Whether a small business or a large chain, and regardless of the rise of e-Shopping, the retail sector remains the front face of the economy. Retail employees, more so than most other fields, have to deal with customers in person, and while good people skills are essential, they are not enough by themselves. A successful sale or a satisfactory customer service experience is built upon years of experience in dealing with customers who, as the old saying goes are always right, combined with rigorous training and continuous reeducation to new products, selling techniques and market trends. At least that’s the ideal retail employee. Unfortunately, the reality leaves a lot to be desired. A recent research produced by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills contains the rather unsettling finding that the retail workforce is in desperate need of training. As the authors put it: "60 per cent of sector employers with skills shortage vacancies have difficulty recruiting employees with these skills" and "In order to meet the predicted skills demand retailers will need to up-skill existing workers and attract appropriately skilled new entrants". The ever-shifting landscape of the retail business, dominated by unpredictable forces such as fashion trends, shifting demands and guerrilla marketing, requires navigational orders that are communicated fast, understood completely and executed smoothly. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt if they also come cheaply, as the razor thin margins an awful lot of retail businesses operate on don’t leave much of a budget for training expenses. As the creators of the industry leading eFrontPro eLearning management platform we might be biased, but when it comes to fast, flexible and cost effective training, eLearning is the only viable option that comes to mind. Let’s see how eLearning can help you build and retain a successful retail team that will keep you ahead of the competition. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing new hires to your working environment and giving them the basic information they need to start being productive, including your company’s operating procedures, policies, guidelines. If your retail business hires new people frequently, e.g. to cover increased seasonal business, automating employee orientation is one of the best investments you can make, and eLearning software like eFrontPro is your best option for achieving this. With eFrontPro you can organize your orientation material in accessible units, incorporate video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations etc., and integrate material from third parties (YouTube, Wikipedia, RSS, etc). And because it’s a full blown LMS as opposed to a static content management system, you can also include tests and quizzes in order to better access your hires’ progress and understanding of the onboarding material. eFrontPro also logs orientation course attendance, something that in case of legal dispute can serve as proof that your company has informed your employees about stuff like labor safety, environmental protection laws, sexual harassment issues, etc., though, you should consult your legal team before relying on this, as it might not apply to your jurisdiction. Training In retail, change is the norm. Employees are often re-assigned or promoted to handle different accounts and/or departments, and there are always new hires, especially in sectors such as clothing retail that frequently hire younger employees that are prone to leave the business after a couple of years or so. All these things make training necessary. eLearning makes it easy and cost effective, enabling your employees to complete their training at their own pace, thus minimizing business disruptions and reducing employee overtime. eFrontPro also provides a comprehensive reporting system that gives you quantifiable information and statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of the training material. An eLearning based solution will also help if have a frequent need to change your training material (e.g. to introduce new tech products or clothing lines, to teach employees new sales techniques and marketing tactics, to promote a new customer service strategy, etc.). eFrontPro allows you to update all your courses without wasted paper and dead trees, re-use and expand content as you see fit; and share courses between different retail departments and branches. Plus, with eFrontPro’s integration to the OpenSesame eLearning content marketplace, you can buy ready-made professional courses in thousands of topics, including sales and marketing. Knowledge retention In all lines of business there are a few employees whose experience is crucial for an organization’s day to day operation, as well as others who are the only ones that know how to handle some rare emergency situation. Retail is no different in this regard. If your supervising employee takes the day off or quits to join a cult, can the rest of your retail employees manage the store by themselves? Can they handle an especially demanding, but very valuable, customer? An eLearning platform like eFrontPro will help you store all of your business’ valuable operational knowledge in a formalized and easily accessible way, safe from changes in personnel, and available to be consulted at any time. Sure, you could just put all that into a document management system, and have them forgotten and buried under digital dust. By putting it in an LMS, though, you ensure that they’re not just static documents sitting on a server, but rather live content that you can use to educate the rest of your staff and even train new hires with — while leveraging all of your LMS’ learning related functionality (from tests and quizzes to gamification and certification features). Sold? Take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can help boost employee skills and increase sales for your retail business. The post eLearning for the Retail Industry with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

Adopting eLearning, settling on some employee training software, and deploying your own enterprise online courses are all big steps towards achieving more efficient, flexible and effective employee training for your organization. As is true for most things in business and in life, however, eLearning doesn’t run very well on autopilot. It might give you that impression, of course, as it’s much a more automated and hands-off affair compared to traditional classroom based training. But even so, it still needs you, or your instructors that will be operating the courses, to be on top of your employee training program to ensure employee participation and engagement — two things that are essential for its success. In this article we’ll examine several ways to come up with an effective employee training plan that will increase employee participation and ensure that your employees complete online training courses inside your LMS portal. 1. Schedule properly One of the main issues that might keep your employees from paying more attention to their eLearning is simply not having enough time. If your employees have some important project deadlines to meet then they obviously will prefer to invest their time in meeting them instead of "wasting" time learning new skills they don’t immediately need. The same goes for overworked workers (e.g. due to increased seasonal workloads). It’s not their fault; rather it is you and their managers that have to prioritize what’s important and what’s not, and schedule things like eLearning for the appropriate time when workloads are lighter. In fact, it’s best that you allocate some time during the week that your employees are allowed to do eLearning — so that they don’t have to sit through their training after a full day’s work, or, worse, on their weekend. Unless, of course, they prefer that. You should also ensure that their managers are sold on the importance of the company’s training program, and don’t try to rush employees back to work considering any time spent on their online training as "wasted". 2. Embrace asynchronicity Another common scheduling mistake when it comes to employee training, is having too many instructor-led-courses that have to happen in real-time, or insisting that your employees take an online lesson at a specific time. One of the great advantages that eLearning has over classroom-based learning is its asynchronous nature. That is, the fact that learners can login and access their lessons at any time (and from any place). For example, some of your employees might like studying from home or on weekends. Others might prefer accessing their lessons during their morning or evening commute. As long as they do access them, let them make up their own schedule and keep their own pace. 3. Set a deadline Yeah, I know, we have just advised you to let your employees "make up their own schedule". And we still stand behind that advice: you should not try to micromanage your employees’ access to the LMS portal. But you should definitely give them specific deadlines for completing each of their course modules. If you don’t, and only set a single far-off final deadline, then they’ll do what the average university student does: they’ll forget about the training program until the very end, and then haste to go complete it as the final deadline looms. If you don’t want that, and you shouldn’t; it would be very ineffective in terms of knowledge assimilation, set a generous deadline for the completion of each module of your employee training program. 4. Get employees to relate to your training material Blah blah blah blah blah. That empty blathering is all that your employees will be able to read in their eLearning courses if you can’t get them to understand "what’s in it for them". In other words, to have an effective and engaging online employee training program you need to make your employees see that your course content is relevant to their work. For this you’ll need two things. First, the managers, and/or instructors need to set clear objectives for your training program, and communicate them successfully to your employees, while also touting their importance. Second, the content should be to the point, with concrete examples relevant to your employees’ roles and experiences. Lengthy abstract theoretical passages should be edited out — your employees will only snooze over them anyway. So, when it comes to effective eLearning content, keep it simple, keep it short and keep it relevant. And then sell the heck out of it to your employees, until they are convinced of that the new skills you’re trying to teach will prove important in their everyday work, not to mention their career advancement. 5. Encourage participation Sure, you can always yell at them for not completing their training. It won’t help, but it might make you feel better. But before it gets to that, how about trying some positive encouragement first? You could, for example, give an extra day off to people who have completed a particular course or course module. Or give a bonus to those who had the best training results. Or maybe just praise your best learners openly, in a company wide email or within earshot of the other employees. There are may ways you can go about it, including a virtual way, which we’ll describe in the very next tip, but the main goal remains the same: you want to make employees feel that increased participation in the company’s eLearning program is something that will be appreciated by upper management. 6. Let the games begin Adding an element of play is another sure-fire way of making any process more fun and engaging. In web based employee training software, or any other kind of software for that matter, this can be achieved through a technique known as "gamification". Increasingly popular in eLearning and even more so in mLearning, gamification refers to the use of game-inspired techniques to increase engagement in a non-gaming activity. It’s not kid stuff either: applicable to learners of any age, gamification has demonstrable and measurable effects, as well as deep roots in pedagogy, cognitive science and human psychology. eFrontPro offers several built-in gamification features, such as points, badges, levels and leaderboards, and it even allows instructors to mix and match them and to customize their behavior in order to implement a particular gamification strategy. It also allows companies to use their custom badges and naming schemes, to get them more consistent with their training content. We suggest you try to incrementally introduce a few gamification elements to your employee training — you’ll soon discover that there’s nothing like a little competitive element to increase learning engagement and get your employees to try to outdo each other. 7. Hear them out Training should always be seen as an interactive affair. By this we mean that there should be a two-way connection between instructors and learners, such that not only the learners acquire new knowledge and guidance from their instructors, but the instructors also get important feedback from the learners, which enables them to improve their course content and teaching approach. This is just as important for web based employee training as it is for traditional classroom based training. Perhaps even more so, as in traditional learning teacher and learner interaction is inevitable, whereas in eLearning you need to work hard to achieve it. Where we’re getting with this is simple: you should listen to your learners. They’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t work in your training courses. Some things might be too abstract, while others might be overly specific. Others, yet, might be hard to understand, or written in a confusing way. There will be also some things that your learners might want to see covered in their courses — stuff that your instructors didn’t consider, or thought was too trivial. Have your instructors listen to your employee feedback and suggestions, and have them iterate on the course materials until they get them just right. A modern enterprise LMS like eFrontPro makes the whole process extremely easy, allowing you to work on your content iteratively, create new versions and re-use stuff with ease. 8. Numbers don’t lie To best way to make sure that your employees are up to date with their eLearning courses is to be up to date with your employees’ training progress yourself. Don’t just wait for their final test results — take advantage of your eLearning management platform’s reporting capabilities to track their attendance, scores, and overall progress. eFrontPro, for example, offers a flexible and intuitive reporting system that allows you to track, monitor and chart employee training progress across your whole company, for a particular department or branch, or for any particular employee. And you can even configure eFrontPro to notify you with an email when a particular event, like an employee completing a course module, or test scores becoming available, occurs. By leveraging your LMS monitoring and reporting capabilities you can get a good, and quantifiable sense of the progress of your employee training program, and easily spot problematic lessons and courses or employees that need a little extra help. Conclusion In this post we’ve examined a few tips and techniques for increasing participation and engagement in your company’s online employee training program. The main takeaway we’ve tried to drive home is that running an effective eLearning program needs organizational support and supervision. Do you have any relevant tips to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section and we’ll try to cover the best of them on a follow-up post. The post How to Ensure your Employees are up to Date With Their eLearning Courses appeared first on eFront Blog.

The term "flow" was introduced by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist. It refers to the state when one is so focused and concentrated on a particular activity, that they may lose track of time. Flow is widely used in a variety of therapeutic fields, but it can also be a powerful tool in eLearning. When your online learners are in "psychological flow", their minds are open and ready to explore the subject matter. In this article, we’ll share 6 tips on how you can integrate a psychological flow into your eLearning experiences. How To Add Psychological Flow In eLearning Experiences "Flow" is a term used in positive psychology that refers to a state of total absorption. Online learners who are in the flow are able to immerse themselves into the eLearning experience without distractions or lack of focus standing in the way. They are fully involved in the eLearning process and enjoying every minute of it. For this very reason, creating a psychological flow is the ultimate goal of any eLearning professional. It also happens to be one of the most challenging tasks to accomplish, as it deals with positive attitude towards eLearning, cognitive processes, and mental states. Fortunately, there are 6 tips to take advantage of psychological flow in eLearning. 1. Create challenging goals Online learners who are encouraged to go beyond their comfort zone and challenge themselves are more likely to be in the flow than those who are certain that they will succeed. If there is a risk that they may not overcome a challenge or there is a distinct possibility that things will not go according to plan, then they are going to go above and beyond to ensure that they achieve the desired outcome. If everything comes easy, on the other hand, they may not be driven enough to put in the extra effort. With that said, the goals should still be attainable and realistic, or you run the risk of making learners feel defeated. For instance, if you set a goal that they do not have the skills or resources to achieve, then no amount of hard work or determination is going to get them to the finish line. 2. Remove any distractions from your eLearning course design Distraction is the foe of flow. An online learner must be able to completely focus on the task at hand, as well as the goals and objectives they must achieve. Chaotic graphics, irrelevant images, and other technical pitfalls or interruptions can stand in the way of full immersion. This is why it’s so essential to remove distractions from your eLearning course design whenever possible. There are, of course, some things that you cannot control, such as a noisy learning environment. In this case, you must do your best to minimize them, like integrating background music to your eLearning course or including subtitles that stress the key takeaways. 3. Focus on intrinsic motivation Extrinsic motivation, like rewards and praise, may drive some online learners. However, encouraging intrinsic motivation is one of the most effective ways to trigger the psychological flow. You can achieve this by emphasizing the benefits of the eLearning course so that online learners will know exactly what they’ll gain by actively participating. Cultivating a strong learning culture is another way to bring in intrinsic motivation, as it stresses the importance of building their skills and expanding their knowledge. 4. Use colors and audio to create the right atmosphere Individuals who feel safe, secure, and tranquil are emotionally prepared for the flow. All of their basic needs are met, so they are free to fully engage in the eLearning process. They may even lose all track of time, simply because they don’t have to worry about anything else than mastering the task or absorbing the information. In essence, they are able to live in the moment and focus on the subject matter, which is the epitome of being in the flow. Incorporating the right colors, sound effects, and music can set the right tone for your online learners. Classical music, for example, can make them feel at ease, but heavy metal or rock might have the opposite effect. 5. Develop self-guided eLearning activities Mastering the art of psychological flow can be challenging, as it involves relinquishing control over the outcome while having complete control of the eLearning experience. In other words, the eLearning course must be challenging enough to test their mettle, but online learners must also feel empowered and know that they are in charge of the entire process. Create self-guided eLearning activities that allow them to explore the subject matter at their own pace, without having to keep up with their peers. Simulations, online scenarios, and serious games are all examples of self-guided eLearning activities that may give them control of the eLearning process. 6. Offer immediate, constructive feedback Online learners who are in the flow are constantly aware of how they are performing and what they must do to achieve their next goal. For this very reason, it is essential to provide them with immediate personalized eLearning feedback that centers on their abilities and skills, instead of their traits or personalities. They shouldn’t feel as though they are being attacked on a personal level or that you are criticizing something that they cannot change or improve. To the contrary, they need to receive constructive feedback that they can apply as soon as possible. For example, modifying a performance behavior or improving how they perform a specific task. Use these 6 tips to integrate a psychological flow into your eLearning course and engage every member of your audience. There are very few eLearning experiences that can achieve this feat, but just imagine the possibilities if you were able to get online learners "in the zone" and fully immersed in the subject matter. Flow is just one of the psychology principles that you can apply to your eLearning course design. Read the article 5 Psychology Principles That eLearning Professionals Should Know to discover additional ideologies that you may want to integrate into your next eLearning experience. The post 6 Tips To Add Psychological Flow In eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

During the last 10 years, improvements in mainstream eLearning offerings, widespread availability of broadband connectivity and developments in web technologies have helped make eLearning not just a useful educational tool but also an essential part of corporate training. So much, in fact, that eLearning in general and corporate online training, also known as "enterprise online training", in particular, have become a hundred billion dollar market. The phenomenon is only going to grow from here as, online learning’s proven flexibility, effectiveness and lower TCO have businesses increasingly adopting corporate eLearning solutions or expanding their already existing LMS-based corporate learning and development programs. The only problem is that not all corporate training systems are made alike — which makes choosing the right corporate training LMS a real challenge when a business attempts to make its first steps into online employee training. In this post we’re going to discuss 8 requirements that your corporate training software (LMS) should cover — and the ways in which eFrontPro supports them. Of course, as corporate environments vary, you might not need some of the items in the list, or your businesses needs might dictate that your LMS offers some additional functionality. Based on our extensive experience dealing with business customers though, we believe that this list is a great starting point for the average enterprise or organization looking into online learning solutions. 1) Single Sign On A prerequisite for any kind of enterprise software and not just eLearning, Single Sign On (or SSO for short) is the ability to re-use the same passwords and authentication mechanism for all your enterprise services. Having an additional authentication system just for your LMS is not just a hassle (employees having to remember and enter yet another password, etc) but also an administration time-sink, as your IT department now has to do double the work to secure all your online assets. It also introduces serious security issues, as things like password expiration policies won’t be in sync between your enterprise authentication system and your LMS. Thankfully, eFrontPro natively supports the two most popular enterprise Single Sign On protocols, namely LDAP, an Open Source standard that’s popular in the Linux world; and Active Directory, Microsoft’s variation on LDAP, popular with Windows-based installations. If LDAP and Active Directory are not your thing, then eFrontPro can also integrate with any identity provider that supports the industry standard SAML 2.0 authentication protocol, as well as federated authentication through its Facebook login integration, although we mostly recommend the latter for public facing eLearning portals. 2) Reporting What’s the use of having a corporate training program if you can’t evaluate its results? Waiting until employees try to put their new skills to use in their work would be too late — and it won’t give the chance to fix any issues in your training material until the next training period. That’s where an LMS’ reporting functionality comes into play. Corporate eLearning, with a capable LMS, can give you real-time, micro (focused) and macro (big picture) actionable insight into your employee’s training progress, and eFrontPro’s reporting capabilities were built for just that. In fact, unlike with some competitive products, where reporting is optional or needs convoluted configuration, eFrontPro comes with a variety of ready-made reports built-in to help you get started immediately. Not that getting deeper into eFrontPro reporting is difficult. The LMS intuitively splits reports based on the subject matter, giving you different reports for the System (an overview of events such as registrations, logins, etc. that occurred in a given time period); Users (information about your instructors and learners); Courses (information about particular courses or groups of courses) and Tests (test score, participation, etc). There’s also an additional "Timeline" view, that gives you a time-based list of any action occurring in your LMS (employees completing a course, a webinar session starting, etc). All report types have filtering options so you can narrow down the results by date, user type, job, skills, groups, categories and many other dimensions, and only see the items that you are interested in. This allows you yo create your own reports by filtering eFrontPro’s database for the information you need, going from a general overview to information about a single specific user, course or test with ease. 3) Import and Export Interoperability with different data formats and good importing and exporting capabilities are essential features of any kind of enterprise software, as half (or more) of the job of an IT worker is to get data out of one program and into another. Obviously, you’ll want your corporate eLearning software to be able to participate in that chain. eFrontPro, for one, does. First, there are the extensive content import options. eFrontPro allows you to import and integrate into your courses all kinds of content files, from the industry standard MS Office formats (Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, Excel files) and PDF documents, to numerous image, audio and video formats — and even Flash files if you got them. And the best thing is that importing just works — you don’t need to convert or "massage" the documents to fit into eFrontPro, the system does that automatically thanks to our proprietary EncodeMagic data conversion engine. This allows you to easily incorporate all of your existing enterprise files and training material into your new eLearning based courses, saving you tons of time in the process. But that’s just part of the story. eFrontPro also support the (de-facto) industry standard SCORM/TinCan protocols, allowing you to import eLearning content created in any compatible system and have it converted into eFrontPro’s native lesson units. In fact, it’s by leveraging this capability that eFrontPro was able to provide native integration with OpenSesame, the leading SCORM compatible eLearning content marketplace, giving you access to thousands of professionally-built high quality courses in all kinds of business related subjects. Of course data exchange is not just for eLearning content — it can also be used for administration purposes. eFrontPro, for example, allows you to export your LMS configuration (including all of your users, courses, branches etc.) as Excel or CSV files, which you can then use to setup another identical installation, or to feed into another program altogether. This can even be automated, as eFrontPro has the option (called an "import task") to periodically check for CSV files in specific folders, and import any data (user account info, etc.) contained in them, for easy making integration and syncing with external sources (such as your ERP platform). Last but not least, eFrontPro can also export reporting results in Excel format, and even produce richly formatted Excel files for test and survey results and other statistics, with nice headings and appropriately styled cells. 4) Integration APIs Sometimes importing and exporting data manually just won’t do. For those times, you want the ability to directly integrate a piece of enterprise software with another. And while some of these integrations can be standard and provided natively, like our support for different Single Sign On protocols or payment processors, other times you really need the flexibility to built a custom integration with a non-standard piece of software or some legacy platform that your business relies upon. For this, you need integration APIs and extensibility that your IT department or a contract programmer can leverage to build you the custom integration solution that your business needs dictate. eFrontPro, once again, has you covered, offering not just a powerful, PHP based plugin API, but also a full blown REST API that makes connecting it to any application server and exchanging data with external services a breeze. REST, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is an increasingly popular way to "talk" to a service using simple URL-like queries. Having got its start in the web development area, it’s now a staple in all kinds of enterprise software services too. As for eFrontPro’s "plugin API", that’s tech-speak for the ability to add your own custom code into eFrontPro to extend its functionality. Both are very powerful ways to connect, script and make eFrontPro interoperate with any platform and service, and both are well documented and explained in depth. 5) Branding Corporate identity matters — and branding is a big part of that. Especially for larger businesses, enterprise software should be able to adapt to their corporate-wide look and feel guidelines. This starts from the prominent display of company logos, and goes all the way through custom themes, colors and fonts, including the ability to add standard legal and confidentiality disclaimers on any intranet page. eFrontPro handles all that with aplomb, allowing you to easily add logos, and change colors, fonts, and other design options through its web management interface. If you want to take it up a notch, eFrontPro even lets you to build your own themes from scratch, allowing you to bundle your own HTML, CSS, images and Javascript files. You can also include custom scripts to an eFrontPro web page to affect its behavior, with full access to the page’s DOM and events. And if you rather just use some ready-made theme, either as is, or to add your own customizations, eFrontPro comes with several beautiful themes to chose from, covering all the range from casual business, to minimal and fancy. 6) Feedback We talked about the need to have "actionable insight" when we discussed reporting, but there’s another indispensable method of getting that for your training program: asking for it. User feedback is one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve your courses, or any other employee-related business process for that matter, and it’s even more powerful when it’s integrated into your eLearning management platform instead of being an afterthought. eFrontPro allows you to conduct surveys and collect their results automatically through the web interface. Leveraging this to get feedback from your learners is the best way to understand their use and identify problematic spots in your training program (which courses offer the most value, lessons that they find particularly difficult or not comprehensive enough, etc.). Having the feature built in allows you to handle it as an essential part of your training workflow, as opposed to having to resort to ad-hoc mail-based surveys (which you’d then have to sit through and aggregate their results) or third-party poll services. 7) Hosting flexibility Corporate data centers have changed a lot with the rise of the Cloud. Some companies use third party Cloud offerings like Google Apps openly, others host their own services in Cloud IaaS platforms like AWS, where others still prefer to keep everything in their own, tightly controlled, datacenter. Even more common is a mix and match of all three approaches, depending on the service. Your corporate LMS platform should offer you the same deployment flexibility, and eFrontPro, once again, delivers. If you prefer total control, you can run eFrontPro as a self-hosted application in one server in your datacenter. Or you can install it on some IaaS platform, like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace or any other you prefer, and access it from there, taking full advantage of everything the infrastructure provider offers and having it close to your other IaaS-hosted services. There’s even another option, our "Managed Cloud" plan, that gives you the best of both worlds, being halfway between a locally deployed server and a public cloud option. With it you get a secure and private LMS environment that doesn’t share resources or code with other businesses, thus giving you both the ease of mind of a managed service (as we take care of installation, monitoring, backup and updates) and the best possible performance and security. 8) ILT support Online based learning is of course, a great and proven training option, but it’s not always the best approach. Sometimes, and for some learning subjects, you need to be able to have a real-time eye-to-eye training session, either in the physical world or online. That’s why your LMS software should provide support for instructor-led training (ILT for short), which is the industry name for real time training sessions that are managed through an eLearning platform. Instructor-led training can take place in the physical world (e.g. in a classroom or conference room) or be held via video conference and similar interactive real-time means (in which case it’s known as a "webinar"). With eFrontPro you can handle ILT with the same ease and leverage all the same features, with which you handle your online courses. eFrontPro allows instructors to add ILT-based "training events", which can in turn have one or more "training sessions" (e.g. different classrooms being taught the same lesson), each taking place in its own location and/or time. It will even handle enrolling and capacity issues for you, with automatic wait list management and automated invitations (compatible with MS Outlook, Apple Calendar and most popular calendar applications), while it also offers native support for BBB and Webex-enabled webinars. Conclusion Choosing the right corporate training system is not an easy task, as you need to ensure that it covers all kinds of disparate business needs while at the same time playing well in your datacenter. In this post, we’ve examined 8 basic requirements that an LMS platform should cover to be fit for corporate training use, and gave some concrete examples of the ways that eFrontPro covers them. The post 8 LMS Requirements For Corporate Training appeared first on eFront Blog.

Who doesn’t like things? I know I do. And most of the things I like, from laptops and smartphones to cars and hi-fi speakers are created by the aptly named manufacturing industry. It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of the manufacturing sector for the economy. It creates jobs, attracts investments and feeds exports. It’s also highly competitive and, contrary to the stereotype of the unskilled "factory worker", it’s increasingly knowledge driven. For a company to be productive, competitive and profitable in the global manufacturing arena, a skilled workforce is not just a nice-to-have asset, but an essential part of the success recipe. Are your employees able to respond and adapt to the introduction of new manufacturing infrastructure and technologies? Are you prepared for the inevitable retirement of your older and more skilled personnel? How fast and smooth is the transition of new employees? Can you handle increased seasonal demand? eLearning can help you address these challenges in a reliable, scalable and cost-effective way — and a learning management system (LMS) like eFrontPro is the right tool to get the job done. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing new employees to their working environment and giving them the basic information that they require to be productive pronto — including your company’s operating procedures, policies, restrictions and guidelines. Being in the manufacturing industry, you obviously understand the great benefits and importance of automation. eFrontPro lets you automate employee orientation and training — so that you can concern yourself with meeting your production and shipping deadlines, as opposed to searching for classroom space and scheduling training classes. With eFrontPro, instructors can organize orientation material in accessible units, and include text, video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and even online content. They can also create tests and quizzes to help access their students’ training progress — complete with automated grading and detailed statistics. What’s more, in an industry such as manufacturing, riddled with regulations and bureaucratic ordinances, eFrontPro’s tracking of training attendance can, in case of legal dispute, serve as proof that your business has informed its employees about environmental protection laws, safety procedures etc. Of course consult with your legal team first, as this might not be the case in your jurisdiction. Training If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it is important to be able to adapt quickly as opportunities present themselves. A new niche market or a sudden surge in demand can require reassignments across the production process, the assembly line or the plant. Plus, there are always new hires, including temps hired to cover seasonal demand or some sudden big manufacturing contract. eLearning makes adapting to increased training needs easy and, something that’s especially important when tight margins are involved, cost effective. It also enables your employees to follow their training at their own pace, minimizing business disruptions that can be costly when you have tight production deadlines to meet. An eLearning based solution will also help if your training material has to change frequently (new assembly lines, the latest green energy rules, new safety procedures, new infrastructure, etc.), since it allows you to update all your courses, re-use and expand content, and share courses instantly between different departments, facilities and plants, anywhere in the world. You also get the flexibility to choose whether to run all of your training from a central location for complete control, or install dedicated LMS servers in each branch or facility. Plus, with eFrontPro’s integration with course marketplaces, such as OpenSesame, you can even buy ready-made, professional grade courses in thousands of topics — allowing your instructors to focus on covering your organization’s custom training needs instead of re-creating material that’s common across your whole industry. Last, but not least, eFrontPro’s comprehensive reporting system will give you detailed statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of your training material. Knowledge retention All organizations have a few employees whose experience is crucial for their day to day operation, or for handling some special crisis scenarios that occur once in a while. This can be especially true in the manufacturing industry, where even the smallest plant often has a multitude of roles, responsibilities and procedures. Ideally, of course, this shouldn’t be the case — and with eFrontPro it doesn’t have to be. eFrontPro will help you store this valuable information in a formalized and easily accessible way that can be consulted by existing employees and taught to new hires. Storing that knowledge in an eLearning platform, as opposed to some document management system, or worse, a few word files nobody would bother to read, makes it instantly usable for training employees and new hires, allowing you to leverage all of your LMS’ eLearning features. An industrial revolution in training If you’re looking for a modern, capable LMS platform for your manufacturing industry training needs, take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and join thousands of satisfied customers, including several multinational companies and organizations in both the private and public sectors. The post eLearning for the Manufacturing Industry with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

We have experienced the wonders and convenience of Skype video conferences. Notice how inexpensive and effective such online meetings are. The emotion, the human face and the human voice help fill for the missing warmth in an eLearning setting. And yes, there are indeed many learning situations that call for a video-conferencing session. Find out the four ways to improve your next video conferencing session. Video conferences are one of the leading strategies to implement telecommuting or distance education. With greater broadband connectivity, users increasingly prefer to communicate using videos conferences. Meetings occur over miles at the same time. Productivity and performance are boosted and so is user satisfaction. The human face, voice, expression and body language orchestrate together to produce satisfying communication experiences. Many misunderstandings created during a voice or text chat are eliminated automatically. Demonstrations of critical procedures or steps are easily carried out on video and easier to replicate than if the instructions were text-based only. This ensures a complete learning achievement. Video conferences are also advantageous in inclement weather. Despite such uncontrollable barriers, users can still interact meaningfully and continue business as usual. The total effect has lead to serious financial gains. Think about the money and efforts saved when interviewing an instructor based in India to invite them to work in New Zealand. Depending on the quality of the Internet connection, both the interviewer and the interviewee can communicate and get their message across with little ambiguity. If things work out, the interviewer can be invited to attend the second interview. The first video communication helps both parties decide if the in-person interview is feasible and useful or not. One drawback of videos is that people tend to think that videos are easy to create. Most use their smartphones to shoot amateur videos and upload for the world to see. We have experienced many distasteful videos that had too many technical errors. Avoid these pitfalls and create professional looking videos ready for live transmission easily. When your learners are ready to connect with you and expect to learn from your actions through the video conference, you do not have a lot of time or space to make mistakes. Live videos cannot be edited! You need to plan out well before the session begins. Rehearse and watch yourself before you are ready to go live. In an eLearning environment, video conferences can help establish stronger rapport and bond between the cohorts. Logging in and communicating for project-based meetings is also more enjoyable than simple chat. Video conferencing software options are plentiful. The simplest ones allow quality live videos to be exchanged easily. They also provide the option of cancelling the videos and using still images of participants if they are not comfortable. There are plenty of video conferencing tools available, all rich in functionality and excellent in what they do. What they lack however, is the ability to connect a live training session with other aspects of elearning. Here’s where an LMS comes into play: It allows for seamless integration of one or more video conferencing sessions with the overall training plan. eFrontPro can work out of the box with two popular video conferencing tools, Webex and BigBlueButton (BBB). Cisco’s Webex is a well-established, feature rich conferencing tool suitable for small to very large enterprises. BigBlueButton (BBB) is a free and open source video conferencing platform that offers all tools required for effective real-time training. eFrontPro allows for single-click setup of conferences, mixed-and-matched with traditional elearning content, storing and delivering recordings of past sessions and more, while at the same time takes care of the conferencing tool’s own configuration complexities and requirements. Your next Instructor-Led Training will be smoother and more enjoyable with eFront learning management tools. In an eLearning video conference, the geographically dispersed participants can see and hear each other. Video conferencing enables learners to see a small video image of the learner or a still-image. Video conferences are utilized for online demonstrations, role-playing activities and for presenting feedback on physical actions. Follow these four best practices when conducting an Instruction-Led Training (ILT): Prepare a video-conferencing studio: No matter where you hold your video-conference from, make sure you have a good camera and the presenter is well-lit, by natural light or even an artificially designed solution. Minimize the background distractions. Tidy up the place. Make sure everything is stationary in the background. Frame the background and make sure the camera is steady at all times. ILT sessions need to give off professional vibes to the learner. So make sure the background is work context related as opposed to a casual setting. Prepare your presenter or yourself if you are presenting: Make sure the dress of the presenter is simple and preferably in lighter or solid colors. Rehearse and watch a sample video before presenting. Dark colors against a light background are great for ILT’s as they allow integration of additional onscreen messages for the learner. Prepare the learners for the session: When the session is open, instruct your learners to keep their cameras off until they are given a chance to speak. Discipline in using the camera can prevent clogging of the network connection. Provide instructions similar to the first and second points above to your learners before the session. A notable tip to add here is to inform the learner of the nature of the session. Provide a short tutorial on ILT’s and their expectations from such a video session. Conduct a smooth session: Make all movements and transitions predictable so that the entire presentation seems to follow a uniform theme. Keep any demonstration-props ready for use. Use close-ups to show details. Vary the camera angle to keep things interesting. Keep sessions prepared for live questions and answers with peers, experts and with instructors. A good idea would be to hire a transcriptor who would record all conversations in text format for all to see and respond appropriately. Great applications of video-conferencing involve showing moving objects. This occurs when your course content requires you to show how a piece of machinery works. In a live video conference or an instructor-led training session, your learners can watch and imitate; and also interrupt you to ask questions. Video conferences also make people seem real in an otherwise remote learning environment. Lastly, deliver powerful emotional messages through video sessions to convince and change the attitude of your learners towards a concept. If used properly, video sessions and conferences between instructors and learners can prove to be motivating and engaging. They also lead to pleasurable learning experiences. Avoid showing long video sessions or a talking head! Do tell us about your own video-conferencing or ILT sessions. The post 4 Ways to improve Video Conferences in Instructor-Led Training (ILT) appeared first on eFront Blog.

Assessment, design, and implementation are the cornerstones of the Hannafin-Peck Μodel. It is the ideal approach for a subject matter that is more complicated, thanks to the fact that it tackles each stage of the eLearning development process separately. In this article, I’ll delve into the basics of the Hannafin-Peck Model, so that you can decide if it’s the ideal strategy for your next eLearning course. A Guide For Applying Τhe Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning The Hannafin-Peck Model involves three essential stages that are each followed by a thorough evaluation and revision process. It was first introduced back in 1987, but still remains an effective approach for designing comprehensive eLearning experiences to this day. In this article, I’ll highlight the 3 stages of the Hannafin-Peck Model, how to apply them in your eLearning course design, and 3 advantages this approach can offer. The 3 Phases Of The Hannafin-Peck Model 1. Assessment The first stage in the process involves a thorough needs analysis. This includes the needs of your online learners, such as their goals and performance gaps, as well as the needs of the organization. You should also develop objectives and start thinking about which eLearning activities and resources will help you achieve them most effectively. Use eLearning assessments, surveys, and other feedback tools to identify the needs of your learners. In a corporate environment, on-the-job observations are also a valuable assessment method, as they can give a complete picture of the tasks, job duties, and skills that your employees utilize on a daily basis. If task mastering is a main concern, then conduct tasks analysis to break each process or procedure into its most basic components, then determine the best way to convey the information to your employees. Is an interactive scenario the ideal choice, or would the task be better suited for an online tutorial? 2. Design The second stage of the Hannafin-Peck Model is actually designing the eLearning experience. This is the time to map out every aspect of your eLearning program and create a storyboard or outline that highlights the online exercises, multimedia components, and eLearning assessments you are going to use. Essentially, the design stage is when you begin to put all of the pieces together so that you can determine how to fill the performance gaps and fulfill the needs and wants of your learners. For the design phase of the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, gather all of your resources and online materials so that you can create a plan of action. Meet with Subject Matter Experts to develop a list of key takeaways and start crafting the eLearning content. The design process can often be time-consuming, as you will need to develop a clear and cohesive strategy to use as a foundation moving forward. This phase relies on organization and planning, so get your eLearning team together and create all of the puzzle pieces for your eLearning course. 3. Development & Implementation The third and final phase involves developing your eLearning program and actually implementing it. After you upload it to the LMS you’ve chosen and ensure that all of the elements are in place, it’s ready to launch. This also typically includes maintaining the program and updating it on a regular basis to meet the ever-changing needs of your learners. In terms of application of the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, now it’s time to put the puzzle together. Proofread and edit your eLearning content to make sure everything is in order, conduct testing, and prepare your learners by giving them detailed instructions on how to access the eLearning course. Once you’ve launched your online training program, be certain that you have IT staff and facilitators on hand to offer assistance. 3 Advantages Of Using The Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning 1. Ideal for all experience levels One of the most significant advantages of using the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning is that virtually anyone can use it to create effective eLearning experiences. This is due to the fact that you are able to break each stage of the eLearning course development process into manageable steps. You have the opportunity to focus on one phase and fine tune every aspect before you move onto the next. Therefore, even Instructional Designers who may be new to the field or those who don’t have much experience with a structured eLearning course design process can benefit from the Hannafin-Peck Instructional Model. Likewise, more experienced eLearning professionals can also take advantage of this strategy, as it can be custom tailored to fit the talents, skills, and expertise of your audience. 2. Improves the quality and consistency of eLearning experiences This Instructional Design model includes a revision round that follows each phase. Thus, you are able to provide high quality eLearning experiences that are cohesive and well organized. Instead of waiting until the end to make the necessary changes, you have the opportunity to improve upon your eLearning course and remedy issues as soon as possible. 3. Allows you to evaluate your eLearning course as you go along There are some issues that are only noticeable after you’ve actually built your eLearning course from the ground up. For example, you may not detect certain coding or formatting problems until you’ve created a rough draft. At that point, it may take extensive modifications to fix the issue, which requires even more money and time. By applying the Hannafin-Peck Model in eLearning, evaluation is part of the revision process that takes place after each phase. Thus, you can carefully analyze and assess every element of your eLearning program in order to catch common errors. The Hannafin-Peck Model is particularly useful when you are dealing with subject matter that is more in depth or complex, as you have the ability to make the necessary revisions as you go along. However, you can apply it in virtually any eLearning project in order to stay on track and achieve your performance goals. Identifying your corporate learners’ needs and goals is a key component of the Hannafin-Peck Model. Read the article Online Training Needs Analysis For Each Of The 5 Stages Of Employment to discover the different online training needs for each of the 5 stages of employment, as this has a significant impact on your corporate eLearning design. The post Applying The Hannafin-Peck Model In eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

There sure is a lot of chemistry between us. And I mean it not in the "we are attracted to each other" sense, but in a much more literal sense: we live in a world that is densely populated with the products of the chemical industry. From consumer goods ranging to personal care products, soaps, cosmetics, and food supplements, to raw manufacturing materials such as plastics and paints. Even the laptop that you’re using to read this post is 50% physics and 80% chemistry. And yet, despite all the huge demand and all the scientific breakthroughs related to chemistry, there is a substantial lack of skilled chemists and technicians in the industry. In fact the problem is so big, that a recent study on the UK chemicals sector [1] shows evidence that apprentice training is gaining ground, due to the inability of the labor market to supply a sufficient number of experienced chemical technicians. eLearning can be the catalyst (pun intended) that will enable the mass scale, cost effective, and flexible solution to this training demand. Employee orientation Employee orientation is the task of introducing your hires to their new working environment and giving them the information they need to start being productive, including your company’s operating procedures, policies and guidelines. If your business frequently hires new people e.g. to cover increased seasonal demands or to ramp-up production to handle a big customer contract, then automating employee orientation is one of the best investments you can make, and eLearning management software like eFrontPro is your best option for achieving this. With eFrontPro your orientation material can be organized in accessible units (courses and lessons) that can include video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations etc., and even integrate material from third parties (YouTube, Wikipedia, RSS, etc). And because eFrontPro is a full blown LMS as opposed to a static content management system, you can also include tests and quizzes to help you access your hires’ progress and understanding of your on-boarding material. eFrontPro’s attendance and progress logs can even be used as proof that you have informed your employees about labor safety, environmental protection laws, sexual harassment issues, etc. in case of legal dispute (consult with your legal team before relying on this, though, as it might not apply to your jurisdiction). Training Chemical industry technicians can be assigned a variety of tasks, ranging from process operation, mechanical testing and maintenance, electrical maintenance, control and instrumentation. That, combined with the pace of technological progress, where manufacturing infrastructure and materials can change every few years, means that you will frequently need to retrain your employees in order to keep their skills up to date. eLearning makes this training and retraining easy and cost effective, while enabling your employees to complete their training at their own pace — something which minimizes operation disruptions and reduces employee overtime. And unlike traditional classroom-based learning, where you only have some periodic tests and final exam results to go by, eFrontPro’s comprehensive reporting system gives you quantifiable information and statistics on your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of the training material in real time. An eLearning-based solution also gives you additional flexibility in updating and expanding your training material, e.g. to introduce new chemical processing machinery or new raw materials, to teach your employees the production process for a new product and inform them of the associated safety guidelines. eFrontPro, for example, allows you to update all your courses without costly printouts (and dead trees), re-use and expand content as you see fit, and share courses between different departments and branches. And with eFrontPro’s integration to the OpenSesame eLearning content marketplace, you can buy ready-made professional courses in thousands of topics, including environmental and green energy issues. Knowledge retention Alchemy, the middle-ages predecessor to modern chemistry, had tried (and failed) to create the so-called "philosopher’s stone" — a mythical substance capable of turning base metals to gold. eFrontPro won’t do that yet, but it is capable of turning operational intelligence into long-term informational gold. In all businesses there are a few employees whose experience is crucial for the company’s day to day operation, or who are the only ones that know how to handle some rare emergency situation. If your supervising technician takes the day off or quits to start an organic farm, can the rest of your employees manage the plant by themselves? Can they handle any sudden disruption or malfunction that might occur during the manufacturing process? eFrontPro can help you store all of your organization’s valuable operational knowledge in a formalized and easily accessible way, and help you keep it safe from changes in your personnel and ready to be accessed and consulted at any time. By putting this information in an LMS, as opposed to some content management system, you ensure that it’s not just a set of static documents sitting on your intranet servers, but rather live content that you can use to educate the rest of your staff and train new hires with, leveraging all of your LMS’ learning related functionality, from tests and quizzes to gamification and certification features, and everything in between. Take eFrontPro for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can be the catalyst that helps you boost your employees’ skills and increase the output of your business. [1] http://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/reports/pdf/chemical-industry-technicians-report.pdf The post eLearning for the Chemical industry‎ with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

There’s a well known saying that "No man (or woman for that matter) is an island". Well, your eLearning management system should not be an island either. When it’s used in the enterprise space, a modern LMS should be able to connect to all kinds of internal (intranet) and third party (Cloud) services, programs and tools. eFrontPro, for one, comes with quite a few built-in integrations, including with third party authentication providers (LDAP, Active Directory, SAML 2.0), payment processors (PayPal, Stripe), eLearning content marketplaces (OpenSesame), tele-conference tools (Webex, BigBlueButton), and many more, including several under-the-hood integrations, like with our proprietary Encode Magic solution that makes sure your uploaded content is appropriately formatted for online use. Beyond that, there’s our REST API, that allows your IT team to create its own custom integration with every external platform that’s capable of speaking HTTP (that’s nearly all of them), and our PHP plugin API which lets you expand eFrontPro’s code with your own plugins to make it talk to any system that PHP has some way of talking to (that’s absolutely all of them). Between these two cases (native integrations AND APIs for creating your own integration) there’s also a third option: Zapier. Enter Zapier Zapier is a third party app (a Cloud-based service, to be exact) that makes it easy to connect different platforms and have them work together. Zapier integrations are based on the notion of triggers ("when this happens") and actions ("do that"). Using this scheme, eFrontPro (or any other application) can invoke certain triggers and have another application respond to them by performing an action (or vice versa). And all that without having to write even a single line of code. eFrontPro, for example, could invoke a "New User Registered" trigger when someone opens a new account, which would in turn have your CRM copy the new account details. In this sense, configuring a Zapier integration is all about connecting the appropriate triggers to the desired actions. The beauty of this scheme is that triggers and actions can be independent, so multiple target applications could be made to respond to the same trigger (that you only have to build once). Thanks to this fact, Zapier offers over 300 integration options, including all major Cloud platforms such as Gmail, MailChimp, Trello, Evernote, DropBox, Slack, Magento, Amazon AWS, ZenDesk, JIRA and many, many more. Connecting eFrontPro to Zapier First you’ll need both an eFrontPro and a Zapier account. Since you’re reading this, I’ll assume that you already have the former, so go on and create a Zapier one too. I’ll wait here. Done? Let’s move on. To allow Zapier to connect to eFrontPro you’ll need to tell it your eFrontPro domain (the URL part of your eFrontPro installation after http:// and before "?") and API key (a alphanumeric key that authenticates remote services attempting to connect to your eLearning portal). You can find your API key in the System Settings > Integrations > APΙ page. Enable it first, by clicking on the checkbox, and then copy the API text, because you’re gonna need to paste it into Zapier. Now you need to login to your Zapier account, and visit the "Zapier Connected Accounts page" (you can access it from the menu at the top). Now click on the "Connect a new account" drop-down, select eFrontPro, and follow the on-screen instructions. Basically you just need to enter your eFrontPro URL and API key in the popup window that appears. Click "Continue" and you’re ready to roll. Integrating eFrontPro with an external service using Zapier Now that you introduced eFrontPro and Zapier to each other, so to speak, you can start using Zapier to integrate third party services with eFrontPro. As a first taste, we’ll show you how you can connect eFrontPro with (popular email marketing service) MailChimp, so that new subscribers from MailChimp lists are automatically added in eFrontPro as new users. As we said before, using Zapier is all about connecting triggers to actions — in this case letting the "user subscribed to MailChimp list" trigger to invoke the "create eFrontPro user" action. Such a pre-programmed integration in Zapier is called a "Zap". First, go to your Zapier dashboard and click to create a new Zap. You’ll need to define the application doing the triggering. In our case, it’s MailChimp, so select that as the "Trigger App". Zapier will show you all the triggers that MailChimp supports. For our example, select the "New Subscriber" trigger. Now you’ll need to connect your MailChimp account, as both ends of an integration must be registered with Zapier. You can either do that while creating a MailChimp related Zap for the first time, or earlier from the "Connected Accounts" page (like we did with eFrontPro, adding its API key to Zapier). Zapier will then show you all your MailChimp lists, so you can select which one your Zap is going to pull new subscribers into eFrontPro from. Once you’ve selected a MailChimp list, click to test that data come along successfully. This concludes the trigger setup. Now you should configure your action — i.e. what happens when some new subscriber’s information comes into Zapier from MailChimp. Your Action App is of course eFrontPro, and the action is "Create User". Next, select your previously connected eFrontPro installation from the list. We’re almost set. New MailChimp mailing-list subscribers will be created as eFrontPro users to the specified eFrontPro installation. But first you need to create a "Template", that is, determine how MailChimp subscription data should be converted into eFrontPro user registration data. E.g. the email of the MailChimp subscriber should be used as the "login" in eFrontPro, etc. Zapier helps you by showing you all the data that flow from the first (trigger) system into the second (action) system. Click to test your Zap. You’re now ready to save it. Alternatively, you could add another step, to create a more complex multi-step Zap (which we will not cover here — the basic steps will be the same anyway). When this Zap is live, every time a new subscriber is registered in the MailChimp list that’ve you selected in the beginning is going to be also added as a new user in your eFrontPro system. More integration The MailChimp-eFrontPro integration was just an example to whet your appetite. You can create your own, custom, Zaps, including multi-step ones, leveraging all of the hundreds of Zapier compatible services. Currently TalentLMS-Zapier service offers several triggers and actions for your integration needs, and eFrontPro can be used as both a trigger or an action in your Zaps. Triggers include: New User, New Course, New Category, New Branch, and New Group, triggered each time a new corresponding entity is created in your eFrontPro system. Actions include: Create User, Create Branch, Add User to Course, Add User to Group, Add User to Branch, and Update User’s Status in a Course. For more details on the data that eFrontPro triggers generate and the required/optional fields for each particular action visit: http://docs.efrontlearning.com/how_to_integrate_efrontpro_and_zapier Conclusion In this post we talked about the powerful Zapier meta-integration service, and how eFrontPro users can leverage it to make their favorite LMS integrate with thousands of different Cloud apps. Zapier offers integration with over 3000 third party apps and services, from Gmail and MailChimp to SalesForce and Dropbox. Integrate eFrontPro in your enterprise or organization today, and see for yourself why it’s the leading learning management platform for employee training and educational uses. The post Custom eFrontPro Integrations Made Easy With Zapier appeared first on eFront Blog.

With an increasing number of enterprises and organizations adopting eLearning, or extending their existing online training programs, eLearning has now become an essential tool for business development. Merely deploying an eLearning solution and hoping for the best, however, will just not do. To really leverage the benefits of online training, businesses need to identify their corporate training & development needs, develop a corporate training plan, and (more or less) stick to it. In this post we’ll examine the six most important things to consider while building your corporate training strategy. Know thyself And by yourself, we mean your company. Sure, you need to have an employee training program; every enterprise does. But do you know in advance what it should cover, how long it should be, what it would cost, and even what technologies to use to implement it? Similarly, you may have some specific department’s training needs in mind, but could there be other departments in that vast enterprise of yours that might also benefit from an online training program? Brainstorming it out yourself is not enough. It’s time to assemble the Avengers. And by Avengers we mean your company leaders, department heads, human resource leaders, employee representatives and other stakeholders. Arrange a few meetings to discuss (and determine) the scope, goals and objectives of your employee training program. Keep detailed notes and try to get a clear view of each department’s employee development needs. Know thy old training If you already had an existing corporate online training program, whether it’s merely a pilot of smaller scope or has even failed, now it’s time to do a postmortem. See how it was designed, implemented and run, and whether its goals were met. Ask your instructors and your learners to evaluate its success (or lack thereof) from any aspect that can help you improve upon it for your new online training strategy (e.g. course quality, user engagement, instructor performance, LMS suitability, skills enhancement, etc.). You should, of course, do the same with any traditional employee training regime that you might have had — e.g. classroom-based seminars. Just because your old training was done offline doesn’t mean it is obsolete. Some parts of employee training, especially those that concern physical skills (like operating some complex machinery), are better done as real-time, hands-on courses, and modern LMS systems offer support for this with "blended learning" or "instructor-led training" courses and webinars. Questions you should be asking: Were they effective? Should you maintain some elements of them in your new online training program (e.g. in the form of instructor-led training)? Does it make sense to re-use existing content (PowerPoint presentations, printed handouts, etc.) from them? Long vs Short-term needs After you’ve gathered your company’s training requirements, evaluated earlier training programs, and solicited feedback from all the relevant stakeholders, it’s time to put all these together and formally develop your corporate training strategy. A lot of the information and feedback you will have gathered (especially from "brainstorming" style meetings where everybody goes off on tangent), will be incomplete, conflicting, or even completely out of scope. Do a first pass and remove anything that doesn’t seem helpful for developing your online training strategy, then use the remaining material to identify your company’s real training needs — which will be of course based on its business and development goals. Some training needs, especially those that are associated with explicit or short-term needs, will be easy to identify. If for example you run a factory and are introducing some new assembly line machinery, you’ll obviously need to train your employees into using it. Or, if your employees are having trouble with some particular skill, that will be another example of an evident training need. Other training needs, especially those that depend on long-term business development goals, might not be so easy to determine — though they might prove the most crucial ones for the company’s feature. If you worked on intranet-focused IT services in the early 2010’s for example, it would make quite a lot of sense to start schooling your employees in Cloud-based technologies and support, because that’s where the market was heading. Separate those two cases (concrete and short-term training needs vs long-term business development training needs), and try to come up with a mix of them that works. Don’t try to fit everything in your corporate training strategy from day one — it will probably turn out very hard to develop, costly, and overwhelming for your employees. After all, the beauty of eLearning management systems and online training is that you can introduce new training courses piecemeal. Balance it all In general, your role as the corporate training strategist will be to balance a number of variables, including breadth (scope), cost, employee availability, etc. Of course if you work in a Fortune 100 company and have been given an unlimited training budget, by all means, go wild. But most corporate training strategies are better off with a balanced approach — and some resources, like your employees’ availability and learning capacity, cannot usually be improved by throwing money at the problem. In the end, it all comes down to taking into account all your pressing needs and constraints while still keeping an eye on the big picture (long term corporate development). The end result of the design stage should be a, still abstract, corporate learning and development strategy that defines a number of training courses, each with a clear scope and specific learning objectives. Make it concrete Now it’s time to make your corporate training strategy concrete. This means filling in all those tricky to calculate numbers and figures, and delivering a final plan, with specific timelines and associated costs, to the big bosses that will sign off on your training program. With your finalized training courses listing, you should meet with department heads and company leaders again, and discuss employee availability to come up with a viable training schedule. Key word here is viable. While understandingly training will be your number on priority, this won’t, also understandingly, be the case for department heads, who will be more concerned with meeting their deadlines and deliverables. This is where, for example, you’ll find out that your suggested 4-hours per week/one month training regime is just not possible under your current workload, and you need to make it into a 2-hours per week/2 months one. It’s also a good time to talk to your IT department and a couple of eLearning solutions providers (such as, *ahem*, Epignosis), discuss with them the desired specifications for your eLearning management system, and decide upon a specific LMS platform, deployment strategy (e.g. self-hosted, private Cloud, public Cloud, etc), and pricing plan. Your goal at this stage is to minimize business disruption, and ensure that all corporate stakeholders are OK with your corporate training schedules. This is crucial, because not only you don’t want them to sabotage or downplay your training program’s importance, but you also need their full support in getting the employees they manage engaged and fully cooperative with their training. Make sure you have the departments’ leaders support and agreement even before you start deploying your eLearning program, by filling them in with all the details, answering their questions and concerns, and making any adjustments necessary to get their approval — before you finalize your plan and start deploying. Rinse and repeat Just because you’ve deployed your online training program doesn’t mean you’re done developing your corporate learning strategy. A corporate learning strategy is not meant to be static — after all, neither the markets nor your business needs are. What worked for 2013 might be old news by 2016 — or even faster if you work in a high velocity industry, such as fashion or IT. While your overall corporate training strategy and eLearning program structure might be good for a while, you’ll need to re-examine employee training needs, course and timelines often. This is for things like adding a new course, updating your training materials, adjusting training schedules, etc. Depending on the rate of change in your particular industry you might also want to re-evaluate your overall strategy once a year or so, too. In general, your goal should be to incorporate all the wisdom and feedback you’ve got from running your eLearning training program to make it better in its next iteration. Reporting tools let you have an overview of the progress your employee are making in their training over time — and make it easy to notice any problematic spots, e.g. lots of employees faring badly at some particular course or lesson. Talking to your employees and conducting online surveys is another great way to solicit feedback from them — provided that you ask concrete questions that can lead to actionable changes to your training program. If you’re just starting out, and are worried about the completeness and effectiveness of your proposed corporate training program, you might want to consider launching it in pilot mode (e.g. for only a few specific departments), watching how it goes, gathering feedback, and then finalizing your overall corporate training strategy. Conclusion A successful corporate training and development program requires a well thought-out training strategy. Such a strategy must reflect and address the company’s training needs and development goals, both in the short and long-term, and much be created with the involvement and support of all relevant stakeholders. Finally, your training strategy, just like every other business strategy in a changing market, must be iterated upon and re-evaluated constantly. The post 6 Important Considerations When Building Your Corporate Training Strategy appeared first on eFront Blog.