How to future-proof your training operations

The speed of business is accelerating exponentially

To keep up the pace, enterprise L&D teams are leaning into upskilling and reskilling, to help workers lead dynamic teams and adapt to unforeseen change. Training teams play a critical role in providing change-readiness and agility to the organization, and their work determines how quickly stakeholders in the organization can identify and capitalize on opportunities in their industry.

The role of learning technology in future-proofing training operations is often underestimated. For a team to provide agility, they must be agile, and to be agile, their software must be up to the task. But most software on the market comes with restrictions that teams are forced to conform to and work around. Shouldn’t technology be an empowering tool, not a limiting factor? Adopting a new piece of software should mean decreasing the workload on employees, but often the additional administrative requirements make operations more complex.

An LMS or LXP was built to deliver content to learners, not to provide multimodal training management. So now you need a multimodal training solution. An HRIS is rarely integrated with badging/certification systems, even though that’s critical data an HRIS should track. Now, you need a badging solution. If you want to create these capabilities and combine systems yourself, it often requires manual data entry and spreadsheet management that will swallow your team’s time whole.

This is the web of point solutions that work well independently but are not built to work well together. What’s been missing up to this point is a platform approach. A design philosophy for learning technology that condenses and simplifies the complex functions of training management into a single user interface is essential.

That’s what a training management system aims to do.

Training management systems: infrastructure for L&D operations

Imagine how inefficient it would be for everyone to try to generate their own electricity. There’d be a lot of redundancy and waste, and it’d take up a lot of everyone’s time. That’s why society invests in utilities infrastructure to deliver electricity to us without having to think about it—it frees us up to focus on other things and be productive.

A training management system is like utilities infrastructure for your training operations that processes and delivers you training data. A training management system can enable you to leverage powerful functionality from your data that disconnected point solutions could never support.

Tech investment for change management

L&D software needs to provide agility and change-readiness to training teams if those teams are going to provide agility and change-readiness to the rest of the organization. Yet learning tech is rarely designed or built to support that kind of role.

Let’s go over 4 major areas of focus to keep in mind when discussing change-readiness and learning technology. These are areas you should consider when looking at new training software to ensure you aren’t buying more complexity-generating point solutions, but truly building an agile framework and infrastructure for training management with your software.

1. Headless architecture streamlines management

Typical learning tech stacks suffer from being disconnected or disorganized, or both. Training software on the market just doesn’t prioritize connectivity. That means an integrated tech stack requires a messy web of point solutions and manual data transfers.

A training management system solves this problem by serving as the infrastructure for the tech stack. A headless TMS can act in the background, powering custom integrations, learner experiences, and more while remaining invisible. This gives you the ability to build what you need on an easy to use platform.

Headless architecture is the single most important element on this list. With enough work, you can achieve the other standards on this list without being headless, but it’s much less efficient. If your software can’t support a headless structure, you should consider whether it’s providing your team with the functionality you need.

2. Automation drives efficiency

With a headless architecture in place, it becomes possible to unlock potent automation capabilities. Complex processes like scheduling can be automated, but only with access to large amounts of data on every aspect of your operations. With headless architecture bringing all your data to one place, that kind of access can be achieved. Most training teams struggle to automate even basic tasks because automation, ultimately, is powered by data. And training data, all too often, is fragmented across a dozen systems, making it difficult to build automation tools that can access everything they need.

What if you could sync employee ID numbers with learner profiles in a tailored-for-training CRM, and automatically run a report every month that showed which employees needed to update required certifications? Difficult and complex to achieve with most training software on the market. But if you have a headless architecture shepherding your data and systems, suddenly that kind of automated functionality becomes eminently achievable.

3. Configurability is scalability

Software exists to support real people in making decisions about the unique challenges they face in the present, and to help real people prepare for the challenges they’ll encounter in the future. So shouldn’t software be configurable to meet the unique needs of real people?

All too often, learning tech is static and unchanging. Software providers identify pain points, and build a solution to address them—but what if your situation doesn’t map neatly into a software provider’s conceptualization? And even if the software matches your use case perfectly right now, will it still be a good fit in a few years when the business has grown and changed around the training team?

Scalability is a question of when, not if. So when evaluating training software, the following should be considered:

• Does the software have modular features that can be enabled and disabled as they’re needed?
• Are the features of the software customizable and flexible, or is the software rigid and non-adaptive?
• Is reconfiguring the software a time-consuming process, or can it be done easily?
• Is there active customer support from the software provider, such as assistance with implementation and roadmaps of future development plans?

Deep configurability is best achieved through a platform approach. With headless architecture principles implemented and a training management system governing your tech stack, systems can be treated as modular components to be added and replaced easily.

4. Insightful reporting and data access

The greatest untapped resource at many organizations is training data. A wealth of information and potential insights on customers, employees, and partners is out there to be discovered, but only if you can actually get to it.

Unfortunately, plenty of enterprise training software has very limited and inflexible reporting capabilities. Customizable reports are rare; often, you’re stuck with pre-generated reports that are non-comprehensive. Your data, inside of your own systems, might be inaccessible because the designer of your software didn’t think you would need it.

But you need to easily access 100% of your training data to make the best decisions. That means a reporting engine that can be configured to your unique needs—what does that look like in practice?

• Relate data from disparate sources. Leverage your automations and integrations to connect all of the data in your tech stack into a single place. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on manual data transfers that undermine data integrity.
• Connect metrics to meaning. What KPIs do your data points reflect? Linking specific training operations to measurable business results takes powerful reporting capabilities, but it’s key to communicating the ROI of training.
• Take the hassle out of reporting. Reporting shouldn’t be a task that consumes hours of your team’s time at the end of every month. Automation and simplification of access will enable your team to get the data you need in a few minutes.

A better way to bring your systems together

At Administrate, we know how important your learning tech stack is to your daily operations. We just think there’s a better way to bring all of your systems together, and coordinate them for maximum efficiency. We believe training software could be doing more to gather data-driven insights and demonstrate the ROI of training operations. With our cloud-based training management system built around a platform approach, we believe we’ve built that better way.

Training software should keep up the pace with the changes a training team instills in a company. It shouldn’t seem impossible to inform strategy with insights captured from training initiatives. Systems should be interconnected and integrated, so that you don’t have to waste time managing multiple software systems just to link learner metrics to business outcomes.

With a headless architecture powered by Administrate’s training management system, you can achieve all of that and more.

About Administrate

Administrate is a training management system that serves as a cloud-based, configurable learning tech infrastructure solution for enterprise training teams. Keep your existing eLearning tools and proprietary systems, and allow Administrate to serve as a single user interface while connecting your training data across the business.

We’re a partner, not just a vendor

Unlike other learning tech providers, we’re not going to leave you to figure it out after you sign on.

Our expert teams dedicated to implementation, development, account management, and professional services have a substantial background in the training industry. They’re standing by to give your L&D operations the best support possible in aligning with business goals and creating real, measurable impact. That’s part of the Administrate experience.

We’ve already helped hundreds of organizations serving millions of learners. We’re ready to help you.