Rethinking Workforce Training with Corporate eLearning

Our way of managing vocational education is constantly adapting to ever-changing social conditions and technologies. In light of this, let’s look at the current state of corporate training and see why eLearning may be the most appropriate solution for preparing employees for the latest challenges of today’s job market.

From Traditional Training to Corporate eLearning

In an era when massive digitalization has changed the educational field and our work environment, even that golden mean known as professional development has had to undergo as much change. Indeed, the growth of remote and alternative workforce models, accelerating innovation cycles, and ever-changing regulations have made traditional learning less effective or completely obsolete, as we stressed in our article on the importance of knowledge management strategies. 

The study also points out that reducing employee training costs is one of the key enablers of corporate e-learning. However, cost reduction is just one of the many facets of eLearning that make it an attractive corporate training option.

What eLearning Has to Offer

The proliferation of online education across industries and the increased investment in eLearning software development is not surprising, as educational technology is paving the way for new learning opportunities that seem ideally suited to the modern way of working, at least in most professional scenarios:

• The rapid pace of technological and legislative change and accelerating product cycles make continuous face-to-face learning unsustainable from both an organizational and financial standpoint. On the other hand, enterprise eLearning software solutions allow businesses to continually adapt their employee retraining programs and provide staff with up-to-date training content.
• Corporate eLearning is far more scalable than face-to-face training because LMS (Learning Management System), eLearning portals, and other digital tools for online education can be accessed by virtually unlimited number of employees. 

• The typical remote setup of corporate eLearning fits much better in modern work scenarios such as geographic distribution of specialists and high staff mobility. In addition, eLearning optimizes training budgets by relieving businesses of most travel, board, and lodging costs.
• eLearning software typically has the data analytics capabilities to track the impact of your training initiatives on staff performance and offer many valuable business insights that would be difficult to obtain with traditional classroom training that relies on tons of paper instead of powerful algorithms.

Since we’ve mentioned data analytics and eLearning software solutions as key factors in achieving the benefits above, let’s delve into this topic to determine the role such tools can play in each phase of an enterprise eLearning implementation.

The right tools for creating an eLearning implementation plan

Corporate educators today can count on a rich set of software solutions to help them assess the needs of their students and tailor eLearning content and activities to meet those needs. Here’s a general roadmap for maximizing the impact of eLearning on your business and the most appropriate technology tools to support your educational initiatives.

1. Assess your learning needs with HR analytics

From a corporate perspective, employee training in the short term is to empower your workforce, which should ideally lead to long-term business performance improvements. But achieving that goal is much more complicated if you don’t know where to start. 

Implementing HR data analytics platforms can help you gather valuable employee data from your enterprise systems (HRMS, ERP, CRM, etc.), track your employees’ key KPIs to assess their current performance and experience, and identify potential skill gaps that can be addressed through appropriate training programs. Based on this data, selecting effective eLearning software solutions and developing training content, and administering training will go much more smoothly.

2. Creating eLearning content with LCMS

While some types of eLearning applications, such as LMSs, provide instructors with built-in editing tools, the real heroes in content creation are learning content management systems or LCMS (Learning Content Management System). 

These software solutions have a full range of features, such as advanced editors with customizable templates or collaborative features designed to create eLearning materials and combine them into lessons and courses. They also feature content repositories that make it easy to download, catalog, and search for learning resources.

3. Managing Learning Services with an Enterprise LMS

Once you’ve developed the right learning resources, you need a tool to deliver those materials to your audience, incorporate them into structured learning programs, and manage them as efficiently as possible. 

The metaphor here is not accidental since LMSs are comprehensive solutions with a wide range of different functionalities covering all shades of the eLearning spectrum. However, their primary focus is on online education’s management aspects (as their name implies). Among the most significant features of the Learning Management System are advanced tools for administering learning services, specifically designed to monitor course delivery and student activity.

An LMS can also be integrated with employee self-service portals and intuitive online platforms that further simplify learning services by allowing employees to access electronic learning resources, employee directories, or product and service libraries offline. 

4. Measure Success with Education Analytics Software

As mentioned above, one of the advantages of enterprise eLearning over traditional eLearning is the innate ability of EdTech digital solutions to connect thousands of students in real-time, examine their interactions with each other and the software itself, and collect valuable data. The job of an educational analytics system is to digest this information and provide insight into the effectiveness of your initiatives and investments in learning.

This can include monitoring learning progress and employee performance to fine-tune didactic programs, assess the ROI of your corporate eLearning investment, and track training costs to optimize your corporate budget.

Your efforts to transform your organization’s stagnant eLearning pool into a vibrant ecosystem will achieve this very goal. Find the right partner for your mission, and they’ll help you find this freedom.