Training Management System Features And Benefits
You may have heard a lot about how you need a Training Management System (TMS) to effectively manage your training, but do you actually know all the things a TMS could offer you?
Commonly confused with a CRM or an LMS, a TMS is the perfect tool for training providers to manage all of their training administration with as little effort as possible!
Let’s take a look at what a TMS does, and the features you can commonly expect from such a system, so you can see if it’s something your training offering needs!
What Does A TMS Do?
A Training Management System is designed to be the central point of your entire training operation. It will give you the ability to manage all the aspects of your business from the system, as well as enable you to integrate all your other favourite tools into the system. In this way, you can have complete oversight of your entire training business without having to switch between lots of different tools and systems.
Being able to integrate with the tools you love like this means you are never limited by one piece of software’s functionality, and you can essentially build a customised system which reflects the way your business works. No more dealing with off-the-shelf options – now you can find a system that works around our team!
So why do you need a TMS to manage your entire training operation? Scheduling and running large amounts of courses requires a lot of organisation and coordination between all the teams in your business. You need to make sure that classes are running when they are supposed to be, that you have free classrooms, instructors, and resources when you need them, that your students are receiving all their class-related communications, that all your course details are up to date, and a hundred other things all at the same time!
Trying to manage this across spreadsheets and different systems can get confusing very quickly! Not only does it heighten the risk of human error, but it also wastes lots of your teams’ time and effort.
A Training Management System pulls all your course management administration into one place, so it’s easier to manage and easier for your entire team to access! Rather than working across multiple places, everything is right where you need it, and you don’t need to waste time hunting around for the information you need.
What Features Will It Come With?
All Training Management Systems will come with different functionality, but here are the top things we think a TMS needs to include:
- A Course Management System (CMS) to allow you to publish your courses online directly from your TMS. This means you don’t need to waste time making edits in two places, and your website will always be completely up to date. It also means you can sell your courses directly through your website and accept online payments, so buying training from you is super easy for your customers.
- A CRM to store all your customer, potential customer, past customer, staff, and vendor details! This means all your contact details are always really easy to find, and your team can be confident since they’re working from the correct data.
- A reporting system that links up with your TMS. This means you can report on any of the data you have entered into your TMS instantly, without any additional work for your team. It also means once you have your reports set up they will always be updated in real-time and display the most recent version of the data when you open them.
- A Learning Management System (LMS) to allow you to offer eLearning to your students with ease.
- A sales system to give you the ability to track all your leads and sales, and create a sales workflow that reflects how your team works.
- Marketing functionality to allow you to do things like create landing forms on your website or use a message centre to deal with customer enquiries.
How Will This Save Me Time And Money?
The main aim of a TMS is to save your training business both time and money! You should be able to use a TMS to enable you to get more done in the same time and with the same amount of staff, as you can pass over a lot of the boring and repetitive tasks to the TMS for it to handle.
Save Time
- Use an automated communications feature to automate your standard emails to your students. After you write the content and set the trigger event, the email will send when it’s triggered, with no need for any further input from your team.
- Integrate some of your favourite tools with your TMS, meaning you can manage everything from one place rather than logging in and out of lots of different places to get everything done.
- Integrating your website with your TMS means you don’t need to update all your information in two places, as the information will always be pulled from your Course Management System in real-time.
- Staff from all over the business can enter their information into the system directly, for example, instructors can input attendance records directly rather than emailing them to the Training Administration team, who would then need to input the information into your attendance system manually.
Save Money
- Get more done with the same sized team, so no need to hire new staff as frequently as you may have to have done in the past.
- A Training Management System has the functionality of a number of other systems you may be currently paying for separately, meaning you can make the move to one system to handle most of your tasks and save on those monthly software bills.