Make the most of your corporate training program with effective training management

Person working on corporate training management on a laptop.

Quicklinks

Importance of training management
Challenges of in-house training management
Reasons for outsourcing
Best Practices
Choosing the right provider
The bottom line.

If you are a corporate trainer or HR manager, you have likely been tasked with managing your company’s corporate training program to ensure that it runs smoothly. But training management is more complex than most people realize. Between planning, implementing, and evaluating learning programs, it can quickly turn into a full-time job — one that you don’t have time for. Nonetheless, training management is an essential part of any successful corporate training program. So what can you do to reduce the workload while ensuring good learning outcomes? In this article, we’ll explain what goes in to successful professional training management and how to implement it without overburdening your existing staff.

The growing importance of training management

Businesses need to adapt quickly to changing markets and technologies, and that makes effective training management more important than ever. Employees must keep their skills up to date, learn new skills, and maintain compliance with industry regulations — and corporate training makes all of that possible. But it takes careful management to keep training programs running smoothly.

Without training management, the corporate training program as a whole becomes less effective. For example, employees might miss out on legally required training. Or courses might be designed ineffectively, causing completion rates to suffer. Finally, a poorly managed training program can cost working hours, which means both higher personnel costs and less time spent on key projects. All these issues create unnecessary costs for the company and cause frustration for staff.

Key responsibilities of a training manager?

A training manager's role includes a multitude of tasks and responsibilities. These can include:

Planning and coordinating training
Tracking learner progress
Evaluating course success
Managing a catalog of courses
Maintaining the learning platform
Ensuring that trainings align with strategic goals
Managing course rollouts

Challenges of internal training management

Looking at that list of tasks, we can see that training management is a big job. Handling all that responsibility internally can be challenging — for numerous reasons. Here are just a few of them:

Lack of time and resources

One of the main issues with managing training programs internally is that companies rarely have the time and resources required to do this multi-faceted job correctly. Having an HR manager or trainer do it “on the side” will likely cause them to feel overworked, or mean that some tasks simply don’t get done. This situation can cause training programs to perform poorly and make it difficult for the person to complete their regular tasks — a lose-lose situation.

Lack of expertise and technological support

A lack of specialized knowledge and expertise in training management can also be a significant problem. If someone is handling training management alongside their regular duties, they will not likely have the skills needed to manage corporate e-learning properly. And although they could eventually learn those skills, it would take a significant investment of time and effort. Since these are exactly the people who are especially short on time, this would be especially challenging.

Moreover, it takes a great deal of expertise to use the learning management system (LMS) to its full advantage. If an internal training manager uses the LMS sporadically, they won’t get the practice they need to learn the system inside and out. That’s why many in-house training managers are unable to make the most of the LMS. That means that the company is paying for LMS functionality that it might never actually use.

Issues with quality control and results monitoring

To effectively manage course quality and monitor user results, training managers need to regularly conduct reviews and collect user feedback. If these tasks are only carried out sporadically, quality issues and learner drop-off can both go undetected.

[Translate to English:] Nadine Pedro, chemmedia AG

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Why outsource training management?

Outsourcing can be an excellent way to ensure that corporate training is managed effectively and efficiently. Here are some of the advantages of outsourcing:

Reduced workload and strategic focus

Outsourcing relieves the burden on the operations team and allows them to focus on the company’s strategic objectives. When they are no longer forced to split their attention between two different areas of responsibility, they can work more efficiently and effectively.

Access to innovative learning technologies and methods

Outsourcing your training management puts it in the hands of an expert whose full-time job is to design and manage training programs. They know the latest, most effective teaching methods and learning technologies and can help your organization implement them.

Customized training programs and greater flexibility

As mentioned above, learning management systems are extremely complex — but a skilled training manager knows how to get the most out of them. They will be able to customize your company’s training programs and design learning paths for people at all levels of your organization, so everyone’s learning needs are met as efficiently as possible.

Cost-benefit considerations

It might initially seem cheaper to keep your training management in-house, since you already have employees who are involved with corporate training. But when you consider that the extra responsibilities take time away from their regular tasks, and that they will be less efficient and less effective than a professional training manager, you can quickly see how outsourcing might have a better cost-benefit ratio in the end.

Best practices: Lessons from a rollout with 150,000 learners

Chemmedia recently managed the rollout of a company-wide compliance training for an international automotive group. The result? By creating a coherent overall concept, choosing the right LMS, and establishing collaborative working methods, we reduced the content creation workload by 60%. Even better, an impressive 98.5% of the 150,000 employees completed the training course by the end of the 4-month rollout period.

Here are some of the best-practices that proved themselves in this project

Establish the right internal structures

Before starting the project, we needed to determine fixed responsibilities, create content templates, and standardize and automate the rollout and management processes. This ensured that the project could be completed as efficiently as possible.

Analyze the target group

In this case, the training needed to be adaptable for all of the company’s office staff — globally. That meant 10 different languages, different cultures, and extremely different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and levels of prior knowledge. A careful analysis allowed us to meet the needs of all these learners.

Ensure a clear, easy learning process

With this many learners, it was crucial to reduce the number of support tickets to a bare minimum. That meant ensuring that the learning platform was extremely easy to use and the training modules were intuitive and, clear, guiding learners step-by-step down the learning path. We also used “microlearning” to further simplify the learning process.

Minimizing learning time

A training program at such a large scale is enormously expensive in terms of personnel hours. Because employees complete the training during their regular hours, the course needed to be as streamlined and effective as possible to control costs. We streamlined the course at two levels. Firstly, the overall course was kept as short as possible. Secondly, we made the course adaptive. People in certain departments or positions could opt out of certain modules, and employees could also test out of modules if they already knew the material. This significantly reduced overall learning time and kept motivation high.

Encourage completion with reminders and management reports

It is never easy for employees to make time for mandatory training. They get busy, distracted, or sick, and quickly forget to make the training a priority. We ensured an exceptionally high completion rate with automated reminders and simple reports that allowed managers to see which employees had not yet finished the course.

Build the training program using collaborative working methods

We streamlined the process of building the training program by using a collaborative, agile workflow. This allowed us to have multiple authors, editors, translators, and corporate education experts working in parallel. We used Knowledgeworker Create to manage the course design, agreements, reviews, translation and approval processes, which kept all info in a central location and let us easily reuse media for all versions of the course. This ultimately reduced the workload for content creation by 60% in comparison to previous projects.

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From 0 to 100 in just four months

How an international automotive group digitalized its worldwide compliance training in short order.

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How to choose the right training management provider

If you’re considering outsourcing your corporate training management, you’ll want to choose your management provider carefully. Look for someone with extensive experience, so you can rely on them to make the best decisions for your particular situation.They should be experts in corporate training management, not just course creation or HR. As we’ve shown above, these fields are related, but training management requires a holistic approach to be effective. Finally, make sure that they work with software solutions that are a good fit for your company and that they can adapt them for your needs.

Here are some questions you may want to ask:

What types of training programs have you managed in the past? With how many participants?
What LMS do you work with? Why is that your top choice?
Which parts of the training process do you manage?
What results or cost savings have you delivered to your clients in the past?

The bottom line.

Corporate training management can help make your corporate training program as effective and efficient as possible. With effective management, you can increase course completion, reduce course creation times, get the most out of your LMS, and reduce training costs. An effective training program can even improve employee retention. However, training management is very time-consuming and requires a great deal of expertise. For this reason, many companies find that outsourcing their training management is the most cost-effective solution.