I’m experiencing it with the Kindle at the moment.

I know, at the back of my mind, that it makes perfect sense. More space for essentials in the suitcase, easier to manage on the commute and far more cost effective – so, what’s the problem?

I guess as with any type of progressive technology there is a fear of abandoning the ‘traditional’ way of doing things. From our experience as a training management software house, the same resistance is seen in the learning and development industry. The majority of businesses know that getting digital with their approach to managing training and course provision, with the likes of online booking and automated happy sheets, is now a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if'.

Sometimes the resistance to change are born out of a refusal to modernise. Occasionally however, this resistance is generated from technical challenges, and training businesses feel that the integration of new software is simply too much of a challenge for the company to face.

Here are a few of the key technical challenges that we believe act as a barrier to progression in the training industry. We’d love to find out whether any of these resonate with you...

Integration of new software

One of the biggest misconceptions is actually around the effort that’s involved in the integration of new software. Today’s developers can create software that is not only bespoke to the needs of the training company but also extremely simple to integrate into the existing system. I’ll mention more on disparate systems later, but training management software can give training companies one single system to operate administrative tasks from – simplifying the entire process.

Understanding new developments

There have been some fairly significant developments in the training industry over the past ten years of so. One in particular is the steady shift from classroom-based learning to eLearning. This shouldn’t be a barrier for trainers but an opportunity to repackage the offering and sell more training programmes.

Essentially, the training business has the same brief: provide great training content. The software is available today to actually allow training companies to effortlessly move from classroom-based learning to online learning – so getting to grips with the technical side of new developments really shouldn’t register as a barrier.

Developing a content strategy/online marketing

Online booking is all well and good, but incorporating this technology to our website doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll get people coming to the site and booking our courses…” This is a key challenge that many face – they see the value in online booking, but realise it is only part of the puzzle. Download our latest whitepaper to find out how you can develop a straightforward but effective content strategy and actually get some quality traffic to your site. A content strategy involves writing some great articles and blogs that are of interest to your target market. Then, once they are written, post them on your site and market that content in the right places – social media will really help you here. Once the traffic is flowing to the website you will be able to justify the online booking integration spend.

Disparate systems

It is very common for training companies to have separate systems for all of their administrative tasks. So, there may be Excel spreadsheets to collate course bookings, a separate CRM provider to manage delegate information, and another email marketing platform to grow the business and generate leads. Sometimes training companies have ten different providers managing what essentially could be done across one platform. Using disparate systems might be the ‘way things are done’, and the thought of overhauling that might sound confusing. However, it is far more efficient with time and money to administrate training across one platform – and the switchover can be managed by a provider so leaves little work for the training business.