Over the past ten years or so, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of community colleges offering corporate training programs in an effort to create new revenue streams for their institutions while filling a much needed void in the corporate marketplace. In fact, a recent study by Technavio predicts that the global corporate training industry will grow by more than $52 billion between 2020-2024, for a CAGR of roughly 10%. This anticipated growth can present significant revenue opportunity for those U.S. community colleges that prepare for the opportunity.
In years past, the primary method for delivering corporate training was through classroom-based, in-person instruction. More recently though, as cloud-based technologies have continued to improve and workforces have become increasingly remote (a trend that was already in motion but accelerated by COVID-19), eLearning has emerged as the preferred approach to corporate training and workforce development. And the core technology that supports all kinds of eLearning programs, including corporate training, is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”.
Types of Corporate Training Supported by an LMS
While your community college can leverage an LMS to support all types of corporate training programs for your clients, some of the most common use cases include:
New hire orientation and onboarding
Skills development and enhancement
Training in core, operational technologies
Sales and customer service training
Compliance awareness and training
Leadership development
The LMS Options for Community College Corporate Training
When evaluating LMS platforms, corporate training executives at community colleges are faced with a several options.
SaaS LMS v. On-Premises LMS
For starters, you can choose to go with an on-premises LMS or a cloud or “SaaS-based” LMS. And while an on-premises LMS does allow for a great deal of latitude in customization, these systems are typically the choice for very large organizations that have the capital budget available for the initial deployment, as well as the resources (both financial and labor) for the ongoing management and maintenance of the system.
And unfortunately, most on-premises LMS deployments are not well-suited for a community college, eLearning-driven corporate training business model, which calls for fast and easy scaling of the system as your corporate training program grows over time.
In contrast, a SaaS-based LMS, offered by a third-party vendor, requires a minimal up-front investment as the vendor has already built out the LMS application and infrastructure for their clients. And most SaaS LMS vendors offer their system on a subscription basis, which makes it easy for the community college system administrator to simply access for features and resources from their vendor as their program and needs grow.
Multi-Tenant v. Single Tenant LMS
The other choice you are faced with as you evaluate an LMS for your community college corporate training program is between a single or multi-tenant architecture. In a single tenant LMS deployment, as the entirety of the application infrastructure and supporting components are dedicated to a single client. This approach, while offering a great deal of flexibility in that single deployment, typically comes at a high price and cannot support the dynamic needs of a community college corporate training program as you bring new clients on board to your program.
A multi-tenant LMS, on the other hand, allows for the dynamic creation of new eLearning environments (portals) on-demand as you bring new clients into your program. This approach tends to be much more cost-effective and well-suited for any organization that leverages eLearning and corporate training as a revenue stream and needs the ability to “spin up” new, private instances of the LMS application as new clients sign-up.
LMS Portals: A Learning Management System for Community College Corporate Training Programs
LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows our community college corporate training partners to launch and manage a private eLearning quickly and easily as you bring new corporate clients into your program. Each new portal can be launched in a matter of minutes with its own corporate branding, employee onboarding system, messaging and collaboration tools, analytics, and more.
Visit our Partner Program pages to learn more or contact us today to get started
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