How to Automate Employee Training

There is plenty of buzz at the moment surrounding AI technology and automation. They’re expanding the boundaries of our capabilities and changing workplace dynamics…but is it for better or worse? It can all be a bit much at times, can’t it? 

Automating employee training is one area that brings significant value, and the benefits can be realized almost immediately! 

New technologies, expanding teams and locations, and globalization all affect and cause businesses to adjust their employee training strategy. In the past, training had to be manually-assigned & delivered, or requested by each employee. 

Now, training automation allows your L&D and training administrators to design workflows, assign them to learners, then track progression and results with ease. 

We’re here to break down automated training for you, explaining:

• Why you should automate your employee training
• Why learning automation is important 
• Easy ways to implement automation into your training 
• The biggest benefits for your business

Let’s take some admin work off your plate! 

What is Automated Training? 

Automated training is workplace learning delivered and efficiently administered through software. The process to automate your training starts with organizing and designing content, sequencing it, and then using features within the program to take care of vital ongoing tasks. This saves significant time for your managers, training admins, and HR teams, which they can redirect to developing and improving training.  

Here are some simple examples of automated employee training: 

• Online onboarding paperwork that is automatically sent to new hires to start their training sequence in your learning management system.
• Automatically issuing a completion certificate and digital badges when learners complete regulatory training courses or other training towards a qualification.
• Bonus – you can trigger an action to automatically re-enroll the learner when their certification has expired and they need to review materials or re-test! 

Many businesses rely on an LMS to administer automated employee training, because LMS platforms have built-in automation features to make the process a breeze.

Why Automate Your Training? 

Manual training programs struggle to keep pace with the massive changes happening in modern business. Older methods of training can no longer provide what teams need to stay competitive and upskill for the future. 

• Training administrators need a more efficient way to reach distributed teams with personalized training.
• Learners need options for on-demand, virtual webinars offering the same valuable content as lengthy, expensive, in-person seminars. 
• Learners need anywhere access to self-paced training content, instead of waiting for materials to be sent to them or assigned.
• Learners need opportunities to discover new skills and interests, instead of HR determining everything they should learn. 

It’s important to discover what parts of your training are best automated. The tedious administrative tasks like assigning users and setting up notifications are no-brainers. But there are big opportunities with designing entire sequences of modules to bring a learner from onboarding through to being a seasoned employee. 

Importance of Automating Employee Training

Manual training programs have significant drawbacks when it comes to meeting modern workplace learning challenges. But some training professionals worry that automated training won’t be as effective as older methods. 

They worry that:

• navigating the new systems will be more trouble than it’s worth.
• training will be impersonal. 
• training quality will decrease as it’s digitized.

Thankfully, LMS platforms and online training software have been specially designed to solve these problems head-on. We’ll discuss more of the benefits below, but it’s certainly worth mentioning the powerful features an LMS offers to make things simpler for admins and learners!

Simple Ways to Automate Your Training

If L&D admin tasks are taking over your to-do list, it might be time to take advantage of these steps to incorporate more learning automation. 

1. Outline your training program to identify where automation would help

The first step is to find which parts of administrating or delivering your employee training are eating up valuable time, and would benefit from automated, online delivery. For example, using a form within your LMS is an easy way to gather important information from new hires.

Training content can automatically be sent to users based on the information they shared. 

2. Choose Your LMS 

Find the ideal partner to streamline your workplace learning. Pay close attention to their automation features and find a good fit for your sector and specific goals.

Continu Reading: 8 Tips to Find the Best LMS for Your Business

3. Upload and create your content 

Take the great materials you’ve already created and collect them together into your new training hub. Easily create engaging training materials where you have gaps. 

4. Automate your admin & HR work 

This is where automation shines! Group learners together based on criteria like role, location, or start date, and lay out a pathway of training content for them to work through. Set automated reminders for due dates and more to save your team significant time up front. 

5. Track progress

Monitoring training progress is another opportunity for automations to do the heavy lifting. Generate reports on user activity with just a few clicks and enjoy more detailed and accurate information on how well your training content is doing its job. 

6. Celebrate progress 

Automation features are also ideal for managing industry certifications. With an LMS, you can automatically issue completion certificates to prove that learners have finished a course and fulfilled requirements.

You can also take advantage of leaderboards, badges, and other fun and social ways to recognize your learners within the LMS, saving a lot of time for admins!

Continu Workflows

In Continu, Workflows are a major component of our automation. Continu's Workflow feature allows you to create automated assignments for your learners based on certain triggers or criteria. This could be a new user sign up, workshop registration, and more. 

Here’s an example of the key steps to automate your training with a platform like Continu.

Step 1 – Create a new workflow

Navigate to Admin > Workflows tab, then click "Add a Workflow"

Step 2 – Set your audience based on certain criteria

Is Associated With: 

This workflow will trigger for the user who is already affiliated with a Department, Group, Etc. 

Is Added to: 

The workflow will trigger when users are added to a particular Department, Group, Etc.

Hired Range: 

The workflow will trigger when users are hired today, 30 days ago, within the last specified days, or a specified amount of days ago.

Step 3 – Assign content (any piece of content you’ve uploaded to Continu) 

Step 4 – Set due dates, escalation contacts for reminder notifications, and customize your reminders

These are the types of automations that will save you significant administrative work! Learners will automatically receive notifications for content that is due or past due, and when they complete a course, they can be automatically assigned to the next one! 

The Benefits: Why You’ll Love Automated Training  

1. Scale & deliver training easily

Automated training through an LMS helps you to scale easily and add new users as your business grows. With automated training you can bulk enroll employees into learning tracks so they can automatically move through courses without needing extra work from administrators. 

Once you have designed a learning track, you’ll be able to save time and avoid duplicating work. Any changes you make will automatically save & update for all learners. 

2. Enjoy cost-savings 

Learning automation tools can save businesses big time! The amount of time and money spent on course design and content creation is generally fixed, but delivering that training can be a huge ongoing expense.

There are even hidden costs like travel for training events, cost of supplies, and the cost of lower employee productivity due to long in-person training days. 

Once a course is built in Continu's LMS, you can keep it updated or make changes without having to reprint and retrain the entire organization. An LMS saves spending on travel expenses, supplies, and lost productivity from in-person training. 

3. Boost engagement and success 

With more tedious tasks taken care of automatically, your L&D or training team can give their time to designing effective courses and materials. 

An LMS gives you automated tools to measure success rates, engagement rates, and calculate training ROI. This gives you concrete feedback and insight into how well your strategy is working – this information is much harder to gather without a digital training platform. 

4. Support consistent high standards  

Automated training streamlines the learning process for all your teams. With large distributed teams and remote work as the norm, it has become harder to ensure consistent training and knowledge standards. With automated workflows, each person who joins your team or changes their role will have a consistent experience as they work through training materials to get up to speed. 

When you switch to an LMS as the single source of knowledge for your training, you’ll have confidence that everyone is working from the same information they can easily access from anywhere. This is an important benefit for high-compliance sectors and large teams. 

5. Encourage self-driven learning 

Automated training helps you build a productive learning culture. Encouraging employee-led growth is a high priority in the boardroom right now. And 74% of employees are ready to learn new skills or retrain to remain employable in the current market. 

With an LMS that automates training, you’ll see motivation spread across your teams as they discover a better way to train. An LMS helps employees to move through training at their own pace, and allows you to adapt content to different learning styles, giving learners the flexible delivery they want. 

6. Give & receive helpful feedback 

Automated checkpoints and on-the-spot feedback during modules will help your learners know they’re on the right track as they move through courses. Automated gamification features like badges, leaderboards, and completion certificates also help you celebrate and keep your learners engaged without needing manual action from your admins. 

Automatically send a survey or request a review of webinars and courses to gather feedback from learners and use this information to improve your training. This saves a lot of time compared to manually requesting & gathering feedback!

Ready to implement automation in your workplace training?

The benefits are clear, and with so many demands on your time, automated training will make a big difference in the way your employees train and upskill.  

Why Continu? 

Continu is a tailored learning platform you can use to train and upskill your teams, empower your customers, and support partners. Continu was designed to be the single platform for all workplace learning, with features to build a learning culture inside and out. 

On top of the powerful automations, other Continu features include: 

• Intuitive, easy-to-use interface 
• Integrations with frequently-used tools like Zoom, Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, and many more. 
• Easily track assigned and completed courses
• Target content by role or geographical location
• Download, export, and share reports with ease
• Scalable platform, accessible from anywhere on multiple devices