flexible reporting from a training management system enabling them to show detailed training records to other teams within the business, Ping Identity may have lost this key operational advantage.
With improved operations comes an opportunity to improve overall efficiency and target key business metrics. Almost universally, companies that implement a training management system can reinvest their saved time and money into high-value projects like product development and improvement. Their course offerings mature and improve, and they often begin offering entirely new training content with the increased bandwidth that better administrative training management provides, fueling growth and improved outcomes.
We’ve often seem teams become more distributed as well, partly through growth but also because they no longer needed to be in the same room to collaborate and share data to tackle the same training problems.
Solutions For Training Management Problems
A training management system provides an extensive suite of capabilities to your training team, all powered by a data model that connects and integrates every aspect of your training operations. The solutions that this provides are extensive, and also, importantly, very modular. Different tools can be linked together using the same underlying data model to create complex functionality that couldn’t have been achieved independently.
For example, an automated scheduling system could generate workable event schedules within minutes based on specified requirements and constraints. With a click of a button, a training manager could accept that schedule, and data pulled from existing course templates can be used to populate events and add them to the calendar. Automated communication taskflows could then generate emails to instructors and staff informing them of the new schedule, and a document management system could automatically pull and send relevant training materials to those instructors. Another email automation could send notifications to relevant managers throughout the organization, letting them know that they should encourage their employees to enroll, and when those employees enroll, automatic enrollment and learner management systems can capture their registration and inform relevant staff within the training team. All of this can be humming along in the background after a manager made a single click to accept a schedule.
That’s just one example of how much administrative work can be easily automated using a well-integrated training management platform. By layering solutions on top of one another, deep and powerful functionality can be unlocked.
Want to learn more about the specific tools and solutions that a training management platform like Administrate can provide? Head over to our Training Solutions page and learn more.
