In continuation of parts 1 and 2 of the Using CMS Technologies for Streamlined L&D Operations series, this post covers goals that affect your program design and content management strategies to streamline the learning and development (L&D) operations for your organization. In previous parts of this series, I explained the roles and job functions to support the design and operations management described in today’s post.
Now let’s focus on the areas to define goals to streamline L&D operations by leveraging content management system (CMS) technologies. Later we can strategize about how to apply resources to your most important goals to create, manage, or deliver training and learning experiences anywhere—or everywhere—in the world.
Not all learning and training operations are created equal; depending on the organization, the vision and mission of your training and development unit may differ. [1][2] Some of you may be in a training unit focused on learning experiences for internal staff. Others of you may be in a training group with a market audience of students or professionals outside your organization. In contrast, other training units target both internal and external audiences. Depending on your target market, your goals may be different. While I have experience in all types of learning and development (L&D) environments, I will focus primarily on training for an external target audience.
When your training operations affect external clients, it typically means your main objective is to provide L&D as a paid-for service. The paid model of L&D adds a whole level of pressure to ensure your operation is not only significant but better than your current or future competition. Even if you corner a particular market today, there is no guarantee you will tomorrow; you are less likely to have a monopoly tomorrow. Today's consumers and organizations must be conservative in their spending habits; this was the case before the coronavirus pandemic and will be the case for an indeterminable amount of time. [3] There is little to no room for ramp-up time for neither students or professionals, so training and development must be valuable and efficient, the first time. Because we live in a digital world, information is accessible to anyone that knows where to look, so L&D (as a paid-for service) must provide the right knowledge and resources to earn and keep value for the consumer. Training and knowledge relevance can change almost as quickly as it's delivery. Depending on the industry you service, scalability and efficiency are essential. But the backbone is the technology, and the tools you chose can make all the difference, which in this case includes the right CMS product solution.[4]
So, in this and most other cases, high-level goals are driven by:
● your target market or markets, including target audiences
● streamlined (new) content development
● program (training and knowledge collection) scalability
● efficiencies in pre- and post-development (or redevelopment) through to delivery
● effective and engaging delivery tailored to your target audience (or audiences).
When you focus on each of these areas, identifying what is most important to your organization and training unit, you can plan what to rank them (by order of importance) to make up your road map to implement or leverage your existing CMS to streamline your entire L&D Operations.
Stay tuned for future blog posts in this series, where I will expand on each of the high-level areas, to help you define your individual program design and content management methods.
About the Author
Christina “Christy” Freire is an accomplished project manager, learning systems architect, educational technologist, and instructional designer with more than 15 years of experience working in various training and education environments. She is currently the global program manager of Curriculum at Cellebrite , digital intelligence and forensic company. Her primary L&D focus is to design comprehensive e-learning programs, implementing strategic, innovative solutions, and support research and development for EdTech, Knowledge, and Information Systems to promote an efficient, user-centered, and effective learning experience.