Strategic Planning

How to Automate Repetitive Training Management Tasks

Rob Walz 5 minute read

How Automating Training Boosts Outcomes

Automating Training Tasks in Administrate

This blog is part of the How to Align Training Needs with Business Outcomes blog and video series. In this article, we explore how a training management platform allows training teams to automate some repetitive but critical training tasks. Check out the video below to learn more.

Building the training communities we want: warm, welcoming, and focused on human-to-human interaction and personalization, is a huge lift for training teams. Managing mass communications drains training resources. That’s why we created a simple, sustainable way to make these communications easier.

Administrate automates a variety of repetitive but critical training management tasks to reduce workload on training managers. With automated functionality built-in, your team will see a significant amount of time returned every week, but we think the deeper value of automation is as a tool for better data capture and analysis. With all the time you will get back, having actionable insights on tap will make it easier to develop your training strategies.

Watch the Video: Automate Repetitive Tasks

How Automation Works in Administrate

Automation is easy to add to almost any aspect of Administrate because our software is fully configurable. Most learning technology is not so open – and in fact, is designed to solve just one problem. This leaves your team stranded and struggling when you’re forced to face new challenges the tech can’t handle. Administrate is designed to change with your needs.

Administrate can automate course approval requests from distributed workforces, keeping calendars and communications synced as learners are approved. Instructors are kept accountable and focused with automated task workflows to ensure nothing is overlooked during course prep and follow-up. Automated reporting makes compliance easier, allowing your team to quickly see troublespots and high-performing areas.

Automate Communications with Learners and Instructors

We spend a lot of time copying and pasting learner lists, managing instructor updates, and sending email and SMS messages when a course is published, changed, or completed. This helps build the human-first, personalized community we strive for, but it is not scalable. When you automate these communications, you can build a welcoming training community with a fraction of the effort.

You can create message templates in Administrate that send bulk emails and/or text messages to all instructors and learners associated with a course, learning pathway, or other segment. These templates can be attached to a wide variety of triggers that send bulk messages at certain times, either as part of a scheduled workflow or in response to a change.

For example, when a new course is ready you can automatically send a text and email message to all of your prospective learners with a link to your course sign-up form. If there is a course change, such as a change of location or scheduled time, that change can trigger a bulk message to all learners and instructors to update their calendars.

How does it work? Bulk communication leverages tokenized data stored in Administrate’s robust CRM, allowing you to personalize each message to the recipient. You can include attachments, links, and other useful information but you don’t’ have to deal with mail merges on your own. Administrate monitors email opens and clicks as well, and further automations – such as reminder emails – can be triggered based on how recipients engage (or fail to engage) with your emails.

Emails and other bulk communications can be edited with templates

See how Royal Caribbean Group automated 87%

of their previously manual tasks.

The Royal Caribbean Story - No More Empty Seats

Automate Training Delivery with Learning Pathways

Learning pathways are easy to create and manage in Administrate. These paths place learners on a predetermined journey that covers training at a pace and flow you choose. Learning paths are a set-it-and-forget-it method to ensure learners complete an entire learning journey. Learning paths can include Administrate events, links to other content within Administrate, or links to events or items outside of the Administrate platform such as one-to-one meetings between the learner and their instructor. Learning paths can be nested within each other, as well, so you can include a sublevel learning path within a larger learning path.

No matter how you build a learning path, your team always has complete visibility into the data within the journey. You can see which learners have progressed, if they’re stuck you can tell where and why they’ve become blocked, and the learning path automates the completion and delivery of credentials.

The data from a learning path can be used to trigger email communications, enroll a learner in a follow-up path or course, or trigger task workflows within your team.

Learning paths are one way to automate training delivery in Administrate, and like everything else, they are connected to other aspects of the platform. How learners engage with, complete, and master learning paths can change how – and when – other features in Administrate function.

Automate Reporting

Administrate adds context to any learning metric, giving you access to real analytics that can drive your training initiatives forward. Reporting in Administrate can be as detailed, and customizable as you like, and these reports can be automated.

In the Reporting section of Administrate, you can easily set a schedule for a report you’ve built. Using Communication Triggers, you can schedule a report to be generated and sent to stakeholders. Keep them informed with reports that arrive on a cadence (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) or when the report is generated.

By automating reporting, you can show the value and impact of training to key business stakeholders, and underscore the impact your programs have on mainline business goals.

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