For learning to be successful, L&D leaders and training managers need the ability to track training progress across their teams, and to check in with individual team members to provide feedback and support as needed. That’s why we built Schoox with features and functionalities that make it easy to track learner activity and connect with employees to encourage continuous improvement.

In Q2, we introduced the My Team’s Dashboard to give managers easier access to the training insights and information they need about each of their employees, all in one place. We’re also excited to introduce coaching in Schoox and share a number of enhancements to help businesses make the most of this feature.

Introducing the My Team’s Dashboard

Tracking progress and training completion is essential to the learning process. One of the biggest enhancements we made to Schoox last quarter was the introduction of the My Team’s Dashboard—one convenient place for managers to access all the information they need about their team’s learning activity.

With the My Team’s Dashboard, all the widgets and dashboards training managers know and love are easier to access and better than before. It consolidates course progress, completion, information about on-the-job training, exams, events, and more for every team member in one intuitive place. Click through different tabs in the dashboard for deeper information about specific areas of a learner’s progress, or simply look at a consolidated view with quick stats about everyone’s progress. My Team’s Dashboard also makes it easier to track skills and metrics, new hire onboarding progress, and compliance.

My Team’s Dashboard not only allows training managers to see every learner’s training and assignments, but also assess their overall growth. With a view of everyone’s progress at once, training managers and L&D leaders may notice patterns, enabling them to adjust training or create new programs to address knowledge gaps.

Making the Most of Coaching in Schoox

Online training is great, but in some work situations, there is no replacement for human-to-human interaction. Coaching is a new way for training managers and business leaders to schedule valuable one-on-one time with team members to check on employee performance, gauge their skill levels, and provide additional support if needed. 

Coaching in Schoox can help managers ensure employees are following proper protocol or specific operational procedures, like stacking cups the right way at a bar or making sure each delivery truck is packed in a particular order. Coaching also provides an opportunity for managers and team leaders to provide mentorship to employees who are looking to advance their careers.

Schoox makes coaching easy by empowering training admins and managers to create custom forms with specific fields relevant to each session. Forms can include fields for comments, yes or no questions, checklists, signature collections, image uploads, and more. This helps maximize the effectiveness of each coaching session for both managers and employees, and ensures everyone is on the same page. Coaching sessions can be scheduled to be recurring or one-time events as needed.

Be sure to keep an eye on the Schoox Workplace Learning Blog for more updates on coaching, and follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Two Ways to Track Training Progress in Schoox appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

Introducing External Content Channels

The best learning programs include a diverse range of content from a variety of sources. And many L&D professionals look to learning experience platforms (LXPs) as a way to provide open content resources, personalized recommendations, and informal learning opportunities to their learners. From day one, Schoox was built as a mobile and social workplace learning platform that meets the requirements you would expect for a learning management system (LMS) as well as the learner-driven capabilities of an LXP.

To further enhance the embedded LXP functionality in Schoox, we’re now offering pre-populated External Content Channels complete with free videos from YouTube that can be used directly in courses and learning programs. With just a few clicks, admins or learning managers can opt to make these videos available to all or select groups of learners, in addition to our many other content solutions.

Q1, Q2, This One’s For You: Schedule and Deliver Reports Every Quarter

Reporting is one of the most useful features of Schoox. Reports eliminate the need to manually track training progress and provide all sorts of information that’s useful to L&D professionals, training managers, and other stakeholders. Admins and managers can select from hundreds of pre-built templates or build their own to include the data most relevant to the audience or question at hand. This could include assessment scores, attendance lists, skill levels, progress toward organizational goals and KPIs, compliance tracking, and more.

Different types of reports can be scheduled in advance to be delivered directly to the inbox of anyone who needs them. To make things even easier, we recently added a new option to have scheduled reports delivered on a quarterly basis. This automates one more workflow for L&D professionals, allowing them to focus on more strategic goals.

Now Playing On-Demand: Offer Academy Content for Purchase

Learning looks different at every organization. For some businesses, learners may not always be internal employees but contract workers, agents, or others who need access to specific training content from outside the organization. In such cases, businesses may opt to offer a library of individual courses available for purchase, similar to on-demand or “pay per view” entertainment.

We recently introduced the Academy Marketplace in Schoox, which allows learners to purchase access to individual courses developed in your academy. Courses available for purchase are displayed on a public listing page with a unique URL, so a Schoox login is not required to view it. That means with a link to the page, anyone from within or outside your organization can easily browse through the available on-demand course offerings. Once they know which course they’d like to purchase, they’ll be directed to create an account in Schoox, complete the transaction, and access the course.

The Academy Marketplace is an ideal way to offer supplemental learning opportunities to employees who are interested or provide secure access to customers, partners, or others who may not be directly employed by your business.

Stay in the Loop with Schoox: Sign Up for Our Newsletter

 From product updates to community events and more, sign up for our quarterly newsletter for the latest on all the great things we’ve got brewing at Schoox—delivered straight to your inbox.

The post What’s New in Schoox? Ready-to-Go Content Channels, Academy Marketplace, and More appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

The number-one business priority for organizations post-pandemic has been customer satisfaction, according to Brandon Hall Group research. Nowhere is that missive more critical than in retail and restaurant environments. Organizations in these environments have a large volume of front-line workers that are hands-on with customers every single day. Delivering effective, consistent training to these workers is critical to building and maintaining customer satisfaction.

But training in this environment is exceptionally challenging. First, these workers tend to have a high turnover rate, which means training needs to be quick and effective to keep everyone up to speed. Another big challenge is that in many of these locations, the workers do not actually work for the company that owns the brand. Further complicating things is the reality that frontline workers make up the majority of the workforce in the franchise business model. These employees are often without access to a computer, making mobile learning critical to their training and development.

In this franchise environment, the network of stores, restaurants, or dealerships has a variety of different owners. Some owners have just one single location while others own a vast network. At the same time, there are often company-owned locations as well. This presents training professionals with a wide variety of dynamics within which to create high-quality, consistent learning experiences. And consistency is key. Whether around town or around the globe, customers expect a consistent experience.

This means the people who are tasked with keeping customers happy need to have the skills and knowledge to excel. Brands must ensure employees in regionally, nationally, or globally distributed locations know and adhere to the standards set by the parent organization.

Left to their own devices, franchisees may adopt their own training methods, resulting in an inconsistent customer experience across locations. Customers don’t know that “their” store is not owned by the brand parent, so they would not understand why things are done differently. A consistently positive customer experience requires standardized training across all locations. Failure to build a successful franchisee and store training program could result in inconsistent quality, operational inefficiencies, and a loss of brand loyalty.

Brandon Hall Group SmartChoice® Silver Preferred Provider Schoox has solutions that are engineered for the complexity the extended enterprise brings to learning. They work with larger, global clients that operate multiple franchised brands, and they are able to deliver simple, powerful learning with the consistency, branding, and mobile capabilities these organizations require. Rather than a one-size-fits-all LMS, Schoox is flexible enough to meet the needs of any organization, whether they are training internal employees or vast extended enterprise network.

The Schoox platform also has robust tracking and reporting features, which are critical in an extended enterprise environment. The learners are not employees, so it can be difficult to measure whether learning is having the right impact. Schoox simplifies that.

The extended enterprise consists of a variety of audiences in addition to franchisees. It can also include customers, resellers, channel partners, association members, and more. Training these audiences effectively and consistently takes technology that is designed for their complexity.

Want to learn more? Check out Driving Learning Success in a Franchise Environment, our onDemand webinar with Tammy Olson, Director of Global Curriculum and Training for Dairy Queen and David Wentworth, Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group on the ins and outs of training in a franchise environment.

The post Managing the Complexity of Franchisee Training appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

Having the ability to configure your learning program’s organizational structure to match your business structure helps businesses overcome some of their leading learning program challenges. A recent survey by Brandon Hall Group found that today’s franchise businesses are facing significant learning program challenges, including: 

• 88% said technology capabilities are a medium or high factor in franchisee training effectiveness
• 62% said they experience difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of their learning programs
• 42% said they lack the right technology to run effective learning programs 

Franchise business models represent just one example of how unique organizational needs become hurdles standing in the way of effective learning. SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, provides a toolkit that explains the full spectrum of organizational structures:

• Vertical structures where work and employees are organized by specialization, usually departments

• Matrix structures where work and employees are organized by specialization and by division, usually product, service, customer, or geography

• Open boundary or network structures where work and employees are organized beyond traditional boundaries into groups and teams that can include third parties such as partners, suppliers, and outsourcers

With this variety in organizational structures, why do most learning management systems take a one-size-fits-all approach? 

Build Your LMS Org Structure Your Way 

While other learning platforms are built exclusively for vertical organizational design, Schoox uses a flexible hierarchy model that makes it possible to support any organizational structure. This means L&D leaders can get creative with representing the nuanced, matrixed ways that people are connected and need to collaborate across your enterprise. L&D can then impact all types of training and talent initiatives including company-wide communication, learning and content sharing, performance reviews, and much more.

Schoox hierarchies make it possible to organize learning programs on a granular level. Here are some examples:

• Businesses: Corporate, brands, franchise operators, regions
• Departments: Functional and divisional
• Jobs: Roles and responsibilities
• Geographies: City, metro area, state, country

Here are some examples from different industries to show how to organize learning for different types of organizational structures using Schoox:

Software (vertical): A software company with a vertical organization where an employee (software developer) reports to a function (engineering). Using Schoox, the software company would be the primary hierarchy, with a grouping to support the one-to-one relationship between the software developer and the engineering function. 

Construction (matrix): A construction company with a matrixed organization where an employee (a project manager) reports to both a function (project management office) and a division (energy). Using Schoox, the construction company would be the primary hierarchy, with groups to support one-to-one relationships between the project manager and each of the departments: the project management office and the energy division. 

Manufacturing (open boundary): A beverage manufacturing company with an open boundary structure where an employee (plant manager) works for a partner or subsidiary (independent bottling plant). With Schoox, the beverage manufacturing company would be the primary hierarchy, with a group that connects the plant manager to the independent bottling plant. 

In this model, the manufacturer has the option to create distinct groups for each of its bottling plant partners. And within these groups, the partners would be able to create their own custom learning programs for their direct employees (e.g., the plant manager, their teams, and the individuals who work at the plant.) This approach is commonly used in franchise businesses such as restaurants and hotels.

Once the organizational structure is in place, simple filters make it easy to send targeted communications, automate learning assignments, report on progress, and provide the right information to the right employees at the right time.    

Schoox in Action—Subway’s Global Franchise Structure

A perfect example of the flexibility of the Schoox hierarchy tools is Subway® Sandwich Restaurants. The organizational structure of the global chain’s 44,500-plus restaurants in 110 countries around the world consists of a variety of relationship types between the corporate offices, franchisors, and franchisees. 

The company’s previous LMS was designed for a vertical organization, so it fell short of its real-world learning program needs. As a result, the restaurant chain struggled to serve the learning demands of its teams, managers, and employees. 

With Schoox, the University of Subway is now structured to model the company’s complex organization structure. Every restaurant, manager, and franchisee can use the platform in the way that works best for them. The flexible hierarchical tools empower the company to deliver a more robust learning program around the world.

Learn More

Learn more about Subway’s success and the power of Schoox to support learning programs for front-line workers in our new light paper, The Top 5 Capabilities of Learning and Development for Frontline Workers.   https://employee-learning-on-the-move.schoox.com/

Want to understand how to organize learning using Schoox hierarchies? Check out our eBook, Expand Your Organization’s Learning Connections, Relationships, and Collaboration. https://learn.schoox.com/ebook-organizational-structures

The post LMS and Organizational Structure: Perfect Pair or Perfect Storm? appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

A recent study from Brandon Hall Group found that while over 76% of business leaders would rate learning as highly important, only 45% rate their own organizations as being highly learning focused. What is going on today? Why is there such a profound disconnect? This post looks at some of the latest issues in the connection between employee productivity and employee job training.

Does Training Increase Productivity?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend 7.6 hours a day working when they are in the office and 5.8 hours working when they are working from home. But are those hours completely productive? That’s the question more companies are asking to ensure they meet their business goals. One way to keep employees productive, according to research, is to make sure they are well trained for their jobs.

Dozens of studies over the years have found a direct correlation between employee training and productivity. When employees know their jobs and their strengths are valued and supported, it creates a workplace culture that fosters high performance and greater productivity, according to Gallup. The study found that strengths-based organizations improve employee performance by 8% to 18%.

In fact, strengths-based leadership has been identified as a core element of fostering employee optimism, engagement, and project performance—all of which lead to significantly higher productivity.

Research: Investing in Training Improves Employee Productivity

Despite the research on the positive impact of training on employee output, many companies have been slow to fully invest in and embrace the potential of robust employee learning programs

eLearning Industry reported the following: “A study conducted by the American Society for Training & Development compared two corporate groups, where one company spent nearly three times as much as the other on organization training, and the results were startling. The group that invested more recorded a 57% increase in sales and a 37% rise in gross profit per employee. This clearly highlights the importance of investing in training and development to ensure high productivity and effective returns.”

Despite the proven advantages, not every company has fully embraced the power of employee training to boost productivity. According to Shift eLearning, “The problem is that many organizations see training as an expense and not as an investment. Untrained employees will inevitably lack the motivation and knowledge to use company resources properly, which will lead to waste, in a service industry. Lack of knowledge about procedures will affect customer interaction and retention. Because of this, your employees, your company, and your clients will all suffer.”

Research: Training Positively Impacts Employee Performance

Findings from two studies conducted by Brandon Hall Group clarify several aspects of the impact of employee training on productivity:

• Learning That Drives Performance: How Do We Supercharge Learning? found that, for many companies, there has been an increasing disconnect between learning and performance. For example:
  • Only 54% believe that learning performance outcomes are tied directly to learning objectives
  • Only 38% business objectives tied directly to talent development objectives
  • Only 31% believe that talent development objectives tied directly to learning performance outcomes

To overcome this problem, Brandon Hall Group recommends that “companies should rethink the learning experience to ensure everything is focused on driving performance. Identifying and understanding intended performance outcomes puts learning in a position to create programs that deliver the intended results.”

•  Upskilling and Reskilling: Delivering Personalized Learning at Scale found that only about 36% of companies believe they are prepared to develop employees to perform the skills they will need in the future. “Business is moving too fast and the workforce is too busy, distracted and dispersed for traditional training models to be completely effective.”

The contradictions is apparent in these two findings from this research:

• Over 76% of companies say business leaders would rate learning a 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale of importance to the organization.
• However, only 45% of companies rate themselves a 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale of how integral learning is to the organization’s culture.

Overcoming Remote Worker Learning Challenges

Training employees working from home presents an additional challenge for companies to deliver effective training programs, according to findings from a survey conducted by Brandon Hall Group called How Are You Adapting to Hybrid Work? About 50% of companies said that Learning & Development, including upskilling and reskilling, is one of their biggest challenges in the next six to 12 months.

“COVID-19 did not cause workforce problems, it merely magnified them,” per the Brandon Hall Group. All of the talent management, upskilling and reskilling, team development, and career development challenges that organizations face now have only “come to a sharper point because of the health crisis and the impact it had on the workforce and society.”

6 Ways to Improve Employee Productivity with Learning Programs

Employee training and job productivity go hand in hand. If companies appreciate the power of a highly productive staff, they should embrace the power of employee training. 

Here are the leading six ways that training boosts employees’ job performance and productivity

1. Inspires New Employees. How you on-board employees sets the tone for their long-term productivity. Training new employees gets them off on the right foot by giving them a good sense of the business and job expectations. For all employees, having a mastery of the knowledge and skills for their job increases their satisfaction and confidence and, as a result, productivity.
2. Reinvigorates Old Skills. Ongoing employee training helps cultivate talent from within your business. By retraining employees on current skills, you can increase productivity by preventing small, basic mistakes. This can also breathe new life into old tasks. Plus, retraining current employees is less expensive than hiring new ones.
3. Gives Employees New Skills. By teaching employees new skills, you can give them a new sense of a purpose. It also lets them know that the organization is willing and able to evolve — and even offer them advancement opportunities.
4. Raises Confidence Levels. Learning and maintaining skills can boost employees’ confidence. With greater confidence, they’ll enjoy a greater sense of value and enthusiasm on the job. This often translates into increased productivity.
5. Supports a Performance-Based Culture. This inspires and motivates employees by giving them attainable goals to reach on a regular basis. However, your culture should also have a clearly defined definition of success. When employees know what they are reaching for, they are able to achieve it in an optimal way.
6. Boosts Employee Satisfaction. Satisfaction is essential for a productive workplace. Employees are satisfied when they’re given the skills and knowledge they need to perform their duties optimally. Training is an important step in providing the skills your employees need to perform their best.

Clearly, productivity is a vital goal in today’s business world. While there are many systems, processes, and motivational tactics employers can use to boost productivity, companies should remember the power of comprehensive, quality training to lay a foundation that supports the highest levels of workforce productivity every days.

To learn more download our eBook: Access the Power of Your Employees’ Strengths.

The post How Employee Training Boosts On-the-Job Productivity appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

When we say vendor, we mean any person or group outside of your organization that has been tasked to deliver a product or service to you. For example, a payroll software provider or a manufacturer would be a vendor.

Choosing the right vendor is not just about getting the right products, tools, or services. If you will be working closely with them, it’s important to choose very carefully.

Do you already have any vendors that are always awkward or painful to work with? Are there any you dread working with? It’s okay if you do. Many of us do. On the flip side of that, do you also have vendors that are a joy to work with?

Think about it. Examine the reasons why these interactions are so different. It’s not just about the service they provide (although that can be a big factor.) It’s also about how easy they are to work with.

That’s what Matthew Brown discusses in this episode of The Learning Xchange podcast. Matthew (Schoox’s VP of Learning and Brand Success) shares his advice for choosing a vendor that can become a true partner of your organization.

Listen to the podcast below or keep reading.

How do you choose a vendor that meets your needs?

When choosing vendors or partners to work with, the first step is to establish what you need. For example, it could be product design, an accounting system, a learning solution, or consulting services.

When shopping around for vendors, look at the features, offerings, functionality, and capabilities on offer. The first step is to make sure that, technically speaking, the vendor is a match and ticks all the boxes.

To do this, you can send out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to vendors. An RFP lets you collect offers from various vendors to ensure they meet all your criteria.

However, some businesses rely on using a generic RFP template. It’s not bad to use a template, but you really need to tailor it to your needs. Not tailoring your RFP means you could end up with a product or service that doesn’t quite tick all the boxes.

No two businesses are the same. We all have different needs, experiences, and perspectives. Using a template to drive your entire project is going to result in missing the mark.

If you still want to use a template, that’s fine, but look at it as more of an idea-starter. Use it as a foundation to build your processes and documentation.

When writing your RFP, think about the goals and strategies of your organization. Look at where you were last year versus now and build your requirements around that.

How does the vendor fit with your organization?

Checking the features and services a vendor provides is the easy part. You could end up with a service that does everything right and yet still run into issues.

That’s why it’s important to dig deeper and look at the vendor closely. This is something that people don’t do often enough!

When weighing up different vendors, ask yourself: is this vendor aligned with my own company culture, values, and goals?

Look at it as a hiring decision. When businesses hire people, they check that they are a good fit who aligns with the business’ core values.

We avoid bringing in people who don’t have the skills or aren’t a good fit because it doesn’t set anyone up for success. Interestingly, we don’t do the same when choosing vendors.

Vendors, while separate from your business, are still a key part of your organization.

When weighing up vendors, ask yourself one question: is this merely a vendor, or could they become more of a partner? Is this a company you simply purchase from, or one that works so well with you that they’re almost a business partner?

That’s what you want from a vendor, someone who acts as a partner.

The difference between ordinary vendors and partners

The difference between vendors and partners is that partners align with your organization.

They aren’t just a good fit. They’re a fit for your company culture and values. They understand who you are and what you do. Essentially, they become an extension of your team in a way that feels seamless. 

The best way to check this is to analyze the sales or sign-up process. You can tell a lot from the communication style of a vendor during this process.

If you notice any friction or something that doesn’t feel right, don’t ignore it. By ignoring it, you run the risk of bringing in the wrong people and products for your business. This can lead to a great deal of disruption and friction that you really don’t need.

What do the employees of the company say?

Checking that the vendor’s values are aligned with yours is more than most people do. But if you want to go even further, another exercise you can do is check what the employees say about the company.

How the employees feel will tell you a lot about what they’ll be like to work with. Spend some time looking through the likes of Glassdoor to get a sense of how the employees feel.

Are they happy? Do they have common complaints about working environments or management?

These employees could be the very people you end up communicating with. If many of them are disengaged, unhappy, and unmotivated, this will reflect in the service and communication. If the workplace is a toxic culture, think about how this could affect your working relationship.

It pays to pay attention to the details. If you are choosing an important product or piece of software that will affect your business’ day-to-day life, it’s not a decision to take lightly!

The post How to Find the Right Vendor for Your Organization appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

What Is an LXP? How Is it Different from an LMS?

LXPs are a front-end layer that typically reside on top of an LMS. They are used to enhance an individual learner’s engagement. They accomplish this through greater personalization and a larger amount of formal and informal content, such as TED Talks, YouTube videos, Harvard Business Review articles, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). These systems employ machine learning to assess employees’ skills and recommend content.

Interest in and demand for learning experience platforms (LXPs) accelerated  in 2019, according to Gartner. Learning management systems (LMS) traditionally focus on scheduling, registering, and tracking learners’ activities. LXPs go a step further by delivering personalized learning paths, channels, and collections of learning materials. This allows learners to organize, access, and share relevant resources, while discovering more avenues of learning.  

The Benefits of an LXP

Today, many CLOs and L&D leaders understand that the processes and systems they’ve relied on in the past no longer support their strategic vision for employee learning. 

Event-based learning, instructor-led training, and systems that are rigid and static are incompatible with their priorities. Examples of these priorities include building a culture of learning, expanding learning opportunities across the workforce, and supporting business growth and success.

An approach to learning that does support these priorities has been the introduction of LXPs. Organizations that have been pioneering this trend have seen several benefits. 

• Learning is more experiential and immediate
• Content is delivered when and where it’s needed
• Learning and development teams are leaner, more agile, and more strategic

The Challenges of an LXP

LXPs do have their challenges, however. One, for example, is a lack of integration. An LXP provides certain features that are missing from legacy LMS platforms. An inability to integrate means that employees would have to log into yet another system to access these features.

Certainly, LXPs have carved out a category in the overall learning technology space. But there’s a growing consensus that they create an additional (even unnecessary) layer. Some feel that the LMS should carry the responsibility of innovating and incorporating the features and benefits that make a next generation learning platform.

Moving Forward: Choose a Learning Platform with Both

Yes, the innovation of an LXP may be flawed in its effort to provide a point solution, but it is still the right innovation. 

Additionally, it might not be clear that there are learning platform vendors out there that have known that learner experience needed more work in the LMS.

As a result, vendors have been working toward strengthening the LXP functionality in their LMS. Yet, legacy systems and an obligation to choose a brand-name vendor have left many in the dark to these new disrupters.

There is a better option than trying to implement an LXP as an added layer to an LMS. It is to choose a learning platform that includes both. This will enable you to:

• Have the important learner experience functionality you need
• And, reinforce your learning programs with a better content strategy  

It’s helpful to remember that the LXP evolution has been driven largely by the customized conveniences of today. Employees are living in a world where everyone has access to whatever we need or want. And we can find it whenever we need or want it—from on-demand movie viewing to food delivery, and so on.

To deliver high-quality employee learning experiences, the platforms you select need to mirror this same level of personalization and immediacy.

Download our free Buyer’s Guide, Navigating Today’s Changing Learning Platform Landscape: A Guide for Choosing a Next-Generation LMS to learn how Schoox delivers an engaging learner experience and learning management functionality all within one system.

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As mentioned in part three of this series, if the bare minimum ‘table stakes’ metrics are all you’re tracking, you will never be able to truly measure the overall business impact of your learning and development programs.

If you’re only looking at how many people completed a training, do you really have any ideas why the success (or lack of success) in compliance is causing performance issues? Is it a specific skill or competency that lacks proficiency that could be the cause of performance issues? Are there other factors?

Essential Metrics L&D Teams Should Track to Show Business Impact

This leads us to the topic of more advanced metrics, some of which can be captured in your LMS while other metrics may require joining forces with other parts of the business, like IT, finance, or HR, to tell the full story. Let’s take a look.

Content-Focused Metrics

If you dig deeper into the content, you can start to understand metrics that can help shape your learning design so you can adapt and adjust the course content.

For instance, how many attempts does it take someone to pass a course exam? If more than one, perhaps the content is to blame. Maybe you’re testing them on things that weren’t covered. Maybe the content is unclear.

What about the performance on each question? If you knew that 100% of the people missed “Question 2” multiple times before they passed, explore what’s tied to that question. Is it worded poorly? Is it unsupported in the content?

Or consider the skill level. Was the course designed to improve a specific skill? If so, what’s the desired change? 

You can also explore drop-out rates. How many learners never finish a course? Do they drop at the same place? Is there a correlation between an employee’s geography, job title, or experience level and the drop-off activity? This is important for building training that gets the right information to the right people at the right time in the right format.

Performance-Focused Metrics

Schoox has a feature called ‘Knowledge Fuel,’ which reflects the level of adequate knowledge within an organization. It combines various performance metrics and reflects knowledge levels of your entire training spectrum down to a specific course.

This feature enables you to understand the impact on the organization when a person leaves. You can see the knowledge deficit the vacancy will create and predict any performance and potential business impacts it will have. Even if you hire an expert in the field, the incoming employee won’t have the exact background and skillset as the former employee, so there’s a definite impact you can’t ignore.

Business-Focused Metrics

Now for the elusive ROI. This is where you take the factors valued by your organization relative to learning and correlate them with your overall spend and other business metrics to describe what the ROI and business impact is for your training programs.

There are some basic ROI metrics. For example, spending $100k on a course to move it from in-person delivery to self-paced, resulting in saving $650k by eliminating travel and physical materials produced for in-person learning.

Then, there are more advanced ROI metrics. For example, delivering XYZ course and seeing a 15% proficiency improvement in one skill, resulting in a long-term ROI of $250k over the next two years relative to, say, coaching activities.

Segment-Focused Insights

Finally, you should consider segment-focused insights—how your training performs when in specific segments of your business. Are there industry or internal benchmarks you could align with? Is there a specific region that should expect different results?

Ready to Start Proving the Business Impact of Your Learning Programs?

Demonstrating the business impact of your training programs is critical to the future success of your organization. Get started by keeping these takeaways in mind:

• Make a plan to measure table stakes metrics (and aim for more).
• Collaborate and strategize to track more advanced metrics.
• Connect learning data to business impact. Know which KPIs are most important and how your learning can plug in to them.
• Take the ‘collection’ process seriously. Understand what you can and can’t get out of your LMS, and other departments.
• As your L&D activities progress, it’s not enough to just provide the data—you have to turn the insights into action to demonstrate the true business impact of learning.

Schoox provides a future-focused, end-to-end learning and talent development solution that makes it easy for L&D teams to draw a clear line between their learning programs and the direct business impact they have on helping organizations achieve their goals.

If you’d like to see how it works, schedule a demonstration with one of our representatives.

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1. Conventional Learning Is a Thing of the Past

Delivering top-quality, consistent training to a distributed workforce via conventional learning methods can be difficult for a variety of reasons. Scheduling a time for employees to attend training sessions can be tough. There will always be some that are unable to attend. When this happens, some workers get the training they need and others do not. When employees are held to the same performance requirements, it is essential to ensure they all receive the same level of training. Since e-learning is delivered on demand, employees can complete training courses on their own schedule, anytime, anyplace, and on any device.

2. Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Employees

As such, employee development is essential. Yet, even in 2021, many companies still do not have a streamlined process for corporate training or e-learning. It wastes both time and money—two things you really don’t want to lose. If you’re a multi-location business owner and your managers are still handing out sheets of paper for your company’s training collateral, and spending a large amount of administrative hours manually tracking attendance, I have some news for you: For the success of your business, it is critical for you to change with the times. Even if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened or finally becomes a thing of the past, online learning is here to stay.

2. Scalability Is Key

Finding a streamlined process to train your workforce is critical, whether employees are five feet or 50,000 miles away. At the heart of any successful business endeavor is scalability.

What are you currently doing to run a well-oiled corporate (or franchised) machine, and what are you doing to be at scale?

There are many headaches that come from running a business and running one with various locations. Some of them are inevitable and come with the territory. But there are also problems that arise that can be avoided, which is important when you’re trying to run a high-performing, well-oiled machine. For example, trying to standardize a system that is adequately equipped to deliver training to all of your employees is especially problematic right now with so many remote employees and geographically dispersed teams. This is precisely why you need a learning management system.

3. Don’t Settle for Just Any LMS

A learning management system (LMS) is software that helps administer, document, track, report and deliver e-learning courses or training programs. Because e-learning is so common now, the market is saturated with LMS vendors. Therefore, it is really important that you know what you need, what to look for, and not to settle for anything less.

When purchasing an LMS, you should be able to:

• Easily create courses that are tailored to your company’s needs
• Test your employees’ knowledge retention of completed courses
• Easily track your employees’ progress as they navigate the courses
• Measure the total impact of your e-learning on your company’s bottom line, and how it directly correlates to the KPIs set forth 

The Schoox learning management system has all four of these capabilities, and more.

5. Embrace the Benefits of Modern Technology

Training consistency

With Schoox, employees can participate in online training in groups or individually, as their schedules permit. As such, content remains the same from one learner to the next. For training and HR managers who are accountable for making sure all employees have access to consistent training, this benefit is invaluable.

Self-paced instruction

An additional benefit of e-learning is the self-paced nature of the instruction. Employees can spend extra time fine-tuning the information they did not quite grasp the first time around.

Software integrations

Further, being able to easily and quickly integrate other technologies with a learning management system is key. There are various tools available that add an entirely new dimension to learning and greatly improve the quality and user experience of the LMS. Since learning management systems continue to be designed to benefit a teams spread out across different areas, social tools, like blogs, groups, discussion forums, and gamification elements like points, leaderboards and badges, greatly help to increase communication and cause the distance gap to feel a whole lot smaller.

Interactive learning experiences

Technology offers other benefits, as well. Training experiences are more dynamic and interactive, changing according to users’ needs. The goal is to attain maximum cooperation between users and systems and seamlessly integrate practices across broader platforms.

Globalization-ready

Text-to-speech functionality continues to be an excellent aid to users who are visually impaired. The dependency on users’ rhetoric skills can cause training to be less efficient, particularly when evaluating users in different countries. As such, Google invests more time and money in these technologies. So, even if all of your employees are native English speakers right now, that may not always be the case with increased globalization. Enabling these technologies help tremendously with collaboration across different regions or countries.

The post It’s 2021 and You Need an LMS Yesterday: 5 Things You Need to Know appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

If you’re a trainer or educator, you’ll have plenty of tools in your arsenal for delivering effective learning. You’ve built these up over years of experience, from your education, research, communication with other educators, or even created some yourself.

But does your L&D toolkit meet diverse needs? Do they serve different types of learners? Or work across multiple platforms? Or use the multitude of technologies right at our fingertips?

In this episode of The Learning Xchange, host Matthew Brown, Schoox’s VP of Learning and Brand Success, takes a look at the broad range of L&D tech tools available to your organization and highlights how they can be used in the process of building or deploying learning strategies.

You can listen to the podcast episode here:

Or you can read on to find out more.

First: Take stock of your L&D toolkit

There are many tools available to help organizations build, embed, and deliver learning. You may already be using some in your L&D strategy, but there are always new tools to discover.

Taking stock of your trainer toolkit means assessing what’s already in it, what needs to be added, and if the tools are working for you and your learners. To do this, ask lots of questions about your organization’s existing L&D toolkit, for example:

• What development tools are currently used to create individual learning assets?
• Who contributes to L&D content creation within your organization?
• Does your organization’s L&D team deploy learning assets strategically?

Once you’ve audited your existing training tools, you may be able to identify some gaps, either in the kinds of training you create or the technology you’re under-using. From here, you can consider what tools you can build into your business to improve training and enhance learning experiences.

Here are 12 of our top tech L&D tools that you can add to your organization’s toolkit.

1. Course authoring tools

Course authoring tools are software programs that allow you to create learning content and entire courses for the end-user. These are key tools for leveraging interactive e-learning development.

Course authoring tools add content to a complete, built-in package. The software is more comprehensive than a SCORM package or video content and offers a wide variety of interactive activities. Some examples of course authoring tools include Adobe Captivate and Rise 360.

2. Content development tools

Organizations can use content development tools to capture content and create digital assets. These assets can range from video clips to images to infographics used for your courses and sharing on social media.

A software package such as Adobe Creative Cloud is a good example of a content development tool, but there’s also a wide range of web-based solutions, for example, Visme and Doodly.

Cloud-based content creation platform Visme allows you to create fun presentations, infographics, and videos. Doodly is a ‘whiteboard animation’ program where you can create professional-looking doodle videos, even if you have little design or technical skill.

Content development tools provide great value to facilitators, as embedding more diverse and interesting content types in your learning platforms can keep learners engaged.

3. Learning platforms

The learning platform is the whole system of tools that work seamlessly together to deliver a student-centric learning experience. Schoox is a learning platform.

There are a number of sub-categories in the learning platform arena, which include learning management systems (LMS), virtual learning environments (VLEs), learning experience solutions (LXPs), microlearning solutions, and digital assessment solutions. Which learning platform, or multiple learning platforms, does your organization use?

If you’re considering adding a learning platform to your toolkit, you should analyze how people currently leverage it. Does it exist simply for compliance or mandatory training? It doesn’t have to be a space just for learning. You could take advantage of other opportunities within the platform, such as community engagement.

4. Online learning options

Structured online learning engagements or courses, such as LinkedIn Learning, can be added to your own LMS or learning platform. These comprehensive, ready-made courses are a quick and easy way to provide value to your learners without trainers having to create a course from scratch.

Plus, these external courses often allow built-in integration, meaning you can launch them from within your internal platform. This helps keep learners focused on your core, central platform.

5. Search engines

Using your preferred search engine is an everyday occurrence for most people, but have you considered how it can fit with your L&D practice?

Trainers often overlook the power of search engines as a tool in their learning strategies, and yet many people use search engines each day to learn. You can incorporate search engines into your learning toolkit by guiding your team and teaching learners how to find the most useful content online.

6. Online video repositories

Repositories such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Ted contain huge volumes of quality content. Rather than spending time and money creating new content, spend some time researching, then pointing learners to freely available, existing, and useful content.

This may not be what you had in mind when building your training, but it speaks to the adaptations many trainers have made this year. This is also a great solution if your existing learning platform does not allow built-in elements.

7. Online communities

In the L&D arena, community and collaboration are key components for providing the best learning experiences. Social platforms, like LinkedIn and professional-focused Facebook groups, host great examples of sharing knowledge between educators. Harnessing social media’s potential gives trainers an opportunity to connect with other people, get different perspectives, share ideas, and perhaps leave with a solution to a problem.

You can create meaningful communities internally within your L&D activities through online peer-to-peer coaching, informal group learning, or by facilitating informed discussions between trusted and disparate colleagues. Encouraging learners to share how they’re progressing supports their development and often furthers their learning journeys.

8. Video meeting tools

Many organizations added the now ubiquitous video meeting tools, such as Skype, Zoom, Go-To, and WebEx, into their learning strategies this year. These tools allow L&D professionals to connect to people, to retain engagement, and facilitate interaction, in a live, real-time space.

While these may have already been part of your toolkit, many trainers have found new ways to use video conferencing software. The tools have also become more advanced. As businesses and education continue to work remotely, it’s necessary to stay up to date with the new features to maintain a more personable connection with your team and your learners.

9. Interactive software

Motivating learners to pay attention to training can be exceptionally difficult, but by getting participants to interact with training elements, you can feel more secure that they’re reaching their learning goals.

Gamification software or game-based learning such as Kahoot! can leverage the interactive and good-natured competitiveness of your learners. It’s a great way to motivate learners and enables you to add gaming experiences, quizzes, and polls to your L&D portfolio.

10. Collaboration and communication tools

Communication with learners is key, and although video conferencing tools provide the most “normal” communication experience, it’s not always necessary to call all learners into a video chat.

Collaboration tools such as Slack, Yammer, and Teams provide virtual workspaces made up of channels, where your learners can communicate and work together in an instant messaging environment. Here you can send messages and share files, as well as create channels private for one-on-one conversations.

This is a great tool to start a collaborative learner community or work privately with a learner to achieve a specific goal.

11. Forms and surveys

While live feedback and polls can aid learning in the moment, using forms and other software dedicated to surveys and data collection can help you evaluate the training’s effectiveness. Collecting feedback and data that can be used later to assess and develop your offerings is vital to continued improvement and engagement.

Tools that help you evaluate and progress as a trainer are equally as valuable as those that directly benefit the learner. When everyone aims to improve, the whole organization can evolve.

12. File sharing and office software

On a daily basis, people use standard workhorse tech tools that you might not consider an L&D tool. File sharing (like Dropbox and Google Drive) and office tools and suites (including Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, and Open Office) are common, but does everyone in your organization use these tools in the same way?

Deploying these tools strategically makes them more efficient and valuable, so consider a uniform approach across the organization. That way, everyone in the organization will know how to collaborate with one another. Consistency, clarity, and knowing what you’re working with is key.

How to evolve your L&D toolkit

After evaluating your existing tools, you should consider your organization’s over-arching learning strategy or create one if it’s not something you already have.

Engage colleagues that have involvement or ownership of parts of the learning process and discuss what tools you have and why you use them. You should be able to articulate your learning strategy clearly to your learners or stakeholders in the learning process.

By adding new tools to your strategy, or formalizing tools that have existed peripherally, you’re aiming to evolve the learners’ experience. For each tool, specify its purpose, its impact on your learning scenarios, and understand how it fits into your organization’s strategic approach to L&D.

Continuing to find ways to meet new demands is vital for L&D’s development. Learning and development professionals are always quick to adapt, however, we should also pull up some guard rails for the learner for the year ahead: be very specific and clearly define what experience you’re providing with your developing learning activities. Analyzing, refining and deploying your post-2020 toolkit will do just that.

If you enjoyed reading this summary of The Learning Xchange podcast episode, there are plenty more episodes to discover. New episodes are published every week on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and more. Subscribe to The Learning Xchange on your favorite podcast app to download the latest episode.

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