How to Choose The Best Online Employee Training Platform

With the employees struggling to meet work deadlines, enterprises always look for ways to improve productivity, time-management and offer on-demand training to their workforce.

A robust online employee training platform is the most effective way to deliver training content to employees in multiple formats. Right from reducing the overall costs of training, allowing employees to learn at their own pace to enabling organizations to create customizable content, there are several benefits that a powerful eLearning platform can offer.

However, not all enterprise learning platforms meet the same requirements or offer specialized content as per individual needs. Therefore, before adopting one of these online learning systems, it is very important to verify that it meets all your needs.

When it comes to the diverse learning requirements of today’s corporate workforce, a one-size-fits-all training program is no longer considered an effective strategy. This is especially relevant for big organizations where employees are spread out across multiple business functions and specializations. Apart from the job-related goals, each employee has different aspirations and priorities, such as upskilling, promotion, or earning a better pay package.

The online employee training platform that you choose, therefore, should offer a tailored L&D approach to offer greater benefits to employees. A customized L&D program can help your organization cater to every employee and support them in achieving their specific goals.

Related Read: Post-COVID Trends in L&D for Employee Training

Organizations today are finding it increasingly difficult to design engaging L&D programs due to busy schedules and low attention spans of employees. Most of the employees struggle with traditionally designed, lengthy learning sessions and consider it as a hindrance to their daily work schedules.  

One of the most effective ways to cater to the learning needs of these busy corporate professionals is to have an online learning platform that offers short, nugget-sized microlearning formats that are easy to learn and quick to finish.

The biggest advantage of microlearning content is its ready availability and the fact that it involves just a few minutes of learning time for corporate employees. A quick 5-minute task simulation to assist them with their specific work requirement or a few minute podcast highlighting a popular topic is an excellent example of microlearning content that your employees can benefit from.

Also Read: How to Choose the Right Employee Training Software 

The corporate training platform you choose must allow for strategic course development within the product. Having a wide range of tools can help managers and course developers to create engaging and compelling content to be able to deliver information in an easy and comprehensive manner.

Further, the training platforms must provide enough flexibility in terms of incorporating interactivity and different types of learning materials, including videos, photos, audio, text, slide decks, and links to external sources. It also helps organizations save costs by reducing the need to buy additional course development tools.

Also Read: Only 5 Employee Training Software You Need to Know About!

For measurable employee outcomes, the training should be designed in a way that by the end of a particular learning session, employees can take the lessons/tips and start applying them at work almost immediately. An effective online training program is one that offers employees with insights and ways to start applying the knowledge gained almost instantly.

To make this a reality, your online training program should offer targeted and actionable content that is completely focused on enabling employees to be better at their day-to-day jobs. The platform should offer a crisp summary at the end of each session to reinforce the key learnings and steps that employees can take.

Also Read: 8 Best Features of an Employee Training Platform

With the rapid shift towards mobile devices, more and more employees are ditching their desktops in favor of more portable devices. This is an ongoing trend that will only become more prevalent in the future.

It is, therefore, essential that your learning platform features a responsive design and is fully optimized for use on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. This allows your employees to improve their skill sets without having to worry about the location and time.

Some of the other important points to consider when you’re investigating how easy it is to navigate a course include –

• Do the hyperlinks work properly?
• Does the online training course provide clear instructions on how to proceed?
• Is it hard to find the navigation icons on the platform?

Factors like these can quickly turn what would have been a pleasant online learning experience into a tiring and frustrating one. Make sure that the platform you choose for your employees is user-friendly with seamless navigation.

Related Read: Best Learning Platform for Remote Employees

Gamification, in this context, means game dynamics being applied to learning instead of entertainment. The concept of gamification is structured around online employee learning platforms aiming to increase employee motivation and engagement and prolong their interest in the course content until completion.

Having a corporate training platform that utilizes a gamified evaluation system allows employees to set objectives and measure achievements in an exciting way. The platform awards badges to employees for their effort and progress, and these rewards are displayed in individual leaderboards within the group, allowing employee reputation to be used to boost their interest.

Related Read: Gamification – The Secret Sauce for Employee Engagement?

Effective monitoring of your employees’ progress can help you determine multiple ways to improve the overall employee learning experience. This highlights the importance of analytics for learning outcomes, which should be readily available to managers and trainers.

It is best to opt for a training platform that allows you to create and export custom reports for specific data and give your employees the opportunity to evaluate their own individual progress through assessments along with an option to generate the feedback needed for them to improve.

Organizations across industry verticals usually use multiple systems to fulfill their business requirements. This makes it essential that the online employee training platform that you go with should be able to integrate with other systems seamlessly, including financial support, employee databases, and product development.

Having a system that allows you to include data from other systems helps you offer much effective training, leading to better business outcomes in the long-run.

Also Read: Best Practices in Training Work from Home Employees

The benefits of an online employee training platform are far more extensive than traditional training methods. For the most part, it all boils down to rapid upskilling and cost-effective internal improvement of the corporate workforce.

However, the requirements of businesses with respect to corporate training vary from organization to organization. Herein lies the importance of choosing a powerful corporate training platform with customizable training sessions and a host of other features that allow your organization to deliver corporate training in an integrated, effective, and comprehensive manner.