An excerpt from the soon-to-be-released book from Tortal Training
You have training content. You have people who you want to train.
Can’t you just stand back and let people find the training they need and take it?
Maybe you could do that. But if you do, your training will quickly become random, disorganized, untrackable, ineffective and chaotic. Your LMS can prevent those bad things from happening. And good results depend on good organization.
How do you start organizing your training materials so your trainees can get the most from your LMS?
Simple answer. Preplanning and organization. Start by considering and listing who your trainees are. If you are a retailer, for example, perhaps you have franchise owners, store managers, district managers, salespeople, technicians, and more. List them.
Once you define who the users are, the next step is to organize your LMS into separate catalogs for each of those groups.
In the background of this planning, it is wise to be thinking about the most important goals you have for your business and your organization. If you do, many of the smaller decisions you make as you plan your training will support that “big picture” of who you are and what you want to achieve.
Upfront planning is critical. That means mapping out how you want your curriculum to look, and how you want it to operate. It can be very helpful to do what universities and colleges do when they organize their courses. Most often, they use a numbering system to name their courses. You can do the same for your catalogs, courses and content packages. Many small companies don’t plan this kind of nomenclature effectively. The result is that as they grow, they must reorganize and regroup their training materials. And those complications can be prevented by simply planning ahead.
Who Will Have Access to Your Catalogs?
After defining who your groups of trainees are, the next step is to think about who should have access to the different catalogs, and how they can access the training materials in them.
You can, for example, give only certain people access to certain catalogs. Your salespeople, for example, might not be able to access the training materials that will be used by store managers. In other words, certain catalogs are restricted, which means only certain employee groups can access them.
To look at this from the opposite perspective, certain groups of employees have open access to certain catalogs, and not to others. Salespeople or district managers, for example, might have unlimited access to certain catalogs. And they might not have access to other catalogs and content.
Furthermore, you might choose to allow members of specific groups to self-enroll in courses that are contained in specific catalogs. You might decide, for example, to allow all your store managers to self-enroll in any of the courses in the catalog you have set up in your Manager Training catalog.
Another thing to consider? If you have specific training for upper-level executives and leaders, that will belong in a separate catalog too. Only executives at those high ranks will be allowed to self-enroll.
To summarize, you need to know who your trainees are and organize your content catalogs for them.
