Training employees is not a luxury but a necessity for most businesses engaged in the manufacturing industry. Besides adhering to the compliance guidelines that make training mandatory for workers in the manufacturing industry, these businesses also operate with complex heavy machines that can easily be dangerous when one doesn’t know what they are doing.
This means, manufacturing training cannot be taken lightly. It cannot be treated as a tick in the compliance requirement box. It needs to be effective. It needs to be impactful. It needs genuine efforts from the organizations side to make the training more engaging. At the same time, it needs genuine interest from the learners to be truly impactful.
Thankfully, with the rise of elearning technology, making training engaging is not an insurmountable challenge any more. However, the previous statement is only true when you have the right tools for the job.
A learning management system is one of the indispensable parts of any business’ online training arsenal. However, with so many options available in the market, how do you choose one that will make your manufacturing training more engaging?
Here are a few tips:
Conduct A Needs Analysis
If you don’t know what you are looking for in a learning management system, chances are high that you will end up making the wrong choice.
In order to determine the features that you need to address your organisation’s training needs, you must first understand said needs. To obtain this information, you must conduct a needs analysis.
During this analysis, ask yourself the following questions:
- What kind of training will you provide? Self-paced? Instructor led? Blended?
- Which parts of your daily operations do you want to improve by training employees?
- Where do the current gaps lie in your existing training program?
- Which features are relevant to addressing these gaps?
By answering these questions, along with any similar questions that you can think of, you can determine a list of features that you will require in your new LMS. Once this is done, you can move on to the next step.
Look For A Specialized Custom Product
With so many LMS being sold in the market currently, the LMS vendors have had to carve their own niche to stand out from the crowd.
THis is amazing news for customers. This means, you can not find a learning management system that was developed keeping the training needs of manufacturing businesses in mind.
It might even mean that you can find a number of options that offer the exact feature set you wrote down at the end of the previous step.
With that said, not all LMS are made alike. When you have compiled a list of LMS with manufacturing training features, move on to check their reviews. While analysing reviews, it is of course important to look at the overall ratings. However, don’t just stop there. Read all the reviews carefully and look for mentions of easy of use, the ease of using the various features, the time taken for deploying updates and new courses, and other specific things that an LMS may or may not do well.
Take A Trial
Fortunately, checking reviews is not the only way to compare industrial & manufacturing LMS. Most LMS vendors worth their salt offer free trials of their products.
Using these trials, you can see in real time, if you are able to use the features offered by the LMS with ease, and if the features you are looking for are truly as impactful as you had predicted. The most important thing that you can learn with a trial is the process of getting help when and if you get stuck using the LMS in the future.
The quality of support is a serious consideration. Even if you don’t face any problems during the trial, it is advisable to get in touch with the support department of the LMS to see how efficient they are with the support.
Conclusion
Choosing an LMS is like choosing any other product online. While the serious repercussions of choosing the wrong LMS may make things seem more complex than they are, we hope that this article will help you move forward in the right direction.