Choosing an online learning platform or solution for your training needs is crucial to the success of your training program – and the fact that there are hundreds of options available can make it feel like an overwhelming decision.
With this post, we want to help prevent you from either buying something your organization doesn’t need, purchasing something that isn’t right for your organization, or even making no decision at all because it’s so overwhelming.
Here are a few tips and considerations when researching training providers to help you pick the right fit for you.
Before Selecting an Online Training Partner
Your first step should be to decide what you want to accomplish with your training program. First ask yourself: What are the challenges your organization is facing right now? Chances are that training can help. Then, consider these questions:
- What are your priorities? Do you want to focus on upskilling? How do you want to deliver training? What training do you want to deliver?
- How should learners find training? Search a library on their own? Be assigned lessons and courses?
- What features do you want? Do you want a virtual classroom capability? Reinforcement boosters? Built-in quizzes? Customization options?
- What do you already have? Have you considered compatibility with your existing systems, such as an LMS, Microsoft Teams, or your company intranet?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you can begin to align training with business goals and needs. Whatever you choose needs to effectively support the choices administrators and learners make to achieve desired learning outcomes. Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all answer.
What If I Pick the Wrong Solution?
There is certainly a fear of making the wrong choice. Everyone faces that in their daily lives. But what that can lead to is often making no decision at all.
By not making any decision for an employee training platform, you and your employees will be missing out on reaping the benefits of the full potential of your workforce. Employees could become disengaged when they’re not equipped with the skills they need or when they don’t see clear paths for advancement, and you’ll likely begin to see higher turnover.
It’s important to answer the above questions and consider your training goals. Having more information allows for better comparison capabilities and finding the solution that will really work for you and your organization.
If you know you need an online learning solution but can’t seem to make a decision for fear that it’s the wrong one, remember: there are no wrong choices, only learning opportunities.
Risk Mitigation vs. Skills Development
Training can come in all shapes and sizes, but when you really break it down, there are two ways to approach a training program. Either you are completing risk mitigation training or skills development.
Here’s the difference:
Completing training for risk mitigation is merely providing training to meet standards at the end of the year or giving learners the ability to select and view random lessons. Examples of this include compliance and safety. It’s also usually not personalized or relatable to their role, which is important in today’s workplace.
Developing individual employee’s skills can help your workforce get to the next level. While it can include the yearly need-to-dos, it goes beyond compliance or technical skills and provides a well-rounded training experience that can be personalized for each employee’s journey. Taking a skills development approach helps employees see clear paths for new opportunities and moving forward in their career.
If you know you need to develop employees’ skills, but aren’t sure where to even start, BizSkills could be the online learning platform for you. The BizSkills platform allows you to easily customize and automate a skills development program based on the most important training needs in your organization, personalized and targeted by job role.
BizLibrary’s Online Learning Solution
There are hundreds of LMS and training content providers on the market that offer similar topic libraries, that are award-winning, mobile-friendly, and offer microlearning videos with the newest technology.
So, what makes BizLibrary unique? Here are a few of our differentiators:
Curated Content Collection
Some providers boast huge libraries of 50,000+ pieces of content but bigger doesn’t always mean better. An overwhelming library can be difficult to navigate and manage. Our library is carefully curated to make sure clients are getting the most up-to-date, expert-driven content. By making our videos in house and partnering with trusted producers, we can respond quickly to our clients’ content needs while also being able to source external experts to achieve a variety of styles and formats.
Quality over Quantity
On top of curating the content in our library, we also continually evaluate our content to determine what needs to be added, updated, or retired from the library. The average rating of our content is 4.3/5 stars, and the average age of our content is less than four years old.
Simple and Seamless LMS
Our learning platform is easy to use for administrators and learners alike. In addition to making assigning and tracking training easy, our learning management system has several features to further engage learners, such as learning initiatives, gamification, and a recommendation engine.
Ability to Personalize Training
Our BizSkills platform allows organizations to scale personalized skills development by getting the right content to the right people at the right time, with our more than 500 off-the-shelf job roles mapped to our award-winning content. Additionally, our content customization tool allows administrators to customize video lessons with branding, company-specific information, interactions, and quizzes.
Partnership
Yes, we are a vendor. But we are also so much more – we are your partner. In addition to exceptional technical support, we also provide a strategic partnership through our Client Success team. From implementation, our team will provide the tools and resources needed for a successful learning program. We are expert advisors and provide best practices and guidance on developing marketing and communication plans, and executing exceptional program management. Your success is our success.
Who We Support
We have strong integrations with learning management systems like Cornerstone, Absorb, Schoox, and SAP SuccessFactors. We also integrate well with BambooHR and offer single sign-on and identity integrations through SAML 2.0 and Okta. Our content can also be used in any system that accepts AICC, SCORM or is xAPI compliant content.
We realize we’re not a perfect match for everyone. Your needs are unique. Maybe you need content in Portuguese or are looking for PMP certification content. If that’s the case, we’ll give you our honest take on whether we’re a fit and direct you to who is. We won’t be able to meet every need every time, but we’re always innovating and expanding our solutions.
BizLibrary clients include small and mid-sized organizations, and we partner especially well with those in manufacturing, construction, business services, hospitality, finance, consumer services, and transportation. However, clients from all industries have seen great success with our product offerings. Through our flexible and scalable online learning solutions, we help them tackle challenges that range from improving compliance effectiveness, to developing managers and leaders, to upskilling and reskilling their workforce.