– Jonathan Hill, Account Manager, CleverLMS
The world is developing at a rapid pace, and the ability to learn new skills and adopt new technologies is crucial for a company’s survival. Those who succeed in it can beat the competition very easily.
Corporate training is a set of educational approaches that help improve employees’ skills and foster a culture of innovation at your workplace. It requires good organisation, tangibility, motivation, and seamless integration with all workflows.
Learning management systems are tools for organising online and offline learning in the company and automating many of the related processes, such as analytics and motivation. You’ll see the essential features of such platforms and understand how to choose the most suitable one.
What is corporate training?
Corporate training helps make employees more efficient at work by improving their skills. While many companies neglect this opportunity, competitiveness, and efficiency increasingly rely on the ability to work with advanced services and perform specific tasks. As new technologies emerge, new skills become relevant, and a lot of work may be automated. So, corporate education is essential today.
Learning management systems, such as CleverLMS, help a company’s management organise corporate education efficiently. This article has two parts: in the first one, you’ll find what corporate training is and how you can organise it best, and then we will proceed to the essentials and deployment of learning management system.
Principles
Let’s start by figuring out several specific principles of corporate education on which we will build our narrative.
Corporate education is deeply interconnected with work processes, so its learning activities are highly practice-oriented and are often performed directly in the workplace.
Corporate education is tangible, meaning its progress and result can be specified and evaluated. It is important to remember this, as the management of many companies forget that they may (and should) measure the employee’s efficiency and track their learning progress.
Corporate education requires clear organisation, guaranteeing that all assigned tasks and educational processes are accomplished.
Lastly, it relies to a large extent on communication and collaboration, including giving and receiving feedback, ideas exchange, and informal mentorship.
Companies use corporate training apps to improve the efficiency of their business education. The apps automate all processes, track progress, and make education much easier.
Let us continue to understand how the management implements these principles in general, so you can see how you can improve your company’s performance and then look at the tools used for the purpose.
Realisation
For efficient education, you need a corporate training plan that will enable you to make it quantitative and actually improve the company’s performance. So, which elements such a plan must have?
Learning is the first part of your plan: it includes creating or selecting learning materials and quizzes and organising them into a course.
Strengthening the progress includes assigning specific tasks that will enable workers to implement their learned skills in practice and check their learning material understanding.
Motivation is crucial to complete the course. To maintain it, you need interactive elements and various reward systems.
Progress tracking to monitor learners’ progress.
Efficiency tracking to see how well employees implement their new and improved skills.
Before implementing the plan, ask yourself specific questions to evaluate what you want to achieve from your employees in the future.
Who will take this course? Overview the competencies, preferences, and skills of employees who’ll become learners to understand what exactly they need and want, and specify it in the form of ideas for your company’s education.
What’re their responsibilities? Build a comprehensive list of responsibilities for each employee: which work processes they perform regularly (examples are design, code development, sales, communications, accounting, or driving), which deadlines/time boundaries they have, and which revenues they eventually bring to your company. Together with ideas from the previous list, it will show you clearly what your employees need to study.
Which resources will we need? They include learning materials, teachers of specific skills, and evaluation instruments to measure the progress.
Which specific results should be achieved? Evaluate how each learner’s performance will increase and how you can measure and monitor it. For example, it’ll be a new skill that’ll bring more revenue for the company, or an employee will do some previous work, such as code generation, faster.
So, you’ll have a portrait for each of your learners with ideas regarding their education, a list of their responsibilities that may be improved, a list of necessary resources, and specific goals to achieve. If possible, both company’s management and specific skill teachers should participate in the course creation. Now, let’s proceed to the deployment part and learn more about LMSs and why they’re indispensable here.
Learning Management Systems
Corporate learning software includes learning management systems (LMSs) specifically designed for business purposes. Education in schools or universities and in companies is quite different, as corporate education is grounded in work efficiency, quantifiability, and good organisation. Based on the mentioned corporate education principles, we may specify what’s expected from a good LMS.
Organising the learning flows, so learners may improve their work skills seamlessly.
Tracking learning progress for learners and sending reports to team managers.
Communication and collaboration directly within the system.
Interactivity and reward system for learners’ engagement.
Knowledge base where everyone may contribute their learning materials and ideas.
Project management elements such as event planner and task scheduler.
Therefore, corporate learning management systems are built to make learning as quantitative and organised as possible. They have tools for task planning, special reward systems, and progress trackers with reports. Being employed in the company, they act as platforms for uplifting skills, ideas exchange, work cooperation, and innovation.
Essential features
As you see, LMS for corporate training should realise specific functions designed to organise corporate learners, track their progress, evaluate their results, and motivate them to stay. Based on the CleverLMS mobile interface that you may see below, let’s specify the must-have features for corporate LMSs.
- A dashboard with essentials such as team statistics and courses.
- Learning journeys with all assigned courses and their progress.
- Tests and surveys to check progress and strengthen knowledge.
- Messages in the form of a forum where all learners and the management may communicate.
- Media and documents for knowledge and learning materials exchange.
- Ratings and results to compare with other learners based on the reward points.
- Gift store to buy specific rewards using reward points, further increasing motivation.
- Task planner to assign specific work and educational tasks to employees.
- Event planner to organise the company’s online and offline activities.
Best examples
Here, we’ll show you three examples of the best LMS for corporate training, but the final choice of them depends not on their features as they are but on your own purposes. So, we’ll try to specify which each of them performs best, so you’ll be able to make your choice. We‘ve chosen these three systems because they are highly contrasted, so you may easily see their similarities and differences.
- CleverLMS is a simple, easy-to-implement solution for educating employees, stakeholders, customers, and franchisees. Its main advantages are high customisation and simplicity: you may adapt your company’s interface, design, and even features quickly and easily. It costs only $5/month per user, and plans with even less price are available, too. So, feel free to choose it in case you need an easy and comprehensive learning platform for any purpose.
- 360Learning is a tool for online education and collaboration powered by various instruments for content creation and data analysis. It utilises AI for content generation and has extensive features for communication and cooperation. Compared to CleverLMS, while it has more features, it’s more expensive ($8/month per user) and much less customisable. It is a good choice for medium-sized knowledge-intensive companies, where content generation and extensive analytics are highly relevant.
- Docebo is a large-scale set of cooperative learning tools for all possible purposes of corporate education. It has robust tools for content creation, including generative AI, various integration platforms, content libraries, and extensive analytics instruments. Obviously, it’s much more expensive than the two other options and quite hard to deploy and adopt. Select Docebo tools for large corporations (300+ users) that benefit from its robust toolset.
Conclusion
Modern corporate training is a must-have for any company that wants to be relevant and remain so in the next 5 – 10 years. New tools and technologies develop constantly, and those who adopt them, learning quickly and efficiently, will strengthen their market positions and beat competitors easily. Conversely, neglecting these processes will lead to a gradual decline of a company.
For successful corporate education, you need a training plan that includes course material organisation, assigning specific tasks to monitor progress and strengthen acquired skills, and tracking all educational processes and employees’ performance. Remember that it’s a quantitative process, so track as many indicators as possible to understand how efficient the process is and what you can improve.
Various corporate training solutions are present in the market to fulfill different purposes. For example, if you prefer a simple and efficient platform with essential features, interactivity, and high customisation, then CleverLMS is the best option. You may also select 360Learning if you have a knowledge-intensive business, such as a high-tech startup or Docebo for large corporations to modernise them.