4 things your clients want from your training platform

Since founding Candle Digital in 2016, we’ve worked with many commercial training providers to help them deliver their programmes online. We’ve created online courses, training hubs, academies and learning platforms – all designed to help them share their expertise digitally.

As such we’ve learned a lot about what a training provider’s clients typically requests when procuring online training and what facilities they need from a learning platform. After all, you can’t be just concerned with the person taking the online training: to delight your HR/L&D contact you’ll need to make sure their needs are met too.

Here’s a quick rundown of our 4 must-have inclusions for your learning platform:

Learner data

Naturally, your client will want to know how well their employees are progressing, what they have completed and – if you can assess it – some preliminary information on the impact your training has had (either on the employee e.g. confidence or their workplace performance).

It’s likely they’ll want a wide overview of the team and also the opportunity to dive into data on the individual members of their team. It’s likely you’ll need to provide a view of different cohorts too if employees are starting your online training in staggered groups.

You may provide your client with access to the learning platform so they can view this information in real-time, or alternatively, you’ll want the ability to download this information in an easy-to-use format (for example CSV) so you can provide this to them.

Flexible enrolment methods

We’ve learned that enrolling learners in a variety of ways is critical to maximising uptake.

Some clients may provide you with a list of names and email addresses of participants. In this case, you’ll need an easy way to upload these into your learning management system (‘LMS’ for short) and assign learners to the relevant courses and resources.

Alternatively, your client may just want a link to send to their employees, inviting them to create their own account. If so, you’ll need a way of allowing learners to sign up themselves using an online form. This is a popular choice for many training providers, as it reduces the administrative burden for themselves and also the client, whilst also giving learners control over their account.

We’ve set up a unique system that allows the training provider to spin up new registration forms very quickly in many of the training platforms we’ve created. With this you can assign learners to specific groups, courses and resources, you can limit the number of sign-ups and also require an access code or email suffix (the bit after the @) to be able to register. These options provide our training clients with the flexibility they need to adapt to their clients.

Co-branding and over-branding

Many of our training providers make it a requirement that their brand is prominent in the learning portal. After all, they want to be linked with the great work you are doing! But if your client wants to have their own logo and brand colours throughout the learning platform, then you’ll need the flexibility to be able to offer this.

For many of our training providers, we provide them with the ability to tweak the branding, theme colours and auto-email content for each client. Of course, it’s important that this carries through to other ‘touch points’ of the learning platform, such as the registration form, certification and any downloadable materials.

Bespoke company content

Your training might be part of a wider initiative your client is delivering. Or they may have other resources for their team they want to signpost to.

Using the enrolment methods above, we’ve found it useful to capture which company each learner is from. Using this, you can then intersperse company-specific content into your learning content, without having to duplicate and tweak whole courses or having company-specific information siloed off somewhere else in your learning management system.

This is a great way to delight your client and help them integrate your training with their own internal campaigns, initiatives and support.

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We’re specialists at creating learning platforms and online training that your clients (and their employees) will love. If you want help making the right choices for your training business, we’re here to help.

Andy Jack

Andy loves helping subject experts, authors, speakers, coaches and key persons of influence to monetise their expertise with online learning. When not on his laptop, he'll usually be found up a mountain!