Some might associate “automation” with a lack of human involvement and computers invading their lives. And they’re right. Automating corporate training will result in less human interaction.
You will no longer have bored coaches repeating the same onboarding course a thousand times, and the L&D team spending half their day emailing trainees about new training courses and the results of the previous ones (checked manually).
You see, “automation” in corporate training helps you spend less time and effort on repetitive tasks that exhaust and demotivate people and pay more attention to things that truly matter, such as the quality of content and development of individual learners’ paths.
Here’s a quick guide on how you can automate corporate training with online training software.
Step 1: Create eLearning courses
You probably already have lots of educational materials. They might be procedures and standards that you provide employees when they come to your company, a culture deck of your company, in-person training programs, etc.
The first thing you need to do to automate training is turn all existing materials into an online format. The next step will be to develop online training programs with courses for different job positions. For the latter, you’ll need course development software.
If you’re new to eLearning, iSpring Suite might be an excellent option for you. It works as a PowerPoint add-in, so you can start creating content in a familiar interface right away, instead of taking months to become familiarized with all the features. With iSpring Suite, you’ll be able to convert existing PPT slides into an online format, record professional training videos, and enhance slide-based courses with media, innovative interactions, quizzes, role-plays, and more.
Step 2: Choose online training software
Once you’ve developed training courses, you’ll need online training software to deliver them to your learners and automate the online learning processes. This is where a learning management system (LMS) comes into play.
An LMS is like an online university for your company. It enables you to store online courses and other eLearning content, provide learners with 24/7 access to them, and automate the most boring and exhausting work, such as grading, preparing reports, and processing statistics and analytics.
LMSs may be suited for large enterprises or small businesses, or designed to be implemented in the academic field. Their functionality and cost vary greatly, so you need to find the one that meets your organization’s objectives best.
If you’re looking for a simple yet effective solution, check out iSpring Learn LMS, one of the top online training software in the industry.
Step 3: Automate HR processes
Now, with an LMS, you can start automating your online learning. Depending on the software you choose, you’ll have different ways to do this. Let’s take iSpring Learn LMS as an example to see how the automation engine works.
With iSpring Learn, you can recreate the structure of your company within the system. This means that you can have the same tree-like hierarchy of departments and sub-departments. Thus, you can assign admins for each branch or department and distribute courses accordingly. You can also create groups of employees within departments if, for example, they are working on a project that requires special training.
Once you’ve created departments, you can automate enrollment by setting parameters, and iSpring Learn will start assigning trainees automatically. Let’s say you’ve hired new employees. The LMS will place them into the “new hires” group and assign them to onboard and general orientation courses. See how it works:
Another great feature is that you won’t have to notify each trainee about an upcoming course and send them a certificate of completion. iSpring Learn will do this automatically, as well as remind them about course completion deadlines.
Step 4: Upload educational content
You can upload online courses and any other type of content, such as videos, ebooks, podcasts, and PDF documents to iSpring Learn.
Create a learning track by setting the order in which you’d like employees to study your content, and the LMS will guide all assignees through it.
Step 5: Track learner progress
After you’ve assigned courses to your employees and they’ve started studying them, you can track their progress. iSpring Learn will provide you with reports on how many educational materials a trainee has studied, what scores they received, whether they complete them on time, and more. You can see both individual and collective reports: the progress of a department or even the entire company.
Step 6: Automate learners’ achievements acknowledgement
The final thing you need to do is make sure trainees’ achievements are acknowledged. iSpring Learn offers two ways to do this:
- Certificates
- Gamification
We mentioned certificates earlier in this article. They mark the completion of a course or learning track. Apart from these, you can set the number of points to be received for each task an employee completes. The leaderboard will show their place compared to colleagues based on the number of points that they’ve achieved.
Competition has proven to be one of the primary motivational factors. It will ensure that learners want to participate in corporate training, which is essential to achieve outstanding results. And you won’t have to spend any time on it – the LMS will take care of everything, once you’ve set the necessary parameters.
To Sum Up
Corporate training is an essential part of business success. Yet, it can be effective only if you do it well. And the best way to guarantee this is to free up time for L&D departments by automating less essential tasks with online training software, so they can dive deeper into designing great learner experiences.
We hope you found this article interesting and useful. Good luck!