The Steps For Digitizing Training Within Your Organization: Part 1

The Steps For Digitizing Training Within Your Organization: Part 1
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Summary: In a continuously evolving economy where everyone is expected to unceasingly innovate and adapt, digitizing your training has become a necessity. Indeed, only a digital training structure has the required agility to turn learning into a competitive advantage. In this two-part article, we’ll explore all the steps you need to take for digitizing training content.

Digitizing Training: Identify Your Managerial Goals & Find The Right Partner

There are many advantages in digitizing training: decentralization of vocational schools, adaptation to a high growth rate or internationalization, multiplication of commitment rates… The idea is to identify those that will have a greater impact on your company and to establish a shared goal around it within your organization, so that you may be in a position to convince and lead the decision-making process.

eBook Release: 5 Steps To Digitize Learning Within Your Organization
eBook Release
5 Steps To Digitize Learning Within Your Organization
Discover all the advice you need to turn your digital learning plan into a genuine success!

To support you in this venture, we have gathered elements that will help you throughout each step, from building your project brief to deploying the solution.

Here are the 5 steps we’re going to cover in this two-part article:

  • Step 1: Identify Your Managerial Goals
    How should you build your sales pitch for each discussion partner? Understanding the needs of decision-makers will improve your understanding of how to present your project’s benefits.
  • Step 2: Find The Right Partner
    How to choose the right platform? Understanding which LMS platform is the most adapted to your issue.
  • Step 3: Present Plan With Figures
    How can you calculate the ROI of your project? Show concretely how your plan will meet your business objectives by generating income or saving money.
  • Step 4: Be Convincing
    How to build your presentation and make it convincing? The best way to convince is to foster an open dialog with your managers by showing them how your plan will meet their issues. After hearing their issues, offer them solutions via a convincing presentation.
  • Step 5: Are You Ready?
    How to successfully set up the platform? Once these steps have been completed, would you be ready to pitch if your plan was accepted? Prepare a budget and a specific backward plan of actions to undertake before attacking your project.

Let’s now take the first step.

Step 1: Identify Your Managerial Goals

Understanding the needs of decision-makers will improve your understanding of how to present your project’s benefits.

It isn’t always easy to convince decision-making teams of the value of investments made in learning technologies. For this, it is necessary to understand their priorities and to show how your project will help them answer it.

In order to build a convincing project draft, you must develop your arguments with rigor and structure. You’ll have to determine a clear and precise vision of what you want to do, along with the positive impacts your plan will have on the company’s activities. To help you achieve this, we have identified the issues of the interlocutors you may come to work with and the arguments you could present them. All you need to do now is to adapt them to your structure.

Issues Digital training
Training Manager
  • Attract and retain the best talents
  • Hire and train internationally
  • Keep up with strong growth
  • Make people operational fast
  • Allows career-long skills development
  • Same content no matter the location
  • Training that effortlessly adapts to volume increases
  • Increases team collaboration and learning
General Direction
  • Reach financial goals
  • Stand out from competitors
  • Trigger collaboration and strengthen corporate culture
  • Reduce risks
  • Empowers employees
  • Generates commitment and collaboration between collaborators
  • Helps develop a company that is able to learn and improve itself naturally
  • Allows regulatory trainings to be carried-out quickly
Customer Management
  • Onboard customers efficiently
  • Increase the customer retention rate
  • Increase the average basket of each customer
  • Develop customer satisfaction
  • Facilitates and centralizes customer onboarding
  • Tracks customer activity and notifies potential contract terminations
  • Better understands customers to present them with new offers
  • A strong asset in customer relations
IT Department
  • Ensure IT security
  • Ensure consistency between the different technologies used within the company
  • Build lasting IT infrastructure
  • Allows the standardization of training via a secure medium
  • Can be integrated to existing tools
  • Reduces maintenance costs (if SaaS-based)
  • Allows regulatory trainings to be carried out quickly
Operational Management
  • Act to allow the structure’s development
  • Track and define the budget
  • Make decisions based on reliable data
  • Easily adapts to growth and level of activity
  • Makes it possible to save money and adapts to budgets
  • Allows access to lots of learning follow-up data for collaborators
Partnerships Management
  • Develop an ecosystem of partners
  • Facilitate interaction and sharing of information with partners
  • Identify and exploit new sources of revenue
  • Allows the fast and centralized onboarding of partners
  • Follows the activity of partners and explain their performance
  • Creates a lasting bond with partners by continuously training them
Sales Management
  • Hire, value, and develop potentials
  • Quickly onboard recruits
  • Find the best resources to sell
  • Find collaborators who are committed and actors of their own learning development
  • Substantially time-saving
  • Allows the quick and centralized onboarding of sales teams
  • Hosts a training that is continuous and constantly updated to meet the needs of teams
  • Develops commitment and learning according to individual need

Step 2: Find The Right Partner / How Should You Choose Your Platform?

Understanding which LMS platform is the most adapted to your issue.

Choosing a learning platform is a critical decision. To avoid mistakes and in order to find the best solution for your company, you need to see things through step by step.

Define Your Needs

Precisely defining the issue at hand is a particularly critical moment of the project. Indeed, it is often at this moment that misunderstandings arise which can cause long negotiations to fail (and make you lose months in the progress of your project). So before you ask how to functionally answer your problems, be sure to have defined your needs. It will never be wasted time! Once this strong basis has been established, you can follow the next step.

Here are a few questions we believe you should ask yourself:

The platform’s target
  • How many users?
  • What geographical distribution?
  • What languages do learners speak?
Learning Content
  • What are your needs when it comes to course content?
  • Who will create this content?
  • Using which mediums?
  • How can these needs be answered after launching the project?
The Educational Aspect
  • How do you want your learners to be trained?
  • What place will you grant social interactions?
  • Do you plan on using ludification mechanisms?
Concrete Implementation
  • Which kind of platform do you want (SaaS-based vs. in-house)?
  • What is your budget?
  • How long should deployment last?
  • Do you need support?
  • What are some possible integrations with the platform?
Analysis Of Results
  • How will you analyze your project’s results?
  • What kind of information about your learners do you need?

Beware: you need to have a clear vision of the evolution of these topics in the years to come. Indeed, you will need to set up an organization capable of evolving and adapting to market and technology changes. This type of organization, known as a learning organization, must be based on three pillars: the decentralization of vocational schools, social interactions and the fact of working in an agile way, always keeping an eye on data. Make sure that the LMS you have chosen functionally meets these obligations.

Find The Ideal Partner

Once you have a clear vision of your specifications, it is time to compare the solutions that exist in the market to select the one that is most suitable. We advise you to visit the websites of the various platforms, to inform you about their use cases and to read their publications. Then, most platforms will enable you to follow a demo module with a sales representative. During this module, you will be presented with the solution and its assets. These moments of contact are important because they will be your main source of information and comparison between the different actors. Take the time to ask questions and dispel any doubts you may have. Once you have clearly identified the actors that could fit your project, you can move on to the negotiation phase.

Anticipate Blocking Points

Building a digitization project is an ambitious undertaking that requires deep transformations within the company. In order to successfully implement the plan you created, it is necessary to anticipate the elements that could prevent it from coming to fruition.

  • Danger 1: Not Having A Comprehensive Plan 
    • The danger: While it is quick to show its benefits, the transition to digital training requires a substantial initial investment (both regarding costs and time). To underestimate it is very problematic because it risks endangering the project and creating big frustrations in your structure.
    • The solution: The right resources to succeed should be an essential part of the backward plan you will perform.
  • Danger 2: Underestimating The Magnitude Of Change 
    • The danger: As you will have understood, planning is a fundamental aspect of your training digitization process. Without a clear, achievable, and costed plan, you run the risk of under-estimating difficulties which could constitute a blocking point for you.
    • The solution: Do your research and set achievable goals. Then you just have to build a precise backward plan on the implementation of digital training in your company.
  • Danger 3: Auditing Partners Insufficiently 
    • The danger: Auditing one’s various partners is often performed in a hurry. However, in a project of this magnitude, it is essential to avoid the unexpected! Engaging with a partner and realizing, during deployment, that the partner will not be able to fulfill some of the features on which you relied can be fatal to the project.
    • The solution: Learning platforms are complex tools with many features. Take the time to build your specifications. At this stage, there’s no point in running, just get to the point!

In the second part of this article, we’ll explore 3 more steps to take for digitizing training within your organization. Stay tuned!

Originally published on August 30, 2018