Classroom training (both instructor led and virtual instructor led) is a much more difficult beast to manage than traditional elearning because it involves the coordination of resources (things like equipment and specialized facilities), people (instructors and students), and places (meeting rooms or classrooms). Critically – all of this has to line up according to a schedule.
For years, Administrate has helped customers navigate this complex juggling act by encapsulating these requirements into what we call course templates – recipes for how classroom training gets conducted. These recipes change based on the type of training that is run, and most customers have several hundred different templates they regularly use. It’s always fun to see the variety of training that gets delivered from our platform too! Everything from safety training involving helicopter crashes to mission critical training on advanced medical equipment is delivered by our customers on a global scale.
But what happens when we’re missing an ingredient from our recipe? Life happens, and one of the key functions of any training operation is to ensure that instruction continues even when things don’t go according to the initial plan. Instructors get sick, equipment can fail, classrooms can become double-booked or might not be available anymore…
“…we were actually toying with building a dashboard to try to visualize some delivery issues and this is everything that we were trying to see.”
That’s where our recent update to our dashboard comes into play: Administrate now surfaces these problems in real-time to make sure there aren’t any surprises! Training coordinators can see problems that have appeared, quickly drill down to understand the specifics, and create tasks to make sure these problems are addressed if a situation can’t be rectified immediately.
It’s all just another example of how Administrate supports the decision making and day-to-day operations of training teams. Stay tuned for more updates in this area!
]]>Let’s take a look at the medtech industry’s relationship with compliance training, and how Administrate has partnered with Siemens Healthineers to make this critical process more efficient by leveraging training data.
Major medtech providers like Siemens Healthineers have to ensure that all of their global customers receive the training needed to operate life-saving medical equipment without an issue. But unfortunately, managing such a complex training operation often creates inefficiencies for the training teams.
For example, in order to provide training that’s both geographically accessible and tailored to local regulations, a strategy of autonomous country training hubs and centers is common. But while giving these local hubs the autonomy to adapt and operate in their unique environments ensures compliance, it can also make coordinating global training operations difficult.
Managing and leveraging data across these hubs can also be a huge challenge when the tech stack isn’t optimized. Multiple databases, differences in content and materials between training centers, and a lack of integration between tools can create difficulties for companies like Siemens Healthineers in accessing and utilizing training data.
Administrate provides a platform for managing not just training, but managing the whole software ecosystem of L&D. That makes it a great match for a sector like medtech that needs to coordinate between lots of smaller units that still have to retain autonomy.
What does that look like in practice?
Administrate provides options for standardization on the back-end that make it easier to support a diverse ecosystem of content on the front-end. For example, a medical equipment trainer in the United States and another in Europe might need to deliver content to different specifications in order to remain compliant. But with Administrate, that content can be managed through a common template that’s designed to feed into Administrate’s data model.
These course templates are the building blocks of Administrate’s capabilities as a platform. By standardizing the way that courses and resources are created, booked, and handled by the system, Administrate can help medtech companies create an environment where data from two training hubs on opposite sides of the earth can still be easily compared and handled together thanks to a common format.
Training data is the most powerful resource that an L&D team has available, but if the tech stack isn’t structured to handle it effectively, that data can become difficult to access and utilize. This is particularly a problem if there are large numbers of separate software systems working in conjunction with each other without effective integration. Data simply won’t flow through a tech stack that hasn’t been designed to make data access simple.
Administrate can serve as a central hub for integrating the training tech stack and ensuring full access to data. An Administrate instance can unify the technology stacks working at different training centers around the world, and then provide central control over the data generated by all of the tools in use.
Administrate’s no-code reporting engine and document management system ensure full visibility into how learners, instructors, resources, and content are being utilized within your system. Not only can that make establishing a paper trail and ensuring compliance substantially easier, but it also makes accessing and analyzing data about the learner experience much easier, too. In an industry where improving training outcomes can quite literally save lives, that’s no small feat.
Medtech training teams around the world have to be able to depend on their software as they navigate complex requirements while imparting knowledge that has life-and-death stakes. Administrate is proud to be a partner in ensuring that medtech L&D teams don’t just have tools that work, they have an L&D software infrastructure for managing and leveraging their courses and data to standardize operations, integrate their technology stacks, scale and expand with confidence, and, most importantly, to continuously improve the learner experience and learner outcomes.
For the past few years, Administrate has been partnering with leading medtech provider Siemens Healthineers to help them rationalize their global training operations. To learn more, take a look at our case study on Siemens Healthineers and how they’ve used Administrate to streamline and scale their approach to L&D.
]]>The pharmaceutical industry’s vital role in the healthcare industry makes it a dynamic industry on the front-lines of medicine. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies face some of the strictest regulatory regimes in the world in order to ensure that medicines are being developed, tested, and utilized safely. This presents a challenge for pharmaceutical training teams and L&D operations – how to keep the pharmaceutical workforce compliant with strict regulations while also staying up-to-date on the latest developments in the field?
Addressing that challenge calls for an extremely efficient L&D operation globally, but Administrate’s work with pharmaceutical companies like Roche has shown that there are persistent issues on the management side that these companies are constantly striving to address. Thankfully, at Administrate, we’ve got first-hand experience in how to ensure that pharmaceutical L&D teams get the most out of their data and software.
With an enormous volume of content to be delivered to teams and learners around the world, pharmaceutical L&D often struggles with the monumental task of scheduling and coordinating events to ensure all learners get the training that they need, when they need it. Roche typically trains 1500 learners every month, on a variety of high-value, complex medical equipment.
There can be dozens of constraints controlling when an individual event can take place – learners, instructors, and resources all come with limited capacity that creates scheduling conflicts. Administrate has seen first-hand how many companies can spend hundreds of hours and large blocks of their year just creating workable schedules.
That’s why Administrate built the Scheduler. Scheduler takes advantage of the modular nature of courses within Administrate’s system to model large numbers of possible schedules and assess them for conflicts. Scheduler can detect whether, out of hundreds of training events, there are any double-bookings or overlaps, even down to the level of individual laptops within your system. For an industry like pharmaceuticals where global operations mean global logistics and all the resulting headaches, Scheduler can cut out an enormous amount of time spent assessing and constructing training schedules.
Data access and management is a perennial challenge for L&D teams in almost all industries, but pharmaceutical companies are especially hurt when their training software fails to provide full and ready access to their data. Key stakeholders in national and regional offices around the world need to be able to assess and utilize training data in order to make critical decisions that drive compliance – yet often, mismatched formats, disconnected databases, and software that’s simply not designed with transparency in mind make reporting and leveraging training data a monumental challenge.
Administrate’s platform contains a deeply-integrated no-code reporting engine that ensures full visibility into any data that the program contains. Built on the design philosophy that your data should be fully available to you, without needing a developer to hunt down and extract your data, the no-code reporting engine ensures that reports containing any data desired can be easily constructed within minutes. This enables the kind of deep and continuous interrogation of your data that’s just not possible with many systems that offer only pre-generated reports.
Administrate provides a level of deep integration that can entirely overhaul the technology stack of a pharmaceutical training team.
All too often, the distributed and global nature of pharmaceutical training creates many sub-teams or training hubs that can have completely different technology stacks, which slows down collaboration between teams and creates a massive bottleneck for efficiency while keeping costs high with duplication of effort.
Administrate is able to provide a single, centralized platform that can assume many of the functions of single-solution software tools popular on the market. And for those systems that companies want to keep, Administrate’s powerful GraphQL API can tightly interconnect those systems into the Administrate data model for maximum effectiveness. For Roche, that meant their training team was able to change their dynamic with other stakeholders, becoming a consultant sharing critical insights.
Administrate has hands-on experience helping Roche Diagnostics revolutionize the way that they structured training software and managed L&D operations. To read about that success story and see how the Administrate platform could overhaul, take a look at our case study.
By partnering with Administrate, Siemens Healthineers was able to build medtech L&D infrastructure that could support their ambitions. Take a look at our case study on Administrate’s partnership with Siemens Healthineers to learn how they did it – and how much value it returned to their business.
Siemens Healthineers needed enough standardization to help streamline training management across multiple modalities, as well as ensuring full visibility and deep, insightful reporting into training data from all over the world. But at the same time, they needed a system that remained flexible and configurable at the local level so that country-level training teams wouldn’t lose critical autonomy needed to address local issues.
Most platforms just can’t provide both. Either they create a top-down system that would ensure data access at the cost of autonomy, or they might provide teams the autonomy they need but at the expense of limited and shallow capacity to report on operations and translate training initiatives into demonstrable ROI. But Administrate was able to provide Siemens Healthineers with a comprehensive training management system that could do both.
Siemens Healthineers used automation, composable integrations and no-code data reporting to eliminate overhead and break records., It has been amazing to watch their program transform so quickly.
By providing a framework to integrate Siemens Healthineers’ existing L&D software tools and plugging them into a standardized, easily-accessible data model, Administrate was able to simplify management loads and produce real, measurable results for the company. To see those results, and to learn more about how Administrate supported Siemens Healthineers’ success story, take a look at our case study below.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what that disconnect is, why it arose, and what kind of changes teams can make in order to make the most of their limited resources for enterprise L&D software.
Don’t get us wrong. Self-paced learning is an incredibly important modality. Companies around the world can use this highly-flexible modality to deliver large amounts of training to large amounts of learners without the hassle of creating and executing on classroom events. That’s probably why such a vast ecosystem of software geared towards self-paced learning exists on the market – there are thousands of options available for an organization’s LMS, LXP, content management systems, etc.
But here’s the truth. In Administrate’s experience, about 80% of all training is not self-paced. Classroom learning, whether in a real classroom or a virtual one, still accounts for the vast majority of the value that training teams generate, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
In plenty of fields, hands-on learning with an instructor present isn’t just a luxury, it’s absolutely essential. Whether it’s training nurses in how to operate delicate and highly specialized medical equipment, or providing safety instruction to machinists on how to manage potentially dangerous tools, sometimes there’s just no substitute for live access to an instructor.
And yet, despite the enduring need for high-value classroom training, Administrate sees just the opposite split in terms of where companies are investing their software budgets. The overwhelming majority of software budgets in enterprise L&D go towards tools that primarily facilitate self-paced learning, i.e. by focusing on content delivery and user management.
Simply put, the conventional market wisdom that has lead CLOs to invest heavily in online training is disconnected from the reality that in-person classroom learning is and will be a critical part of most business’s L&D operations for a long time. It isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just an overall failure of the market to anticipate how training teams’ needs would actually develop.
Let’s dig a little deeper and assess why these skewed priorities developed.
Fundamentally, it’s just easier to address problems that arise in the world of self-paced learning. That’s not to say that problems related to content delivery don’t have complex and often interlocking challenges, but, for the most part, the industry developed good strategies for addressing those challenges years ago. The barrier to entry to develop and market a tool like an LMS is fairly low, and therefore the market is heavily saturated with tools that deliver content to learners.
A much higher barrier to entry exists for tools that assist with the back-end management of training operations – and this is why there are relatively few tools available in the enterprise L&D space that provide this kind of service. At the end of the day, organizations invest in what they know about – and the market is so dominated by tools aimed at self-paced learning that managerial tools fall by the wayside.
For example – consider the problem of scheduling. Classroom training involves enormous logistical hurdles simply because physical resources have to line up in the same place at the same time in order for the training event to work. Calendars for instructors, learners, equipment, and locations are obvious starters, but the situation gets even more complicated than that.
How do you work in the schedule for a third-party catering company providing services to a multi-day event? How do you accommodate something like a representative from an outside vendor there to supervise training on their company’s equipment? How do you prevent double-booking of something like an expensive simulator, and by the same token, how do you maximize the uptime of that simulator to achieve the best value-for-money on its investment?
Questions related to scheduling are what computer science calls optimization problems – how do we take various constraints and find not just a working solution, but the best possible solution?. These problems are very difficult to solve efficiently, even for computers, which makes the barrier for entry to create a scheduling software much higher than for something like an LMS – which means options are limited and investment is curtailed.
Investments in self-paced learning are far from useless. They’ve produced enormous returns for companies over the past several years, and have enabled innovative new approaches to learner engagement. But with the market as saturated as it is, and the pace of innovation in the LMS space slowing down, organizations would be wise to redirect their investments into optimizing classroom training.
Scheduling and resource management are the largest areas with potential for efficiency gains that are specific to classroom learning, but there are many areas where more efficient management of training could pay dividends. Reducing the manual work involved in booking courses and learner registrations, for example, is another. Simplifying and streamlining the management of training data could also lead to optimizations in high-value classroom training settings. Something as simple as having the data to correlate instructors with the courses that they have the most success in teaching can go a long way towards improving the learner experience.
The takeaway is simple: if classroom training is here to stay, and it most certainly is in many critical industries, then it’s time to make serious investments in improving the logistical and managerial obstacles that are impeding its efficiency. Enterprise L&D cannot afford to continue misaligning its software investments with the reality of where it’s generating value.
At Administrate, we’re passionate about investing in the backend infrastructure to manage and streamline classroom learning at the enterprise L&D level. To learn more, visit our Enterprise Leaders page to get a glimpse into what training professionals can do using the Administrate platform.
]]>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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”]]>