This won’t be another article on corporate training. Thousands of articles – as well as books and thesis papers – have been written about that already, as corporate training is an important and complex subject.
Of course, even a subject like that can be put in simpler terms. The importance of corporate training has been well known for many decades: the success of the Ford and GM mass production lines, as well as the KFC and McDonalds “fast food” concept, wouldn’t have been possible without it. In 1964, Gary S. Becker, a university professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, had published a book called Human Capital. He wrote about how human resources were gradually turning into the most important assets of a business; later, in 1992, he went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work. In our current time, we can see that this process has already been completed: indeed, human resources have become the most important assets of a business, along with information. Like with any other assets, their potential economic value needs to be increased (“enriched”) further: this is accomplished by training employees in accordance with the long-term goals of the company and its divisions.
As we know, another important business asset is knowledge. The ability to acquire, accumulate and use knowledge is a major competitive advantage in any industry. For example, every employee at McDonalds possesses a standard set of knowledge and skills, enabling every customer to receive their order in a predictable amount of time. You could think that there’s an entire army of trainers constantly zipping around the tens of thousands of McDonalds cafes to keep every employee’s knowledge up to date.
Of course, that is not the case. It’s no secret that this feat is accomplished through the use of learning management systems (or LMS). These systems make it possible for employees to train at any time, anywhere: at home, at the workplace, during daily commutes. Every home and workplace computer becomes a training center, reducing the need for expensive onsite training, making schedules more flexible and resolving the issue of training trip expenses. The use of LMS enables companies to develop their own training courses and to manage their information resources and their training processes much more effectively.
In theory, anyway. In practice, any attempt at setting up a corporate training program using simple free software will inevitably run into issues. Such software always needs adaptation and tweaking, requiring the company to hire a team of programmers. Other companies choose to pay enormously to have a commercial LMS, created by big-name (or even not-so-big-name) developers, deployed for their use; in many cases, they then see costs climb higher and higher as their goals remain out of reach.
We know this because these companies often come to us for help. For this reason, we’ve developed our own LMS that we’ve named Loodle. We’ve already deployed this system for several of our clients.
How does it work?
Loodle: the basics
The main idea of Loodle is this: “Let’s only have the basic LMS functionality built into our system, but make that all possible basic LMS functionality”. We’ve made our system to be simple and intuitive to use, easily modified to include any functionality required for a particular use case, and easily integrated with any systems that a client may be employing.
Upon logging into Loodle, the Administrator enters their profile. From there, they may add new users, manage user lists, create and edit user passwords, review user performance analytics, register and manage individual companies within the holding company as well as divisions within each company.
The company creation window looks like this:
And this is how a user list is edited:
This interface may be called minimalistic, but simplicity and functionality are its primary qualities. The Administrator is given access to all the tools required for managing corporate learning – and to these tools alone. If the Administrator’s duties are expanded to include, for example, managing the training courses themselves or the internal communications related to upcoming training sessions, the Administrator role will be given the appropriate controls (the training course management tools or the Announce Session button, respectively). A Manager will typically have fewer rights, being able to manage only the users in their company or division, but not the companies or divisions themselves.
Anyone sees only what they are supposed to see. For a common user, this would be their personal statistics and a selection of courses and tests to be taken. Some tests may be required, as decided by the Administrator.
A common user profile looks like this:
When taking a test, the user will receive a selection of random questions from the common question pool. The number of questions is set by the Administrator, as is the time allotted for the test.
That’s not all. We’ve anticipated the need for managing the training courses themselves. Training materials may be used in various forms: HTML references, e-books, presentations, video files etc. Your Loodle-based corporate LMS will present the courses as hyperlink lists. Tests may also be linked to courses, with the user being required to take the course first before taking the test. The system is simple, but it works brilliantly.
Loodle: LMS minus headache
And now, the main event. We can guarantee that the deployment of Loodle as your corporate LMS will be easy and cost-effective. This is because we will be deploying the system for you – in accordance with your technical specifications, of course. We will structure your instance of Loodle as you see fit, introduce all the course and test content, and create training schemes for every role in your organization (with appropriate training course sets). We will create an optimal configuration for Loodle analytics, with data table display and Excel export functions, multi-view data sampling and data visualization in the form of graphs.
If you prefer, you can use the default Loodle UI design – but you can also order a unique individualized UI design. Like this one:
If you don’t mind using LMS over the web, we’ll prepare and deploy a web server for you. If you prefer working in a private cloud, we will deploy a similar configuration from your data processing center.
Of course, we’ll help you set up the company structure (with companies within the holding company and divisions within each company) within the system, as well as all the required employee notification services over email, SMS and other channels. We’ll also teach your own administrators to do these things. If you wish your system to have automatic user identification in accordance with the current employee database, we’ll deploy a module for synchronizing your user database with the active employee catalog. The LMS that we create for you will be exactly the one your company needs – that’s our motto.
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To sum up, it could be said that every LMS works using the same concepts: employees view the training portal through a browser, and the portal provides the full view of training materials and certification tests to every user according to their role in the company. There’s a dedicated portal for instructors, as well as a training process control system for managers. Also, most LMS include suites of software tools for use in developing interactive training materials. It is assumed that any corporation that makes use of all these wonderful tools should be able to devise a complex training strategy that would increase the skills of its employees with maximum efficiency – though, as we’ve already seen, things are not so simple in practice.
If it is possible to create a “silver bullet” LMS, then Loodle is it. It is, at its core, an extremely simple and friendly solution, easy to deploy and support, and we will pledge to help you on every stage. We can create a working solution – that is, your own corporate LMS, easily scaled up, modified and added to – within only two or three weeks. Moreover, the expenses of deploying a Loodle instance are comparable to “entry-level” prices for deploying commercial LMS.
The peak season is coming. It’s time to train your salespeople, consultants, customer service assistants and administrators. Contact us!