There’s no shortage of software out there that’s built for training. A quick look at the market will reveal well over a thousand LMS offerings alone. And in Administrate’s experience with our customers, the typical training team is using much more than just an LMS. 10-12 software systems involved in the creation, management, delivery, and reporting processes of training operations isn’t uncommon.
That’s a lot of software. So what makes Administrate special? Why are top training teams choosing us?
The simple answer is that Administrate isn’t just another single-solution software system. Administrate provides a level of streamlined capability, all under one system, that no disconnected tech stack of a dozen point-solution systems can provide. Administrate isn’t another factor to corral into your tech stack: Administrate is a one-stop shop for everything a team needs to manage L&D operations and employee training.
A Platform Approach To Employee Training and Development
The single-solution software that’s so common in the L&D space has a serious flaw. These systems do their jobs fine in a vacuum, but what happens when it’s time to get serious about integrating them into a larger tech stack? The answer is usually a headache.
That’s because these systems are rarely designed with integration and interconnectivity in mind. They tend to struggle to communicate effectively with other systems, or do so only in a very limited, pre-determined capacity. That’s not a recipe for success in enterprise technology.
We need software that’s highly interconnected and built to integrate so that we can use systems in conjunction with each other, instead of manually feeding spreadsheets in and out of them and manually handling their data. That’s where Administrate comes in – a rejection of the single-solution software paradigm in learning technology.
Administrate is a platform built for enterprise training, which can serve as a single user interface for everything a training team needs their software to do. But Administrate is much more than an LMS. With built-in tools for course management, resource management, content management, advanced reporting, and more, Administrate is a comprehensive training management platform.
Build vs. Buy
Of course, no software is going to meet your organization’s needs exactly unless you build it yourself to your own specifications. Too much training software has no real consideration for internal development teams and how they have to work to adapt off-the-shelf software to the unique needs and use cases of a specific organization.
Not Administrate. We focus on providing an empowering developer experience through a highly-capable GraphQL API, to ensure that our customers can build their own solutions on top of our platform.
Using our platform as a base, for example, ForgeRock was able to build an automated badging and certification system that raised learner engagement well above industry norms. Boston Whaler was able to use Administrate to build a turnover report that identified at-risk employees and helped the company reduce turnover.
How does Administrate provide this kind of foundation? By pairing reliable backend operations with a commitment to accessibility for developers.
Administrate’s Employee Training Feature Set
Course Management
Course management really is the heart of how Administrate creates a platform that’s both highly capable and highly customizable, and the secret ingredient is the course template.
Course templates are the building blocks of Administrate’s automation and data management practices. By utilizing a standardized template containing all of the information needed to run a training event, course templates reduce the manual work of training management.
Need to make a change to how future events will be run? Edit the course template and automatically propagate changes out to all scheduled events. Need to create automations that send alerts to learners and instructors about upcoming courses? Course templates are the starting point for those automation triggers. Want to automatically generate workable training schedules without spending weeks shuffling courses around on whiteboards? Course templates are the building blocks for Administrate’s AI-powered Scheduler feature.
We just can’t stress enough how fundamental the course template is to how Administrate functions, and what they can do to eliminate the manual work backing up your team.
Resource Management
Course templates are so flexible, in fact, that they don’t just help Administrate manage your courses – they serve as the building blocks for managing your resources, as well. Course templates contain information on the resources needed to run a training event – from rooms, to instructors, to materials and more.
Just as Scheduler can manage creating a workable schedule of training events using course templates, it can also use the information in those templates to cross-reference needed resources against a calendar of resource use. This allows Scheduler to automatically detect and avoid double-booking resources like classrooms, instructors, or laptops, and ensures that employee development isn’t interrupted by an unavailable resource.
Additionally, Administrate’s automated communications systems can be configured to create task reminders for staff to assist in resource management. Create an automation trigger within a course template that emails event staff instructions for exactly what resources are needed and how they need to be staged, and you can create a paper trail that ensures accountability and reduces the chance of overlooking key details while running training events.
Content Management
Content management systems are not new, but they have a problem. They tend not to be designed with modern data management practices in mind. Course, learner, and training operations data is often difficult or even impossible to access. Pre-generated and un-alterable reporting structures serve as a gatekeeper that prevents users from seeing anything that the developer did not predict they would need to see.
Just take a moment to think – how much data is there that you know must obviously be somewhere in your systems, but which doesn’t show up on the limited selection of reports available to you?
Administrate’s content management capabilities follow our philosophy of accessibility and flexibility in all areas of the system, while still maintaining accountability. With the Administrate API providing full access to all content within the system, Administrate’s platform is able to support not just full access, but more advanced content search and recommendation features that provide learners with an experience that is tailored but not restrictive.
At the same time, with Administrate’s comprehensive Document Management system, course materials associated with a course template can be carefully maintained to ensure that while learners have access to the breadth of content available within their system, there’s also a paper trail detailing what content they have seen and maintaining careful version control over training materials – particular important in highly-regulated industries where precise training requirements may change unexpectedly.
No-Code Comprehensive Reporting
One thing we’re keenly aware of as a company that focuses heavily on training data, is that the market for employee training software lags when it comes to allowing customers access to their data. So many systems are only capable of generating a predetermined report that doesn’t encompass the full scope of the data within your software. Now, that’d be fine if the developers perfectly predicted your exact use cases. But how likely is that?
Administrate believes that your data should be available to you. You should have full access to it, whenever you want, without having to deal with someone else’s concept of what your data should look like. That’s why Administrate’s no-code reporting engine exists, to provide our customers with a completely customizable portal into all of their training data. It also interfaces with our automation triggers and automated communications tools, so that reports can be automatically generated and sent to relevant stakeholders with just a few clicks.
Integration and a Foundation for Headless Architecture
Administrate firmly believes that headless architecture is the future of training operations and training technology. The same leaps and bounds that ecommerce has made in customizing the user experience can be made for the learner experience, and the impact on employee development is sure to be just as immense.
Headless architecture – a system where the learner-facing frontend runs separately from the business-logic backend – is something Administrate is built to support. The critical link in the chain of any headless architecture is a highly capable API, and the Administrate API is exactly that, tailor-made for enterprise training teams to connect their software systems together for maximum efficiency.
Administrate can function as a central nexus for all of your backend systems while also delivering data to your front-end – even if you don’t choose to use the Administrate LMS. With a focus on integration and interconnectivity, Administrate can connect just about any system out there to any other, providing reliable and centralized control of your employee training data.
Streamline Employee Training With Administrate
Administrate is software for managing employee training and development. That’s an important distinction from the thousands of options out there for software that simply delivers content to learners, or the thousands of single-solution software systems out there that might address one or two facets of training management.
Administrate is a platform for training management, built from the ground up to make enterprise training management easier. If you’d like to learn more about Administrate, and what it could do for your organization, take a look at our Why Administrate page and discover what the platform can offer.
“With Administrate, we saw 90% of our manual work vanish overnight.”
