Employee Training Tracking Software For Small And Medium Businesses

Training can have a great impact on employee retention, motivation, and work performance. But if you train employees without monitoring their results, you may soon find yourself wondering why you can’t see any great improvement. For one thing, your training programs might be boring and confusing, and trainees can’t muster up the motivation to complete them. The best way to bridge the corporate skills gap is to use training tracking software. In this article, we’ll talk about what training tracking software is, what features it typically has, and how it can help your business.

What Is Training Tracking Software?

Training tracking software is better known as a learning management system (LMS). Companies use it to store all educational materials, deliver them to their staff members, and receive analytical reports on trainee progress, content quality, and more. LMSs from different vendors differ somewhat in their capabilities, but this is generally how they all function. Training tracking software allows you to upload eLearning courses, assign training content to individuals or departments, keep track of trainee performance, and assess results. Think of it as your online university in which routine tasks, such as grading, notifying trainees, processing analytical data, and preparing reports, are automated.

The Main Features Of A Corporate LMS

Companies may have various training needs and, therefore, different requirements for an LMS. But typically, an LMS addresses these three requirements: manage trainees, educational materials, track the learning progress, and generate comprehensive reports on the developmental results of individuals and/or departments.

Main Training Tracking Software Features:

• Trainee management. Add and remove users, organize them into groups or departments, and assign them different roles. This functionality is essential to teach your team online training lessons.
• Management of training materials. Upload, manage, and deliver training materials to trainees.
• Progress tracking. Assess how an individual or a group of trainees perform.

Extra Features:

• Learning path. If your corporate training program includes several topics, you can unite all training modules into a single course, creating what’s referred to as a learning path.
• Event calendar. Besides eLearning courses, you might have some face-to-face training sessions or webinars. In this case, you can schedule these training events in your LMS. As with online courses, the LMS will notify trainees of upcoming events.
• Certification. To motivate trainees, it’s important to reward them for their success. LMSs can issue certificates of completion when each training program is completed, sending them to trainees automatically.
• Mobile learning. A native mobile app allows trainees to access training materials at any time, from any device.
• Social media tools. Like digital social media, some LMS platforms can include likes, shares, discussions, and user feedback. This helps create a more collaborative learning experience and increase trainee engagement.
• Gamification. To make sure trainees are motivated to train hard and well, some LMSs offer gamification options, such as points and badges for learning progress, and a company leaderboard.

How Employee Training Tracking Software Can Help Your Business

Now, as we’ve seen the main features of training tracking software, let’s take a look at how it can benefit your business in particular. An LMS will help you with any training need: onboarding, product knowledge training, job-specific skills training, sales training, and channel partner training. Let’s examine each of these in greater detail:

Onboarding

Training tracking software will allow you to put most of your new hire orientation training on autopilot. All you need to do is create an onboarding course once, and then assign it to all new hires. This training program will usually include the following topics related to the company:

• Corporate history
• Mission, vision, and values
• Corporate policies
• Corporate culture
• Organizational structure
• Description of products/services
• Key clients and partners

Product Knowledge Training

Some companies prefer to create a separate training program on product knowledge and assign it not only to new hires, but also to other employees in order to refresh their knowledge. Besides, you can create short courses on product updates or particular features and easily inform the entire staff about them with your corporate LMS. To make sure trainees remember the key points of your course, you can add a quiz at the end. Depending on the assessment results, you’ll be able to see if an employee needs additional training or has retained the content sufficiently.

Job-Specific Skills Training

Every job requires workers to have specific skills. For example, a teacher should know how to plan lessons, an architect should have CAD (computer-aided design) skills, and a programmer needs coding skills. Job-specific skills training is an essential part of corporate training, especially in the technical sphere. Technology is constantly changing, so that’s why even experienced specialists need to update their skills regularly. Training tracking software allows you to provide continuous learning to your staff without a great effort on your part. An LMS performs all routine tasks, thereby giving you time to concentrate on more important ones, such as identifying training needs and developing content.

Sales Training

Retail small business sales training usually focuses on how to sell products better: understand customers’ needs, present products in terms of customer benefits, close sales, etc. Training tracking software allows you to provide your trainees with beautiful SCORM-compliant courses, assess their knowledge with interactive quizzes, and enhance their communication skills with the help of dialogue simulations.

Channel Partner Training

Your channel partners might be spread out all over the world, and an LMS can help you deliver training to them and make sure they have the knowledge they need. Such training gives channel partners insights into your products, the development pipeline, product updates, features, and more.

Employee training tracking software is a highly popular tool, both in medium-sized enterprises and small companies. It allows businesses to optimize training costs, automate training management processes, and get a clear understanding of what a particular employee or department is good at on the whole, and what still needs to be worked on.