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Top 5 Challenges When You Scale External Training (and How to Solve Them)

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Barry Kelly
December 1, 2023
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Whether you’re in the business of selling training content, or you’re training customers on a complex product, you can’t scale external training with lo-fi technology. For today’s training businesses, relying on an internal-facing LMS takes a serious toll. Expensive licensing models force payment for inactive users – bleeding budgets dry, and inefficiencies from the manual provisioning and distribution of a growing amount of content is a constant challenge. 

This is where Thought Industries’ Panorama shows its unique value. It’s an external LMS multi-tenancy feature that delivers a rebranded experience to each segment, customer, or persona in your external training ecosystem. 

Depending on where you are in your digital transformation journey, we know that your struggle goes beyond outgrowing a homegrown tech stack, or relying on generic employee learning platforms that buckle under the weight of external training demands. If any or all of the following five challenges resonate with you, let Panorama empower your training businesses to totally redefine what scalability means from the ground up.

1. Manual Content Provisioning 

When you start out building training, designing, managing and delivering content to each customer individually is part of the process. But as your training business scales, manual provisioning can’t help but slow you down and become a serious bottleneck. 

Panorama allows you to centrally manage all of your content and your courses across as many audiences as you serve. You can update parent courses, and see that reflected on child courses according to your own policies and context. This ensures efficiency, while empowering you to scale your training efforts with ease. You can manage and distribute custom solutions to multiple audiences, segmenting what they need all from a single platform, without fragmentation. Your company can grow organically, without manual provisioning of content slowing you down and hindering that growth. 

See how MongoDB uses Panorama for strategic customization, building micro-sites for various audiences, leveraging strong core features and enterprise scalability this exclusive replay from COGNITION23.

2. Different Requirements for Different Groups

There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to training content, so centralized provisioning is just step one. For LMS multi-tenancy to work as a force multiplier, it needs to flexibly meet the different requirements of various groups of learners, from individual customers to channel partners, educators and even internal employees. 

Panorama allows you to curate personalized learning experiences for each audience, tailoring your training content and requirements for each group to ensure a relevant and effective learning experience for all.  As each cohort has their specific learning needs, the more you can offer flexibility and personalization, the higher those all-important engagement metrics will soar.

3. Messy Data and Reporting Across Segments

Data is the lifeblood of any business, and training is no different. Being able to visualize consumption and engagement data, and then compare training metrics with other data points from across the organization is critical. We hear time and time again that training businesses are calling out for cleaner engagement reporting across the different customer segments, so they can measure the performance and ROI of their training. 

Panorama seamlessly combines with Thought Industries’ reporting tool, ensuring clear data sets that support informed decision making. No more sifting through complex logs, you can access clear, segmented reporting for different groups of learners and content, allowing you to refine your training strategy as you go. 

4. Lack of Client Admin Capabilities

If you’re spending too much time managing instances on behalf of your customers or other learning audiences, you’re not alone. One of the most common challenges is an inability to hand over control to platform admins, empowering them to manage their own learning experience. As you’re always on stand-by for changes or troubleshooting, you can’t focus on more strategic growth work elsewhere. 

Panorama takes the pressure off your own internal training teams by delivering control to partners in a strategic way. Administrators can tailor their learning instance to their unique needs, allowing your business to support existing learners without the need for hand holding and support every time a design change becomes necessary. Suddenly, you can scale external training without any added resources on your side whatsoever. 

5. Profitability Constrained by Rigid Licensing

Frustrated paying for learners who never log in? This is a traditional challenge in external training, and can stand firmly in the way of scale and growth goals for your training business. Rigid contracts and long term agreements may not align with actual usage over time, and underutilized licenses become a drain

Panorama offers sublicenses and audience architecture for true efficiency, and provides a wide range of monetization options, simplifying the seamless delivery of licensed learning and content delivery to various groups of learners. Thought Industries guarantees a dynamic licensing model, so your business can adapt to the evolving needs of your customers, without over committing yourself for the long term. 

Thought Industries is Your Route to Quality Training at Scale

Anyone who has experienced even one of these five challenges recognizes the fundamental difference between an internal LMS, and a solution that has been purpose-built for customer and partner use cases. With an internal LMS, scale is always hopelessly out of reach. 

Powered by Thought Industries, your training business has the technology to achieve what’s been missing up until now – easy, centralized content control and data visibility, smart segmentation and licensing, and relevant, personalized course delivery for truly limitless scale. 

Book a demo now to see how Thought Industries can scale your external training.

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