Scaling up your business is a balancing act. If you do it too quickly, you can expand well beyond your means. If you don’t do it quickly enough, you’ll be missing opportunities.
But even though the tempo at which you scale your business is very important to the outcome, the things entrepreneurs say are hardest to perform when scaling up always have to do with people.
Attracting and hiring quality talent needs to be done quickly and efficiently. If the business is scaling beyond your ability to manage it, you also need to think about creating a good management team. And because scaling up changes how a company conducts business, new procedures need to be created and put in place quickly.
That creates plenty of challenges for a business and many opportunities to experience crippling growing pains.
But you have at least one thing going for you – the software solutions that make scaling up easier. And just as you can find software that can help you manage inventory more efficiently, you can use eLearning systems to educate, train, and provide support for your employees.
What’s eLearning?
eLearning is learning conducted with the help of electronic educational technology. It’s not a new concept, as people have been using mechanical and electronic educational aides since the beginning of the 20th century. For most of its development, eLearning focused on providing education at a distance, using emerging audio and video technology.
The eLearning your business can use on its way to a bigger and better future will probably come in the form of learning management systems, or LMSs. LMSs are software solutions that are used to deliver, track, report, and administer classes, courses, training programs, and any other type of educational content.
For a business experiencing rapid growth, LMSs can be beneficial in several ways.Click To TweetLearning Made Fun and Easy
Gamification is not something a business-person would consider especially important in an employee training environment. The usual model for training, the one that involves sitting behind a desk, listening to a trainer, and probably looking at a slideshow or a similar presentation doesn’t have room for playing games.
But maybe it should. Because making learning fun and interactive can increase learner engagement and improve knowledge absorption and retention across all age groups. Gamification is not a feature every LMS offers, but it is increasingly present in the learning and development community, and it will probably become even more relevant.
Gamification is not the only novel way of learning offered by LMSs. Microlearning, or delivering small, bite-sized learning units followed by a quick test, is also hailed as a great way to improve learning outcomes. You might not be able to use microlearning to turn your employees into engineers, but it can be very effective for knowledge reinforcement.
A Convenient Way to Learn
LMSs allow you to organize and plan educational content from a single location. But the centralized planning doesn’t imply centralized learning because learning management systems allow learners to use the educational content at their own convenience.
LMSs (learning management systems) - training when it is wanted, where you want it. Click To TweetThe learning material is available to your employees 24/7, and it’s not dependent on them sitting in a classroom. The availability of learning management systems means that the learning materials can be accessed at the time when they’re needed the most.
If your employees need to look up some information from the training that they need immediately, they can access it right away – no need to contact a trainer, a teacher, or their colleagues.
And the best thing about it is that the learners access only the coursework that’s relevant to them. An LMS allows you to create separate coursework for separate roles, and even tailor it for specific employees. This will help you with anything from onboarding new employees, to preparing the existing employees for how their role will change when the business scales up.
An Easy Way to Track, Record, and Evaluate Learning
You can deliver the best coursework in the world and pour in as many resources as you possibly can into training your employees, and still have an inefficient learning program because you lack the most important thing – a way to track and estimate the learning outcomes.
Learning management systems can help with that as well. LMSs allow an unprecedented insight into the learning habits and outcomes of your employees. The data they provide can show you who learned what and how easily. LMSs can even remind you that your employees need refresher courses to stay on top of compliance requirements.
From onboarding to meeting compliance requirements, learning management systems offer you the critical support you need while your business is expanding. Click To TweetThey can improve employee retention, reduce the time it takes to train and retrain them, and do all that while saving you money.
eLearning Systems Comparison
And yes, different systems come with different features and some might be better for your business than other. but as long as you take the time to compare LMSs and find the right fit, you can end up with a system that will have your back throughout your business’ expansion.
