Today’s workers face more challenges than ever. New technologies, more stringent regulations, and higher standards within in the workplace have all combined to increase the complexity and demands faced by employees. Given this, companies of all sizes and from most every industry are looking to implement effective workforce development programs to help ensure their employees have the knowledge and skills they need to perform in their job roles and contribute to the success of the organization.
What is Workforce Development?
Workforce development refer to the programs and activities employers us to train and educate their employees. Unlike job training, it does not simply focus on providing workers with the tools to do their job. Workforce development programs have a larger goal of ensuring the long-term success of employees.
Workforce development should be a “win-win” endeavor in that it supports each employee’s career development and productivity while helping the organization to maximize its overall success.
eLearning for Workforce Development
At one time, the only viable option for workforce development was in offering in-person, classroom-based training. Unfortunately, this approach did not scale very well and led to challenges in ensuring consistency, as well as in capturing and analyzing program data.
Over the past ten years or so, online learning, also referred to as “eLearning” has emerged as the foundation for most workforce development programs. Unlike classroom-based training, eLearning has no need to bring employees together at set times to conduct training activities. Instead, it allows employees to work through materials at their own convenience.
Other advantages eLearning offers over in-person training include:
Cost-Effective
eLearning eliminates the need for travel, catering, and the printing of training materials. It also eliminates the costs associated with pulling employees away from their job roles to attend training classes.
Consistent
Unlike in-person training, eLearning ensures consistency with regard to the content and messaging of your training program as there is typically a single set of materials used to build training courses.
Contextual
eLearning provides employees with the opportunity to access the training materials they need, when and where they need it. This allows for contextual or “just-in-time” training, which has proven to be highly effective as it provides for learning during real world scenarios.
Technology and Content for Workforce Development Programs
Any organization that chooses an eLearning-based approach for workforce development must choose a technology and content development strategy to support the program.
The core technology for eLearning is a learning management system, or “LMS”. This is the application that is used to build, deliver, manage, and track an eLearning program. While some companies choose to “stand up” an LMS on their own servers, today it is far more common for an organization to work with a SaaS LMS provider to access the features and capacity they need over the Internet.
For most companies, the bigger challenge is in determining a content development strategy. Current estimates indicate that the creation of a one-hour course can cost up to $15,000 and take nearly 300 hours to develop. Given this, many companies choose to work with training content providers to gain access to ready-made content for their workforce development program.
LMS Portals: Technology and Content for Workforce Development
At LMS Portals, we provide our clients and partners with a SaaS-based, multi-tenant LMS that allows an administrator to launch and manage a dedicated eLearning environment (portal) for each of your unique training audiences. Each portal includes a rapid course development engine, along with powerful tools for user onboarding, group management, learning path creation, live remote training, certificate awarding, analytics, and more.
We also offer a library of 140+ ready-made and customizable courses, covering most every aspect of workforce development and training.
Contact us today to get started or visit our Partner Program pages
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