How A TMS Can Benefit Every Team In Your Business – Part 1

How A TMS Can Benefit Every Team In Your Business – Part 1
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Summary: Have you ever wondered how a Training Management System like Administrate can help all the teams in your business? Wonder no more!

7 Ways A Training Management System Benefits Your Training Administration Team

If you’re looking for a way to make sure your training operation runs smoother, a TMS (Training Management System) could be the answer to your problems. Training Management Systems, like Administrate, are designed to manage your entire training operation for you, so your staff don’t have to deal with as much administration, repetitive tasks, and duplicate data entry.

How A TMS Can Benefit Every Team In Your Business
Discover how a TMS (Training Management System) could be the answer to your problems and make sure your training operation runs smoother.

If you’re considering a TMS for your business, you may think that only a few people in your business will actually get any use out of the system, but we’re here to show you that your entire business can use a TMS in a useful way!

In this series of articles, we’ve picked the most common teams of staff we think will be present in a training company, and highlighted all the different ways they can use Administrate to improve their output as a department and help your entire business run more effectively! Stay tuned for more articles in this series in the coming weeks!

First up let’s tackle the team that is probably going to get the most benefit from a Training Management System – your Training Administration team.

1. Quickly Schedule Your Courses

If you run a lot of courses, chances are a lot of your Training Administration team’s time is spent scheduling those courses so you can sell them online, and so you can keep track of when and where a course is happening, as well as which tutors and resources will be attached to the class.

If you’re running several instances of the same course, that’s going to mean a lot of copying and pasting to schedule each course individually. Details such as the date and the tutor may change, but things like the course description, the length of classes, the number of classes in a course, and the assessment method are going to remain the same, and that is going to get very boring very quickly!

Administrate allows you to schedule courses in just a few clicks, saving your team lots of time and effort, so they can get on with more important tasks. With Administrate, you can create course templates, meaning you template most of the details of a course you are scheduling, and you can then copy and use this template across all the instances of that course you need to schedule. Now the only information you need to go in and edit is the changeable points – everything else will stay the same and be pre-populated for you. Not only will this make this job far less dull, it also cuts down the chance of human error, and the wrong details being copied and pasted into the wrong box then published on your website!

2. Assign The Right Tutors

Aside from doing the repetitive side of course set-up, there’s also the scheduling side, where you need to make sure you’re assigning the right tutors for the job.

Administrate helps you do this in a number of ways:

  • You can set the relevant qualifications that each member of staff holds when you enter them into the system. That way if a certain class can only be taught by people who hold that qualification, you can make sure you filter your tutors correctly, and only assign the best people for the job.
  • You can track when tutors are on holiday, so you’ll never assign a member of staff to something and then have them not turn up because they are actually out of the office.
  • When tutors are on holiday, or already assigned to a conflicting course, Administrate will make it impossible for you to select them for another class by removing them from the available tutors list when you are scheduling your courses. This means you will never be able to double book your staff!

3. Manage Your Resources

As with your tutors, it’s important to make sure the correct resources are assigned to each of your courses. This can cover things like classrooms, teaching materials, specialist equipment such as vehicles, projectors, computers, etc. Basically, anything you need to make sure your course runs successfully.

First of all, you can record all your resources within Administrate, to make sure you have a complete record of every resource you have as a business. Administrate allows you to sort your resources exactly how you want them, with the use of custom fields meaning you can get as detailed as you want to. This can be handy if you want to do things like record the serial numbers of all your laptops, or the registration numbers of your vehicles, so you always know exactly which one you are booking a course.

You can also set the location of each of your classrooms and resources to make sure they are always assigned to the correct location and are never accidentally assigned to somewhere they cannot actually be used.

Additionally, you can include information like whether something is out of service, or how many copies of a certain book you own, so the person scheduling the courses always has the full picture, even if they are based in a different location to the resources themselves.

Then, when you schedule your courses, you can pick the exact resources you need, and be confident that everything assigned to that course will be present, and be in working order!

4. Gather Feedback Easily

One hugely invaluable task whenever you run a training course is to get feedback from your students. However, we do appreciate that this can be a hugely time-intensive activity.

Administrate is designed to make sure you can gather all the vital feedback that you need in order to measure your training effectively, without you having to spend hours on both collecting and analysing the data!

First of all, our fantastic SurveyMonkey integration means you can send your SurveyMonkey surveys directly from Administrate. Not only does this allow you to use the contact data you already have for particular classes, but it also means all the responses can be pulled back into Administrate.

This means less work for you when collecting the data, as Administrate does it all for you, and all the information can be pulled directly into our reporting system so you can analyse it however you want to.

5. Automate Your Communications

Your Training Administration team probably spends a huge amount of time just sending emails to your students. Most of the emails will contain the same sorts of basic information, such as sales confirmation, class instructions, or survey requests, but obviously specific details such as contact details and class details will need to be changed every time.

This means a lot of copying and pasting, gathering all the details you need to input into the emails, and double checking the details are correct for each email, which means the time you spend on each email can really start to add up!

Administrate allows you to set up templates for all the emails that you need to send, and then it will pull through all the specific details from the system, such as student’s name, email address, the course they have purchased, and the specific dates of the course. This means you can be confident all your emails will always go out with all the correct details in them, without you having to spend time double checking them.

You can then set the trigger events which will tell the email it’s time to send. These can be things like a certain date or a customer completing a sale, and will cause the email to send automatically. This essentially means that once all your templates and triggers are set up once, you really don’t have to worry about the email side of things again unless you need to add a new email template into the mix.

6. Assign Tasks To The Right People

If you work in a large team, split over different offices or different locations, it can be hard to split up the work that needs to be done to people other than yourself. You can spend a lot of time just dishing the work out, and emailing people what they need to do, which can really eat into your productivity.

Using Administrate to assign tasks to people is a much quicker way of working, ensuring everyone knows exactly what they are doing without you wasting too much time in the process.

When you create an event you can assign tasks to that event (which you can also template using task workflows, so the same tasks can be copied across multiple events with just a few clicks) and then assign a person to be responsible for that task. You can also make sure that people are emailed whenever they are assigned to a task, so they know exactly what work they have to do.

All the tasks for each event will be displayed on the event screen, on everyone’s homepage so they can see their own personalised list of tasks, and will be emailed to them every morning as part of their task list, so it’s really easy to keep track of what still needs to be done and who is responsible for it!

7. Creating Learning Tracks

Sometimes it can be hard to clearly plan out the different training that you offer and how it all connects to one another. This can be all the different pieces of work a student has to do to gain a qualification or all the different courses a student has to complete to add up to a larger qualification. It’s important your students have full visibility on what is expected of them, and that you have visibility to how your students are progressing, and what work still needs to be done.

That’s where learning tracks come in! Learning tracks allow you to create personalised learning plans for your students depending on what learning outcomes they want to achieve. You can plan out exactly what training they need to complete, and in what order, to make sure they get the training result they want.

Originally published at www.getadministrate.com.