Automate training when you assign learning pathways

Learn how to use learning pathways to automate training and save valuable time for your L&D team.

One of the key roles of any L&D team is to make sure that everyone in the organisation is given the correct training. That will include mandatory training that applies to all learners, as well as role-specific training and personal development training.

Managing and maintaining all of that can become a major drain on time for any organisation. It’s particularly difficult for larger organisations to manage, but even in smaller organisations — where the size of the L&D team is proportional to the size of the business — assigning learning can be an overwhelming activity.

That’s why it makes sense to automate as much of these mundane yet important activities as possible so that you can focus on more important things, like creating new course content.

So let’s look at how you can automatically assign learning pathways to automate training across your organisation.

Automate user provisioning

To automate training, you will need to get your learners onto your LMS in the first place and make sure they each have the correct profile information, such as their job role and organisation. Since you’re going to be automating learning pathways, it makes sense to automate the sign-up process, too. This makes it easier for learners to access your LMS and also represents another major saving in time and resources.

There are a few different ways to automate user provisioning to your LMS. These include:

Integrating with your HR system or CRM

If you’re already collecting all the information you need to create each learner’s LMS profile elsewhere, such as your Active Directory or HR system, you can integrate your LMS with the other system in order to automate user creation on your LMS. In technical terms, this is calling web service APIs on the LMS from your user source.

We’ve previously written about integrating your HR system and your LMS, integrating your LMS with Salesforce, and integrating your LMS with Hubspot to achieve this. This feature is available for Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace and Totara TXP.

Uploading user provisioning files

Another option is to automatically generate user provisioning files from an alternative user source, then upload them to your LMS where they can be processed without the need for manual intervention. This feature is available for Totara TXP.

Automating training allocation

Once you’ve got your learners signed up to the LMS, you can also use automation to assign the correct learning to each user. Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace and Totara TXP all have features that will help you to automate learning assignments. 

The best approach available will depend on which LMS platform you are using. As with many things in elearning, there are many different ways to achieve similar outcomes. A handful of the most popular ways to automate training are:

Integrating with another system

Similar to the process for integrating with another system for user provisioning, you can also call web service APIs on your LMS to assign training to a user. A very basic example would be automatically assigning onboarding training to new users added to your HR system in the past week.

This feature is available for Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace and Totara TXP. But because the business logic has to be in the calling system rather than the LMS itself, it can result in a more complex implementation.

Configuring dynamic audiences

Totara TXP includes a dynamic audience setting, which allows you to automate training based on specific details within each learner’s profile. For example, all staff managers could be automatically assigned a course on effective performance management or all learners with a particular role could be assigned a role-specific certification to ensure they can do their job competently.

Dynamic audiences can be used to automatically assign a correct course, program or certification based on any attribute contained within each user’s profile.

Configuring dynamic rules

The Moodle Workplace equivalent of dynamic audiences is dynamic rules. It works in a very similar fashion to what we’ve discussed above and can be used to achieve similar results.

How will you automate training?

There are multiple other ways of automatically assigning the right training to the right people within your organisation. Whatever the best way of achieving automation via your LMS, doing so will free up a significant amount of time.

Talk to us about the increasing automation across your LMS. Just fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.

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