What do you think employees want most from a training program?
If you said "that it's easy," you'd be right. 93% of respondents to an Ipsos survey on workplace training emphasized the importance of training that is easy to complete and understand. This was the most common answer in the survey.
Making a training easy to understand takes time, effective instructional design, and a deep understanding of your learners. But there are steps you can take right away to ensure that a training is easy to complete.
One of the most important things you can do to improve the training process – both for your learners and your company – is centralizing and streamlining the learning process using a modern LMS.
What is a modern learning management system?
A modern Learning Management System (LMS) is a software platform designed to streamline the management, delivery, and measurement of online learning programs. Unlike traditional systems, a modern LMS enhances the learning experience with:
- Customizable Learning Paths: Tailors the learning journey to meet individual needs and goals.
- Advanced Assessments: Offers diverse testing tools to gauge learner understanding.
- Comprehensive Course Management: Simplifies course creation and management for administrators.
- Microlearning: Supports bite-sized learning modules for easier absorption of information.
- Mobile Accessibility: Ensures learning can happen anytime, anywhere, on any device.
- Centralized Training Material: Keeps all learning resources in one accessible location, streamlining the learning process and improving organization-wide training efficiency.
By shifting from scattered, legacy systems to a modern, centralized LMS, companies can offer more engaging, effective, and easily manageable training programs.
Benefits of a centralized training management system
Using different training systems or shared storage solutions can work for a while, but a centralized LMS will help you get the most out of your training materials. Here are just a few of the benefits of centralizing your training process:
Easier user administration
Without a centralized location for your training materials, you might have several different systems that learners need to access over the course of their training.
Each one of those systems probably requires an account, which means someone needs to facilitate the sign-ups and solve login problems. As your company grows, that can become a full-time job quickly.
A unified learning platform means learners only need a single login and your administrator can perform all of the required user management from one interface. It might not sound like much right now, but over time it could easily save you hundreds of hours (and dozens of headaches).
Easier maintenance of training materials
Imagine that you're managing a product training program, and you have a few different documents that show your users how to use this product. The master copy is stored on your personal hard drive, the sales team has one in their shared drive, your designer has a few versions on their computer, and there's a video in a private YouTube channel for your new employees.
Now imagine that there's been a small change in that product and you're in charge of making sure that everyone's documentation has been updated.
Sounds like a pain, doesn't it? You'll need to track down all the copies distributed across various teams, make sure the edits get made, and update the video. And that's just for a single piece of training material.
The complexity of managing all of these systems compounds if there are multimedia assets, assessments, or any of the other elements of blended learning that promote efficient learning strategies.
Centralized learning resources make it much easier to keep those resources up-to-date without the anxiety of missing one of the places you've stored a copy.
Better learner experience
Think about the learning process from your employees' point of view. If they have to figure out where to log in every time they need to complete a training, they're using time and brainpower before they even get to the material.
That doesn't account for outages, forgotten passwords, lapsed accounts, and other problems that pop up from time to time on different platforms. A centralized hub for training is easier to remember, more likely to work, and requires fewer things to remember.
Sure, logging into a few different services isn't that big of a deal. But as we saw, the ease of completing a training is a high priority for learners. Employees are more likely to engage with simplified training processes than complicated ones.
Cost savings
Depending on the legacy systems in use, a centralized employee training system could save you a lot of money in the long run. If your training content is spread across multiple platforms, there's a good chance that you're paying for at least some of them, and subscribing to multiple services gets expensive fast.
Add that to all of the added administration and time savings discussed above, and you could be looking at saving a substantial amount of money by using an integrated training solution.
We have a tool for calculating the return on investment of using our own LMS. Give it a shot to see how much you might be able to save by centralizing your training using Continu.
How to start centralizing and streamlining your training
Now that we've seen the benefits of a centralized, streamlined training program using a modern LMS, how do you go about getting started? Use these four steps:
1. Conduct a training audit
Do you know exactly what courses, articles, videos, assessments, and other materials are part of your training program? And where they're stored? How about when they were last updated?
If not, it's time for a training audit. It might seem like a lot of work, but it will make the rest of this process much easier.
Create a spreadsheet or a database and find every piece of training content you have, then make a note of what it is, where it's located, and when it was last updated. If you have specific training courses or programs, make sure that they're documented, too.
(Don't worry, once you've made the migration to a modern LMS, you won't have to do this again, because it'll keep track of everything for you. As long as you don't start using multiple platforms again, of course.)
2. Plan a learning path
If you don't already have training programs, journeys, or paths, it's time to start planning one – or several. This is what streamlines your training and improves both learner outcomes and the learner experience.
The idea behind an effective learning path is that learners should progress through the proper lessons at the proper time. This means they're reading, watching, listening, or otherwise consuming content that's both helpful and understandable throughout the training process.
The right learning path depends on what your employees already know, your learning objectives, compliance requirements, and more.
And while you don't have to get everything exactly laid out at this point in the process, it will make your eventual migration to a modern LMS much easier. Give some thought to how you might create consolidated learning programs earlier rather than later.
3. Select an LMS
Now that you have an idea of the learning path(s) you'll need to build, it's time to choose an LMS. We have several guides that will help you. Start with these two:
Don't rush this process – choosing the right LMS for your needs is important. Making the right decision the first time will save you lots of headaches down the road. And if you'd like to get a free demo of Continu and see how unified employee development can help your company, get in touch!
4. Start migrating
You've completed your training audit, developed a learning path or two, and chosen an LMS. Now it's time for the final step in centralizing your training and improving the learning experience across your company: implementation!
Of course, migrating all of your content into an LMS and deploying the new system will take time. In some cases, it can be a major endeavor that requires the cooperation of multiple teams. You may also need to reformat or update some of your training materials.
But the time spent here is worth it.
Start with a rollout plan, then coordinate with your tech team, HR, and anyone else who needs to be involved.
Once you've implemented your new LMS and migrated the content into it, you've taken the most important steps in centralizing and streamlining your training. Now it's time to let your employees experience this new training process for themselves!
Streamlined training delivery can revolutionize learning at your company
Employees' highest priority when it comes to training is ease of completion. And having training spread across multiple platforms makes training more difficult. It's as simple as that.
A modern learning management system saves time and effort on user administration, maintenance of training materials, and more. It provides a better experience for learners and administrators through simplified training processes.
If you're serious about organizational learning optimization, it's time to adopt a centralized LMS. Yes, it will take time to get it set up. But if you've never used one, you'll be amazed at how much it improves the learning and development process at your company.
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