January 13th, 2010 by Robin Green

For many reasons, a learning management system course may be your ticket to success this year. For starters, you may be one of the thousands of Americans either worried about your job security or still seeking a full-time position. If the former is your case, you may be taking steps to strengthen your position in your current job.

To increase your value as an employee and ensure job security, pursuing online training to gain fresh and relevant skills is an effective strategy. However, there are other subtle ways to communicate your value as an employee to your superiors.

Find ways to remind your supervisor of your contributions to your company. What are you doing in 2010 and/or did you do in 2009 for the company’s long-term benefit? Remember–anyone is expendable. Give your boss more than one reason to believe that losing you would be detrimental to the betterment of the company.

Put yourself in the center of the company’s business activities; now is not a good time to be on the sidelines. Take a look at your strongest skills or areas in which you have considered developing professionally. Then, resolve to use some of your spare time to improve on those skills and apply them to your daily workflow. Look into online training courses either offered by your business, or on your own via a learning management system or other medium. Shadow a colleague. Go the extra mile; come in early; stay later; be more productive during the work day.

Most importantly, be willing to learn the skills required to fill whatever need you see in the organization. Be the one who steps up to the plate and takes initiative. Now is your time to work on your image at work and create a better reputation for yourself. Show off your work ethic and get serious, giving the impression of being efficient and productive.

Part of getting serious is changing negative behaviors that have become habits. One all too common habit in the office is complaining. Check yourself on this habit and adopt a more positive outlook. Make a coin jar that you have to drop a dollar into each time you catch yourself complaining at work. If gossiping is another of your bad habits, include this in your habit-breaking resolution.

Now is the time to become the kind of highly skilled professional you are capable of becoming. When considering taking online training or learn new skills, look at the numbers from December and consider yourself lucky to have a job in the first place. Last Friday the Labor Department reported that the U.S. lost 85,000 jobs from the economy in December. And most economists safely assume that the unemployment rate, which was steady at 10 percent throughout December, will probably only worsen in the following months.

However, perhaps you fall under the second category mentioned in the first paragraph–the unemployed or underemployed. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up seeking employment or people working part time for lack of full-time positions, is at 17.3 percent, nearly double the unemployment rate.

You may be one of those people who were considering a job change or a career shift, but were caught by the recession in a position you weren’t happy with. Now is not the time to sit on your hands and regret not having acted sooner. Online learning is a great option for a fast and cost-effective way to learn new skills and prepare yourself for a change in career. Pick up applicable job skills by taking a course in conflict management, customer service, diversity, or communication. Learn how to coach, start your own business, or perfect your English.

The self-paced nature of many online training programs and learning management system courses allows you to keep your present job while working towards placing yourself in a position to land a better fitting job in the future.

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Coggno.com offers premier online training courses.

January 10th, 2010 by Robin Green

Advances in online training have led to a revolution in the learning space by providing learners with skills they need to have to succeed in their job. For a successful business, e-learning needs to focus on learning for adults and with primary focus related to their job. This simply means, leveraging technology, training needs to be delivered to ensure they have necessary knowledge to be productive and have a constructive impact for their employers.

How would online training guarantee this learning transformation? Most training delivered in class is made for the organization or to achieve business goals. This might not be the solution since training should be designed for learners and help each learner achieve a superior performance. E learning makes this possible by moving away from a ‘one course suits all’ approach to an individual training method.

For any organization that has a large geographic spread, online training of employees can ensure consistent learning. A well designed e-learning provides learners with up to date knowledge using practical scenarios. Most e-learning helps organizations, both small and large reduce training costs tremendously.

For instance, if you have are a product based company, that has regular updates to a product or have a global product launch, you will need to ensure your employees are knowledgeable about the product. In most cases, you will need to send trainers to each region to train the staff or even have regular trainings scheduled to ensure that the information provided to customers is accurate. With such requirements, online training ensures uniformity in training delivery within a fast paced environment.

It reduces travel costs and provides your staff with the flexibility of taking courses to their convenience. Deploying courses online is easy and can be done quickly which allows employees to get up to speed as early as possible. With online training gaining popularity, it is not a huge expense on the budget but can be built rapidly and cost-effective. Some of the training designed includes audio, video and other audio-visual enhancements that can keep the learners engaged.

Some online training for business includes simulations that help learners to understand the product without actually risking a live environment. Tailor made courses are not high-priced and can be built in-house with the right tools. In fact, there are e-learning service providers that identify training gaps, design a training strategy and recommend solutions that can suit your budget.

Usually, online training is a one time expense, you can always choose from customized solutions to ensure the training is focused to the business in entirety or you can pick off the shelf courseware that can be aligned with your business requirements. Corporate training and e-learning are quite sophisticated and have drifted away from usual page turners. The training designed is more oriented to meet higher learner retention and improve employee productivity.

Online training is available for most industries and can be used to train unskilled laborers to prepare them for management. E-learning has had a positive impact on business that have implemented it has a training solution.

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Coggno.com provides high-quality online training.

January 6th, 2010 by Robin Green

This year, use your learning management system to secure an edge in the competitive global economy. In choosing the right LMS training for your organization, remember that knowledge is power. Especially in this knowledge-based economy, the most valuable asset you have is the knowledge of your employees. Capable and confident employees are the foundation of a successful business.

There are many ways in which a learning management system can be used to profoundly benefit an organization. Well-trained and knowledgeable employees are the glue that holds your organization together. They make your operation run smoothly, boost your company’s reputation, prevent injuries at work, and ensure that you are meeting all required legal standards. LMS training can be used for compliance training, sales training, and other areas of company education.

Compliance training is easily taken care of online. Using an LMS, you can cover all kinds of important topics, workplace safety, cultural sensitivity, sexual harassment, and other respect and legal issues in the workplace. However, for an employee taking mandatory compliance training, too often a training issue seems simply common sense, or not worth one’s time. This too-prevalent conception towards compliance training can cause behavior such as learning content skimming or skipping of entire sections in the learning content, and ultimately, mindless guessing on exams. Oftentimes students simply retake assessments until they have scored well.

Trainees’ absence of interest in a compliance training topic is often a result of bland training material–not to mention the sheer reality that the training course is mandatory. And that lack of interest can cause students’ failure to really learn and process the learning content, and to skimp on the time required to actually absorb the material.

However, holes in employee understanding of important issues (like those listed above) which compliance training courses cover can cause big trouble down the road. That is why supervisors are wise to ensure that employees are completing course material completely and correctly, and devoting the appropriate amount of time on each part of the training course.

Of course, it isn’t enough just to train employees on organizational policies and procedures. In order to get ahead in a competitive job market, take advantage of your training management system to go the extra mile. This year, educate your employees with state-of-the-art and effective tools so that they can efficiently and effectively educate your customers.

Customers want to make an informed decision when considering buying a product. There is no greater discouragement to purchasing a product than an apathetic or unknowledgeable sales representative.

Aiding with the development of employee knowledge is an essential practice for any company hoping to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive business environment. For this reason among others, investing in your employees is the wisest business move you can make in 2010.

Provide your employees with a customized, one-on-one training method. How can you do this? Using a SCORM-compliant learning management system is one solution that more and more organizations are turning to to make sure their employees are well-educated on their products.

But being well-educated on a topic is only the first step. This reminds me of some professors I had the unfortunate experience of having in college. A professor who was a physics genius but knew nothing about teaching. A literature professor who took no time for her students and spent more time trying to get published, or applying for federal grants. And so on.

Clearly, it isn’t enough to simply know a lot about a topic. In the same way, it isn’t enough for your staff to simply be well-educated about the product they are selling. They need to be able to share that knowledge with others.

This year, think long-term and invest in your best asset: your employees. Use your LMS not only for compliance and other basic training, but to educate your staff on how to best interact with customers. Deliver online learning management system courses to help your employees explain features and aspects of your product, and help customers understand all there is to know about your company’s benefits and unique products and services.

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Coggno.com offers world-class e-learning education.

January 6th, 2010 by Robin Green

Using a Learning Management System has many advantages when you have a global audience. It provides trainers, learners and moderators with a variety of features from administration of courses, documentation, tracking, scheduling courses, reporting, etc. Your LMS can provide your organization with a gamut of customized services that can increase efficiency and reduce training costs.

If you are considering implementation of a Learning Management System in your organization, you will have a scalable learning solution, with the capability of supporting multiple languages. A LMS will provide you with Competency Management, the ability to track and manage workforce competencies to ensure alignment with business goals. Identifying skill gaps, learning paths to fix skill gaps are some of the features of competency management in a learning management system.

Not all organizations have converted their classroom training to e-learning, most of them use a blend of e-learning and instructor led training. When you have a global workforce, a learning management solution can be a valuable solution to manage ILT and e-learning. It is a centralized tracking system that saves time and improves training efficiency.

When you need to manage student reports, or require customized reports, using a LMS can offer you such flexibility. A learning management system is capable of providing you with user history, test scores, summary of test by user groups, pass and fail statistics. Each of these reports are provided with ease and can be accessed with the click of a button.

Learning management systems are known to be successful for the administration of training within an organization. It facilitates completion of enrollments, both for individual users and batch registrations, ensuring users meet course pre-requisites, auto sending event notifications etc.

When you have a shortage of skilled workforce, using a learning management system can ensure that your employees have consistent training. Even if they are geographically spread, you will be capable of delivering the training across all operations, 24×7 and in multiple languages. Most organizations that have implemented a LMS have a collaborative learning community, with a variety of learning solutions that depend on the organizations training needs.

With a fast paced business environment, to have stand-alone training for each function and then deploying the training at intervals is not a feasible option. With corporate accountability, using a learning management system can help achieve an all inclusive approach for education. With each region or country, the training needs to align with local regulations. A LMS can give you the flexibility of managing content and updating this to meet each user groups training needs.

As you can see, a learning management system is an effective solution for global education. In addition to this, there are other features that a LMS supports that as a result add to the user-friendliness of the solutions such as;  advanced search functionality, easy integration with existing CRM, ERP and HR systems, etc.

The learning management system also has security features to protect user data, privacy, and prevent unauthorized access. This ensures that your organizations e-learning experience is not only effective and scalable but safe as well.

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Coggno.com offers world-class LMS platforms.

January 2nd, 2010 by Robin Green

Every organization has an additional responsibility when they send their employees on assignments outside the country such as training, now made easier with compliant platforms of online training. Usually, these trainings teach employees of the work culture, safety tips, how to deal with emergency situations etc. Have you considered using online training to educate your employees? You might find this as an expense for a minor training requirement but since this a one time investment; it has advantages in the long run.

Most employees find any training boring and unnecessary, and attend them because they are unavoidable or a requirement to travel abroad. If you use online training to teach ‘International Travel Safety Tips’, you can change their perception. Elearning can make the program flexible and interactive. An interesting example is to make an interactive solution that would involve the learner going on a short journey.

The online training can have real-life scenarios that an employee would face during international travel. Usually, these trainings are conducted by the travel team or an individual from HR. The trainings are conducted by them every time employees are scheduled to make a trip. This can be a time consuming activity for the trainer and even stressful for the employee.

With an online training program on international travel, employees can learn everything they want to and get certified as well. You can include a bunch of questions as a part of an assessment to ensure that they have retained the training. The training programs are self-paced and do not require them to pull out of their daily schedule to complete.

Organizations have employees traveling to different countries. In such situations, trainers are required to be knowledgeable about each destination and this can be quite tricky. Online training allows you to have a single interface, with content that is focused to each destination. Elearning ensures that each employee that takes the training receives consistent information; this cannot be guaranteed in a classroom setup.

If you have budget constraints to build such training, you can always look for online training that are available on the Internet. Once you find the training, you can customize it to meet your organizational needs. In fact, some of the online training is designed to cover every aspect of travel safety. For instance, the training covers topics that comprise of type of clothing, different aspects of the destination, information that must be seen on your itinerary, emergency contacts, documents for the business trip etc.

In the past, training employees about international travel safety tips was not taken too seriously. With strict rules and regulations defined by the federal and state authorities organizations needs to carry out these trainings. Taking advantage of an online training solution can help you meet your organizational training needs and ensure compliance to government regulations.

Training your employees about safety for international trips can be overwhelming and it is a good idea to cover every aspect. From H1N1 to getting to the airport, every organization must train their employees and make certain they are prepared for an emergency. With the right online training program, you can have your own ‘Travel and Living’ and make this an enjoyable experience for your employees.

Visit Coggno’s online training marketplace now for online training courses on a variety of topics.

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Coggno.com is a leading provider of high-quality online training.