A partner training LMS helps you train business partners (resellers, contractors, outsourced teams and associates) so they follow your processes and best practice, and so you can track their training compliance. There are many options. This checklist covers what matters.
What should a partner training LMS include?
1. User experience
Make your partners' lives easy. Good UX means they absorb processes quickly, engage more and adopt what they learn; poor UX breeds frustration. Good UX also makes it easy for managers to find partners who are struggling or non-compliant.
2. Co-employment protection
Training partners and associates carries co-employment litigation risk if handled incorrectly. Your LMS should be designed to help protect you. Ask us to show you how.
3. Mobile, just-in-time learning
Partners should be able to learn on their phones, search topics and pull up processes, best practice and tips at the moment they need them.
4. Augmented reality for hands-on work
In engineering, manufacturing and construction, AR glasses keep hands free while showing content, and field engineers can connect to a control room where experts see and hear what they do. See NSFlow and Remote Expert.
5. Just-in-time triggers from equipment
Link machines or production lines to the LMS so an error code automatically sends the operator the right how-to instructions. Even new operators can reduce downtime and handle more complex repairs.
6. Integration for mass onboarding
If you train more than a couple of hundred partners, integration with single sign-on (SSO), identity management (IDM) and your enterprise service bus (ESB) matters. Automated enrolment and assignment save hours of admin.
7. Customisation
Align the LMS with your brand and culture for a consistent partner experience, and build custom modules and reports on industry-specific topics.
8. Scalability
The platform should grow with you. Reliability and ease of use protect admin time as numbers rise.
9. Reporting and analytics
Custom reports can show how well partners onboard new people and get them certified, hours trained (so you only pay for completed hours), associate retention, and satisfaction. Peer comparisons can motivate call centre and outsourced construction teams.
10. Support and training
Look for documentation, videos and live support. Our platform averages two support tickets per 100,000 users per week.
11. Content management and assessments
Upload, organise and distribute materials across devices. Skills Velocity supports e-learning, face-to-face, blended, instructor-led and one-to-one assessments, with SCORM, video, quizzes, presentations, HTML and surveys. Assessments test knowledge and retention, and can gauge satisfaction too.
12. Gamification
Badges, leaderboards and rewards raise engagement and motivation.
How do you compare partner training platforms?
Score shortlisted platforms against these 12 points and your partners' preferred ways of learning. For an example of a partner building its own academy, see Cobry Academy. Book a discovery call.
