Do Training Providers Need a LMS?

A Training Provider is the business entity (or organization) that offers training to customers as a service being provided. With the popularity of IT technologies, most of the training centers pay attention to emergent technologies and generate business income via selling this type of courses. New Horizons or Itpreneurs should be the names easily to be identified.

Of course, there are other types of training provides whom focus on specific subject domain knowledge, such as Sales, Leadership, Change Management, and many others. For example, the British Council is a British organisation specialising in international cultural and educational opportunities.

For those technology training partners, they tend to work with Top IT Companies, such as Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP. By building a close business relationship, these training providers, most of the times, need to be awarded and recognized as: Microsoft Learning Partners or Authorized Learning Partners by Cisco. These companies then will purchase required hardware / software equipment as well as training kits (books) in order to conduct training to the general public. The writer of this blog has been lucky enough to get exposure on Learning Partners Business Development responsibilities during his service in two Network equipment providers. He has been visiting countries to build close business relationship with School/Universities and some IT solution providers in several big emerging markets.

With the development of open source and well-known corresponding popularity, many instructors would dedicate their personal time to compose some learning materials, with the purpose of getting familiar to those open source tools. Data Analysis in R, Writing Web Applications are only two of the many examples. Those instructors would attempt to local (regional) training centers and then build a different type of cooperation in getting students to attend courses. It is a common win-win strategy, where both sides, the training providers & instructors, should take long-term vision in their roadmap.

The above description should pretty much describe the business activities of a learning provider. The learning content are pretty operated in a mark up Buy-and-Sell Accounting records, meaning, obtain the training kits/books from IT companies with a cheaper price, then put it in a learning package to target customers. Students base can be coming from Enterprise, College/Universities, or individual. They pay the price, some with discount, attend the course. Then, participate certification exams to be awarded with "Azure Administrator Associate" or "Cisco and NetApp FlexPod Design Specialist" certificates.

As such, the LMS should be able to have the identify (database fields) on "Course Program (Certification Program)" "Student Profile with student name, contact number, payment record, course attending record, exam record." In some of the countries, their government would have tuition reimbursement program for some people, such as newly graduate or senior citizen, to obtain training. Of course, the training center may or may play some roles in assisting student to obtain such funding, where it may or may have a record shown in the student profile.

Under such circumstances, it is more like having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), instead of a Content Management System (CMS) or LMS. This type of customer information is most valuable when you believe that customer retention is a great, though, invisible, asset to your business activities. The writer of this blog even see some training partners are using an Excel file, with all of these information. However, their instructors are embedded with professional knowledge & skills and the customer service in that training center is widely recognized, with which their success is pretty much understandable and expectable.

Quiz Review: Fashion trends come and go. Technology is ever-changing faster than that. How could a training provider sustain its existence in a dynamic condition?