Looking for employee training software for your business? This full guide will help you choose the right one. Let’s get into it.

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Employee training has become a non-negotiable aspect of operational workflow for forward-thinking organizations. After all, a well-trained employee is typically more productive and can contribute meaningfully to business success. But did you know that recent statistics show that 59% of employees still receive no formal training at work?

Shocking data, yes. But it also provides you with a unique opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by giving your employees training courses that’ll boost their efficiency and operational outputs.

But here’s the million-dollar question — what employee training software should you use?

In this guide, we’ll give you a comprehensive introduction to employee training software and our top recommendations, including their features, pros, cons, and more.

What is Employee Training Software?

Employee training software is a digital platform that helps companies streamline the process of delivering training courses to their employees. Such training could include everything from onboarding new hires to skill improvement courses and compliance training.  

Usually leveraged by the learning and development (L&D) team within a company, these digital training solutions ensure a smoother and more efficient training process, thereby improving knowledge retention and learning success among employees.

However, employee training software does more than just facilitate the delivery of training materials. They also offer add-on features such as:

• Interactive learning modules
• Course creation
• Assessments
• Segmentation
• Progress tracking
• Metrics and analysis. 

These features can provide organizations with insight into the effectiveness of their knowledge advancement programs. These solutions can also help highlight areas for improvement within their operations.

What are the Three Types Of Employee Training Software?

Employee training software is not one-size-fits-all. Depending on your workforce's unique learning needs and preferences, your HR or L&D team may require tools with specific features. 

Thankfully, you have options. Here are three types of training software you can leverage for your employee training programs:

1. Learning Management System (LMS)

This is probably the most popular type of employee training software, with statistics showing a global adoption of 73.8 million users.

An LMS is a platform that allows you to compile and assign relevant training materials to the appropriate learners. This platform also allows you to track each participant’s learning progress and completion status.

Generally, an LMS acts like a central hub for knowledge where employees can come to access and undergo training. However, it will typically not offer authoring or course creation features.

Key features

• Course management and delivery
• Progress tracking and reporting
• Assessment and certification tools

Best use cases

• Employee onboarding
• Compliance training

2. Learning Content Management System (LCMS)

An LCMS gives you the functionalities of an LMS and then more. With an LCMS, you get authoring capabilities, which allow you to create training content, in addition to compiling, managing, and delivering it.

In addition, the content on an LCMS is typically digital, which offers HR and L&D teams a wider range of tracking and analytical functionalities. For instance, you can track how much time an employee spends getting through a module.

LCMSs are go-to organization systems that produce a large volume of training content and need more versatile tools for content creation and management.

Key features

• Content creation tools
• Content storage and organization
• Interactive media (videos, simulations, etc.)

Best use cases

• Custom e-learning content development
• Rapid course development and deployment

3. Learning experience platform (LXP)

Like an LMS or LCMS, an LXP also acts as a hub where employees can access training materials. However, the primary difference between an LXP and an LMS or LCMS is that employees have to discover the content they need for themselves.

In other words, your L&D team does not assign any training content or learning materials to employees. Instead, they create a comprehensive knowledge base of training courses where employees can find information.

Many LXPs also integrate AI and data analytics to recommend content and create a personalized and user-focused approach to learning.

Key features

• Personalized learning paths
• User-generated content and peer learning
• On-demand learning

Best use cases

• Personalized employee development
• Social learning and knowledge sharing

Now, let’s explore the more popular uses of employee training software in today’s business world.

What are Some Employee Training Software Use Cases?

The various types of employee training software cater to the varying needs of organizations across diverse verticals, ensuring they can fill skills gaps and equip employees with the knowledge they need to succeed.

Here are some popular use cases for employee training software:

• Employee onboarding: Onboarding new hires is one of the most popular use cases of employee training software. With this platform, you can automate and streamline the onboarding process for new hires, ensuring they get a comprehensive understanding of your company’s culture and are set up for success.
• Upskilling and reskilling: Another popular use case is upskilling and reskilling. Since employee skill development is vital for any organization that wants to stay competitive, it's no wonder leveraging employee training software for upskilling has seen widespread adoption.
• Sales enablement: Many companies also use employee training software to facilitate the improvement of their sales team and its performance. With this platform, employers can provide their teams with training material to ensure they are up to date on the latest product knowledge, market trends, and effective sales techniques.
• Compliance training: Companies also leverage employee training software for compliance training management to ensure that employees understand and adhere to their business policies. HR and L&D teams can leverage the software to automate this training and include interactive learning flows to boost completion rates. 

Now, let’s examine why employee training software is highly effective in these use cases and more.

What are the Benefits of Business Training Software?

Business training software offers employers an efficient way to prepare their teams for the increasing demands of operational productivity and market competition. 

Here are five key benefits of leveraging employee training software:

• Better employee development: Business training software helps to improve knowledge and skill development among your employees, contributing to a more productive workforce. By helping to compile and streamline the deployment of training content while ensuring high engagement levels, employee training software can play a key role in upskilling your business teams.
• Improved training efficiency: As a forward-thinking business owner, chances are you’ve already created internal training programs for your employees. However, employee training software may be the key to unlocking next-level results. From more interactive training methods to progress tracking and analytics, these platforms can help you refine and improve your organization’s training efficiency.
• Training consistency: By leveraging software in your business training, you can introduce consistency and ensure that employees in the same learning categories have access to the same quality of training — from the knowledge content to the duration of training and delivery. 
• Scalability: Another benefit of integrating employee training software into your business workflow is scalability. Unlike traditional training, where scaling up training groups has several limitations, training software offers impressive scalability. You can easily accommodate larger training groups and beef up your training content as your organization’s needs grow.
• Improved employee engagement: Finally, employee training software offers users several interactive elements, such as videos, animations, and gamification features, which can help improve engagement levels among your workforce as they learn. It can also help to improve your training completion rates.

So, what factors combine to produce these numerous benefits? Keep reading as we explore the essential features of typical employee training software.

What are the Key Features of Employee Training Software? 

Several features combine to make employee training software a good solution for knowledge development and retention. Below are some of these features:

Course content authoring

An essential feature of employee training software is content authoring. This functionality allows HR and L&D teams to create their unique training materials tailored to meet the specific skill and knowledge requirements of their organization.

Content management

Compiling and creating the training materials necessary for organizational growth is one thing. But how do you organize and deploy them? This is where the content management feature of employee training software comes into play. 

Learner progress tracking and assessment

Unlike traditional training methods, employee training software allows stakeholders to keep track of the progress of each learning and assess employees’ improvement from one central point — the training platform. Typically, this feature of the software offers data visualizations and custom reports to streamline this process. 

Personalization

Employee training software allows employees to have personalized learning paths as they navigate the training courses they need, leading to better engagement and knowledge retention. In addition, many employee platforms can also recommend training courses based on specific job descriptions.

Gamification

Gamification has become a popular feature across many digital platforms and employee training software is no different. By introducing gamification and other interactive features, L&D can boost engagement levels among employees and even improve completion rates.

Social learning capabilities

Social learning tools, such as chat rooms, forums, and collaborative projects, can play an integral role in improving learning among employees. Effective employee training software typically includes social learning capabilities that encourage knowledge sharing among members of the workforce.

Robust analytics and reporting

One of the critical advantages of digital employee training platforms is their advanced analytics and reporting functionalities. This tool offers stakeholders comprehensive insights into progress, engagement levels, and other metrics that help quantify employee learning performance.

Automation

Employee training software also features various automation features — from training count delivery to progress reminders, assessments, and certifications. This helps to optimize the entire training process for learners while freeing up administrative staff for more complex tasks. 

Mobile learning

Effective employee training platforms also offer users mobile features to make the training as seamless and accessible as possible. With mobile learning, employees can access training content via their mobile devices and learn on the go. This is particularly beneficial if you have a remote workforce.

Feedback system

Finally, no employee training software is complete without an efficient feedback system. By leveraging ​​built-in feedback channels, your HR and L&D teams can gain insight into the effectiveness of their training content and methods and identify areas for improvement.

The Importance of Integrating Knowledge Management with Employee Training Software

Integrating your organization’s knowledge management with your employee training software can work wonders in terms of your workforce’s access to relevant company information and insights.

But what is knowledge management?

Knowledge management refers to the systematic process of compiling, organizing, and sharing a collection of an organization’s knowledge base and information assets. This ensures that employees in such companies can find accurate information easily when they need it.

So, how does this intersect with employee training?

Integrating your knowledge management system with your employee training software can help improve learning processes as your team members can find related info about the company when they need context. After all, contextual learning generally improves knowledge retention. 

More importantly, your L&D can make new information more relatable to employees by showing the relationship between the training they’re getting and real-world applications within the company. This is particularly crucial for use cases like new hire onboarding, upskilling, and compliance training.

Guru’s AI enterprise search further enhances this integration by allowing employees to do a deep dive into the organization’s separate and diverse information collections — say, integrated apps, internal communications, and knowledge bases — when they attempt a search.

This ensures they can find the information they need regardless of where it is in the organization’s network.

Watch our on-demand demo video to learn more!

What are the Potential Challenges of Implementing Employee Training Platforms?

Yes, implementing employee training platforms can significantly boost learning efficiency and resulting productivity within your organization. But, it’s not without some challenges:

• Cost: Depending on the size of your company and its budget, the cost of setting up employee training software may be a challenge. You’ll also need to factor in ongoing subscription expenses for as long as you need the training platform and its built-in tools.
• Integration with existing systems: Another issue many organizations face is integrating employee training platforms into the existing IT infrastructure. While many training software programs are seamless and require little, if any, complex installations, others may require specialized services, such as custom development and data migration before they can be fully operational. On that note, making sure the tool you choose offers good customer support can save you time and money. 
• Data privacy and security: Data privacy is another common concern many businesses have when leveraging employee training software, especially when they’ve integrated it with their knowledge management systems. Since the platform will typically contain organizational data, data security is an understandable challenge.
• User adoption: Finally, some employee training software may have complex user interfaces that aren’t user-friendly, which can make usage challenging. In other cases, a lack of interactive features and intuitive interface may reduce engagement levels among employees, which may pose an issue for training operations.

That said, we’ll now walk you through our top 5 employee training tools, which all check crucial boxes — including effectiveness, essential features, user-friendliness, data security, and more.

What are the 5 Best Employee Training Software Tools?

Picking the right online employee training software for your organization can be an overwhelming decision, as there are tons of options to choose from. Here are our top 5 recommendations for seamless online learning:

1. TalentLMS

TalentLMS is a cloud-based LMS that boasts an easy-to-use interface and several scalable features. 

TalentLMS offers users a built-in library that allows for efficient compilation and organization of training modules. You can also upload SCORM, xAPI, or cmi5 files.

In addition, it also has gamification features that can make the learning process interactive and engaging for employees, potentially boosting training outcomes.

You’ll also find that TalentLMS integrates with Guru, which means that the collection of all your company’s internal knowledge is only a fingertip away from learners!

Top features

• Customizable learning paths: TalentLMS allows you to create personalized training experiences for each of your employee groups, thus creating personalized user experiences.
• Advanced reporting: You can track learner performance with detailed analytics.
• Integrations: You can also seamlessly integrate Talent LMS with popular tools like Zapier and Guru.

2. Absorb LMS

If your goal is compliance training or employee upskilling, Absorb LMS may be the ideal software for you. 

The first thing about Absorb LMS that stands out is its modern design. But there’s more. It also provides users with versatile tools for course authoring, management, and reporting. 

In addition, if scalability is a priority, this tool can easily keep up with the comprehensive training needs of your growing organization. 

With its advanced reporting and analytics functionalities, Absorb LMS allows you to gain clear insights into the ROI of your training program. We should also mention that it has a mobile version for both Android and iOS, which means your workforce can learn on the go.

Top features

• Engagement tools: You can leverage quizzes, surveys, and polls to keep learners engaged and proactive.
• Advanced analytics: Absorb LMS offers you comprehensive analytics to help you make informed decisions regarding your training program. 
• Automated notifications: The platform also has built-in automated in-app notifications to keep users updated.

3. Docebo

Docebo is a sophisticated LMS that leverages AI to enhance the employee learning experience.

With this tool, you can create personalized and interactive learning environments and initiatives through its AI-powered recommendations and social learning features.

This platform is ideal for large organizations due to its versatile scalability features. However, HR and L&D teams in small businesses can also use Docebo to deliver training at scale.

We should also mention that this tool boasts comprehensive analytics features to track training success.

Top features

• AI-Powered recommendations: Docebo provides personalized content suggestions to learners based on their activities and preferences.
• Social learning: The platform encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing through social learning features.
• Mobile learning: Employees can learn on the go as the platform also has a dedicated mobile app.

4. iSpring Learn

One of the finer points of iSpring Learn is its user-friendliness — no complex installation or IT deployment required. 

This learning management software is an effective solution that focuses on ease of use and rapid deployment. If you need to launch a training program quickly without sacrificing quality, iSpring Learn may be the tool for you. 

With iSpring Learn, you’ll have access to a wide range of content-authoring tools to help you create training materials. It also has advanced learning tracking systems with advanced metrics and analytics.

In addition, this platform also allows learners to choose their preferred learning paths, ensuring they can absorb information at their unique optimal rates.

Top features

• Quick course authoring: You can create interactive courses quickly with built-in authoring tools.
• Advanced analytics: iSpring Learn lets you track learner progress and performance with comprehensive analytics.
• Mobile app: You can provide your workforce with access to training on the go with a dedicated mobile app.

 5. LearnUpon

LearnUpon boasts a user-centric LMS that’s ideal for helping companies improve their employee onboarding and professional development. 

LearnUpon has an interactive course authoring feature that helps users generate training content while also organizing and delivering it. 

In addition, the platform also boasts comprehensive features for more specific internal training tailored to each employee’s job description.

In addition, LearnUpon also allows organizations to create internal wikis and knowledge bases so employees can easily find answers to questions they have about company policies and FAQs. 

Top features

• Multi-training feature: LearnUpon lets you manage multiple training portals from a single account.
• Blended learning: You can combine online courses with in-person training sessions.
• API integrations: The platform offers you integrations with a wide range of third-party applications.

How to Choose Online Employee Learning Software for Your Corporate Training Needs 

The first step to choosing the right employee training software for your company is identifying your specific corporate training goals. Once you do that, you can then pick the appropriate tool to help you achieve your objectives.

In this section, we will guide you through the essential factors to consider.

• Functionality: What specific features are you looking for? Do you prioritize interactive and gamified content? Would you need employee training software with content-authoring capabilities or just a management and delivery system?
• Accessibility: Next, you want to consider how the majority of your workforce (including admins) will access your training content. Are you dealing with remote employees who may prefer the flexibility that mobile learning offers? If yes, prioritizing a learning platform with a mobile app is a good idea.
• Pricing: You always want to consider setup and subscription costs. Is the price of the employee training software you’re considering within your budget? Are you getting enough ROI on employee productivity to justify the expense?
• Scalability: Another essential factor to consider is scalability. Do you see your organization needing to increase training numbers or beef up learning content in the short term? If the answer’s yes, then you need to pick software that can easily scale with you as you grow.
• Integrations: Finally, workflows can quickly become very complex if your employee training software does not integrate with the systems that your HR or L&D team already uses. So, check that the platform integrates with your IT setup.

Over to You!

We hope that this blog has helped you understand the benefits of employee training software. However, that is only the first step.

Next, you’ll need to choose the right software that can cater to your organization’s corporate training needs. Remember, the trick is to prioritize an ideal combination of functionality, integrations, and other factors.

But that’s not all. 

By integrating Guru with your training software, you can achieve more with your L&D project by creating an all-in-one information finder for your company. 

Guru helps employees find the answers they need from anywhere in your organization’s information pool without switching platforms. This can significantly improve your results, whether you’re onboarding new hires or upskilling existing employees.

Try Guru today.

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