Broaden your portfolio of services with training management via your members’ CMS portal or extranet.
Content management systems (CMS) are typically used for publishing content but can also offer a training management capability which supports your need to offer training and education to your members, customers or workforce, online via CMS enterprise portals.
The right training management tool will track the training progress and history of users. It will enable sophisticated management of training programs with visual training pathway designers, simple tools, online payments for units on registration and powerful reporting.
A study on the importance of employee training for the organisation’s success published in the International Journal of Science and Research concluded training resulted in improved morale, less supervision requirements and increased productivity.
Training is important for your workforce but also as a service for your customers with potential to generate revenue. A web CMS platform that has the capability to deliver courses via your portal makes the business case even more compelling.
What to Look Out For
Here are some features to consider for your online training course delivery.
Visual course program interface
A visual user interface for mapping training programs, viewing employee progress and awarding competencies is a key feature of a modern course management system.
Management and administration
The training application should make it easy to run courses with material hosting (files, videos, etc), a calendar for session times and student history. A good training system will also manage events, help people book resources and facilitate online payments for courses.
Standards compliance
If your online training application is standards-based (like the SCORM standard) you can purchase third-party training packages and run them on your system. This saves the hassle of repackaging the content for your training environment.
Multi-site
With multi-site capability you can run many different training courses on the same Web CMS across public Web sites and member based portals. This is useful for organisations with many brands, branches and locations.
Training Example
Utilising the training capabilities of your web CMS via a secure member portal brings the added flexibility to offer courses to both internal and external audiences on the one single platform.
MIPS
Addressing the needs of the Australian healthcare practitioner community, Medical Indemnity Protection Society Ltd (MIPS) is a membership organisation committed to providing healthcare practitioners with the protections, security and support they need to practice with confidence.
The MIPS website services a 40,000 strong membership, allowing members to access information, manage membership, conduct online training, download membership documents and update their details.
MIPS saw the value in extending online engagement to facilitate greater support and training to the community.
Working together with the Elcom team, new features were added including the implementation of automated email, SMS alerts and risk education dashboard. Elcom's Training Manager provided an effective platform to deliver MIPS’ initial business needs and a path forward for enhanced development.
Game on for Training?
What does the future hold for training? Trends like virtual reality (VR) and gamification are bringing exciting dimensions to learning and development programmes. VR can be used to “immerse” a person in a training environment to gain situational experience and gamification turns training into a “sport” where points are scored and goals are achieved.
Training delivery has come a long way and today’s technology is taking it a step further by enabling integration through a CMS enterprise portal platform for greater engagement and commercial potential.
Further Reading
