Member development and growth are core factors in the success of your professional association – satisfied members help spur membership growth, better collaboration, and optimise financial performance. How can you stay true to your association’s mission and better serve your members? The answer is: Your member education and training!
On the rise in our new today, classroom training, whether in-person, virtual or a hybrid mix of both, brings results. But, with the added complexity of our hybrid world, there’s an urgent need to adapt learning technology strategies to ensure that the features and functionalities of the tech that fuels your member programs is also supporting your team’s training back-office.
LXP, LMS, TMS… there are many learning technologies in the member education ecosystem today, but when it comes to in-person and virtual classroom training operations, you’ll want to ensure your tech delivers the features and functionalities dedicated to optimise this form of delivery. For most professional associations, these challenges include reducing manual and repetitive tasks and easing the heavy workload associated scheduling and resource management, instructor collaboration, cost tracking and reporting.
Let’s take a closer look at the most critical features to look for when evaluating learning technology solutions for your member education, especially when delivering classroom, virtual classroom and hybrid training.
Four key features for optimising your in-person, virtual and hybrid member training operations
1. Conflict-Free Course Scheduling
To ease the complexities of course scheduling, resource and instructor management, look for learning technology with easy-to-use scheduling and resource allocation tools for flexible management of your training sessions. Dedicated tools will allow you to have greater visibility into your scheduled sessions without compromising a user-friendly experience. Features like color-coded markers can help you quickly identify conflicts and reduce errors. In addition, your chosen system should also have features allowing for automatic notifications, reminders, and to-do lists so you’ll never miss an important scheduling task again!
2. Dedicated Instructor Engagement Portal
It’s no secret that complete transparency reduces confusion. When choosing your training platform, look for one with a dedicated instructor engagement portal. A key feature of this unique collaboration space is that it allows your instructors and subject matter experts (SMEs) to communicate with your back-office team about potential issues with schedules, courses, or deadlines. By providing easy communication in one place of record, you’ll have less errors before and during your training.
3. Manage Memberships and Certifications
Associations today need to develop a groundbreaking training program in order to respond to the growing demands of today’s business world. By establishing certification programs, they help organisations hire the most qualified candidates through certification and gives individuals a set of recognised criteria to validate their qualifications and advance their careers. Hence, your system should allow you to store, track, and manage memberships and certifications quickly and easily all in one place.
4. Custom-Made Reports
Making sound business decisions requires tools to track and consolidate critical data points which are often missing when it comes to classroom and virtual training. Look for learning tech that can help you collect, visualise, and interpret your training data to gain valuable insights and improve efficiency such as instructor utilisation rates, budgets and more.
Ready to Optimise Your Member Education Operations?
A Training Management System (TMS) is a viable learning technology for optimising and automating training operations for member education initiatives such as scheduling, resource management and more. Laser-focused on the back-office for classroom, virtual and hybrid training, the TMS complements your other learning technologies to help you train more with less.
For over 20 years, Training Orchestra has been helping 600+ organisations worldwide address the complexities of training operations so they can automate and optimise: session scheduling, resource management, instructor collaboration, cost tracking and reporting. As a complement to existing learning technologies, Training Orchestra’s Training Management System (TMS) can replace all XLS spreadsheets and manual tasks, so you can better manage training as a business.
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