As you explore running a skills-based training program through an LMS, several complexities come to mind worthy for you to consider, but almost always, understanding the key differences between each LMS starts with one question:
For example, does it capably take someone from Electrical Level One, Electrical Level Two and so on all the way through to Master status?
Defining the journey alone to ensure that people create the necessary skills and experience is a very complex exercise. To illustrate, if we were to lay out the picture of one’s journey for all the possible roles at a dealership, it would cover the walls of a sizable office for a year.
That’s right – by the time you lay out thousands of courses, the business rules driving all of this and the elements that are regionally specific, brand specific, state law specific, etc., you have but the first layer of complexity to define.
The second layer consists of the business drivers necessary to put in place so that you are mapping everything in a dynamic way.
The third layer of complexity is that the skills path is constantly changing and never static. Within an LMS, you’re actively defining what your programs are based on the industry landscape before you at that time. So there is always plenty of tailoring and adjusting your programs over time. In addition, as things change, a new product line may be introduced, an old product or set of requirements may expire and unique service requirements may become active.
All of these elements and more are constantly evolving. The landscape you’re striving to deliver results within may not be in your control, which creates additional complexity.
Therefore, your LMS has to define aspects of the journey ahead in a way that is easily consumable, constantly calculating and readily understood by all utilizing it moving forward.
When we think about the issues above and how each might play a role in skills-based training programs being effective, how can we efficiently handle them so that there’s no bottleneck for training managers?
It starts with having a solid methodology that demands all components of the journey, business drivers and skills path within the LMS are accounted for. Let’s say you’re a tire technician working at a full-service tire shop. You learn how to provide essential services, then eventually learn how to change tires and then you’re in a position to be the shop manager. That makes perfect sense as a path to follow, except some managers use outputs from their LMS to calculate whether people are compliant or not. There’s an outside chance that they’re bringing in performance metrics for their retail locations to see any correlation between them. Managing those programs is difficult because they’re often not laced together cohesively. Instead, you have to go through literally 17 different systems to try to accomplish your goals.
Ultimately, what happens in that complexity is that training is seen as unnecessary pain that is not driving things forward in an organization. Nonetheless, we know that training managers have big priorities to tackle. Let’s explore those more specifically.
Day to day, the biggest priority for a training manager always appears to be ensuring that people receive training, not skills. Frankly, they’re focused on people receiving training on things like how to change a tire or learning a new product about to be released so that the training manager can check a box for the organization. Knowledge becomes a “nice-to-have” compared to each individual receiving the training they were supposed to.
As you can imagine, this point of view is problematic, to say the least. Yes, you may offer training for a new product to be released to the market. But what’s missing is a lot of thought about the organization’s bigger picture or a focus on ROI. Training managers are most driven by getting training out to people. They don’t often consider training a needle-moving effort for the organization.
However, some training managers care about how training fits together for better business outcomes and how it can result in people being better members of your network. From there, the next priority is executing training as efficiently as possible. Much of this next priority can be logistical: Do you have instructors in the right place at the right time? Do you have the current materials you need? When’s the next product release coming out? Aligning with that is critical.
Yet another priority is having the right people prepared to conduct training. This is followed by ensuring training across the organization – if only a piece of the organization understands specific skill sets, the company is in a precarious position. One or two people could walk out of an organization and take all that knowledge with them, whereas they could have dispensed it to other team members more evenly. At a granular level, if Bob has a rare skill set and then he retires, who can fill his place? Who’s the closest representation of Bob in the organization?
In the absence of a definition of what you need and where the gaps are, organizations will just throw people at training opportunities to be in the good graces of the parent company (“See! We’re compliant!”) and look good to their employees by sending them to the training.
In the same vein, training managers also want everyone to get every seat at the table, with fair distribution so that people across regions receive training the right way – a much more systematic and controlled way upon rollout.
If you’re rolling out a new product or technology that needs to be supported when the product’s released to the field, what you’d like to see happen is that your best and brightest people gain access to that new, advanced technology. In the old model, someone might draft a junior person who was free in the afternoon.
A knowledge-based approach that puts a premium on delivering courses above all else doesn’t add a lot of value.
Within the situations we’ve discussed here and for how we resolve certain issues, there are aspects of an LMS that are more ownable to LatitudeLearning than other skills-based LMS systems.
For one, we have experience working in many industries and our ability to help define and redefine a big step when it comes to rethinking your organization. LatitudeLearning’s team allows you to map out multiple programs for organizations that are very dynamic in their operation.
How so? Common skills are required across all brands, but, at times, unique skills are needed for specific brands. Defining what skills accompany what brand is vital for a business, which demands an LMS that can dynamically deliver all of that knowledge, apply it appropriately and give management complete visibility of activity at any given moment.
In contrast, far too often, an organization will certify someone through a course – which is fine for that individual at this point in time. But what happens when the certification changes a year from now? What happens when that same person doesn’t renew his certification and falls out of compliance?
For many LMS platforms, accommodating so much change is a serious issue that falls outside of its capability. Not so for LatitudeLearning.
The LMS can work dynamically and constantly be changing in terms of the complexity it can handle. Rather than a static or single program, LatitudeLearning can literally manage multiple programs and tracks for a technician – programs and tracks that are always calculating, always working, always empowering you to ramp up, ramp down and build out everything else. All while defining what the organization and its people need from the perspective of a skills mix.
What we’re talking about is an entirely new and different perspective on what makes for an invaluable, contributing member of your network. Through LatitudeLearning, you’ll consistently know where your people stand at any given time regarding their skill set and if the expectations of the network are being met. Want to ensure your organization can stay current with the constantly changing training demands and drive more people to participate? Stay in the loop and ahead of the curve by subscribing to the LatitudeLearning blog.
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