To get your employee onboarding up and running, you’ll need two tools: a SCORM authoring tool for creating training courses and a learning management system (LMS) to deliver them to new hires. However, the modern market offers so many solutions for effective onboarding that it’s getting difficult for companies to select the perfect software for their particular case. Luckily, this choice will be easier if you know precisely what you need.
To help you with this, we’ve compiled a list of the essential questions one should ask themselves when selecting software for onboarding. Answer them to identify your needs, and then find the software that fulfills them best.
Do you have ready-made training content?
Yes
Great! Move on to the next question.
No
Your onboarding courses should first exist to deliver them to your new hires. There are two ways to create training content:
- Hire an L&D team
- Create courses in-house
If you decide to create training courses yourself, you’ll need an authoring tool. You can either use your LMS’s built-in authoring tool and develop simple training programs or purchase a powerful fully functioning tool and create advanced courses. Make this decision according to your training needs.
What are your LMS requirements?
An LMS is a must-have tool for employee onboarding. It stores all of your educational materials, automates all training management processes, such as trainee notification on new courses and deadlines, and generates reports on trainee progress. These are the basic features that almost all LMSs have. Now, to pick the right one for your company, you need to dive a bit deeper and identify what other features would be helpful in your case. Here’s what you need to know:
- Would you like trainees to register in the LMS via the administrator or on their own?
- Would you like to increase trainee engagement by making onboarding training gamelike?
- Will trainees only take training programs online, or would you like to use the blended approach (both online and offline activities)?
- Would you prefer to host an LMS on your servers, or are you looking for a cloud-based solution?
- Should your LMS have integrations with other tools and systems? If so, which ones?
Based on your answers, create a list of required features for your perfect LMS. You can also add other necessary questions concerning your organization’s technical requirements and data privacy.
How many employees will you train?
LMSs can be designed for small companies, large enterprises, or universally. If you have only ten employees to train, you don’t need an LMS that’s tailored for thousands of trainees. The opposite is equally true. So, calculate the approximate number of potential trainees and see if the LMS you’re considering is suitable for your case.
Please notice that corporate training isn’t limited to onboarding. When you determine the number of trainees, it’s not only new hires you should count but other employees too. Your company is unlikely to have more than one LMS, so the one you choose should be able to cover all of your organization’s training needs.
What’s your budget?
How much your company can afford to spend on training software is a critical factor that can significantly influence your choice. Apart from determining the affordable pricing range, it would help to decide which pricing plan will work best for you. You see, LMS vendors offer different pricing models. You can pay for:
- A set number of trainees on a fixed price
- Active trainees only
- The features that you use
- A periodic license (for large enterprises)
- Setup, maintenance, and customization
If your primary training need is onboarding, you might want to look for LMSs that allow you to pay only for active users. You never know how many new hires you’ll have this or next month. If you pay for a fixed number of trainees – say, for 50 users – but you had only 30 new hires, it means you spent almost half of your monthly budget on nothing. The active users pricing model helps you prevent such situations.
Are you and your staff tech-savvy?
Yes
Super! You don’t need to be afraid of advanced tools or open-source solutions – you can set them up yourself, maintain them, and fix any issues that might come up in no time.
No
Many eLearning tools require IT skills. If you don’t have them, you won’t be able to utilize the powerful capabilities of those tools in your work. So, try looking for easy-to-use yet powerful solutions – they will help you develop and deliver engaging training content without spending much time and effort.
