As the global workplace continues to increase in complexity, companies of all sizes and from most every industry are in need of high-quality corporate training in order to effectively compete and remain viable. For many companies, this means working with third-party consulting and corporate training organizations to gain access to the expertise and employee development capabilities they require.
Given these growing training and consulting needs, a recent report by Technavio predicts that corporate training will see a 10% CAGR growth over the next four years, for a total increase in industry revenues of nearly $53 billion. This presents a great opportunity for consulting organizations to grow their business and diversify their revenues while helping their clients solve a pressing need.
The Consulting Business Opportunity Offered by eLearning
In years past, the only real option for delivering corporate training and workforce development was through classroom-based programs. As a business opportunity for consulting organizations, however, this presented several challenges:
High Cost
Under a classroom-based training model, the consulting organization incurred significant expenses toward instructor travel, lodging, venue fees, catering, and the printing and distribution of learning materials. eLearning eliminates these overhead costs.
Consistency Challenges
When you have multiple instructors leading on-site training sessions, there can be consistency issues as you cannot be sure that your entire team is delivering the same, up-to-date materials and messaging. With eLearning, you are working with a single set of up-to-date content across the entirety of your client base, thus ensuring consistency and accuracy in your training.
Scalability Issues
Another challenge of classroom-based training is in the hiring and training of additional instructors as your client base grows. And the inevitable turnover of instructors exacerbates this challenge. eLearning eliminates scalability challenges by enabling you to simply leverage a single set of training materials for multiple client engagements and programs.
Data Collection Challenges
An important aspect of any consulting-led training engagement is in the ability to present analytics and reports to your client to verify the value of your engagement. While this valuable data can be difficult to capture through classroom-based training, most eLearning technologies include embedded tools to communicate the value and success of your training engagements.
Learning Management System Options for Consulting Firms
The core technology that supports all types of eLearning engagements, including consultant-driven corporate training, is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. And while there are several options available for LMS architectures and deployments, there are two specific features that should be strongly considered as they are well-suited for the unique needs of consultant-based eLearning.
Multi-Tenant Architecture
A multi-tenant LMS is an architecture and deployment model that will enable your organization to manage multiple instances of the LMS on a single application. While a single tenant architecture deploys the entirety of the software and its supporting components for one client, a multi-tenant LMS allows your to quickly and easily “spin up” new eLearning environments (portals) as you bring on more clients and create new training engagements.
Multitenancy allows you to manage all of your client portals from a centralized console and ensures that each instance of the LMS application is always the ‘latest and greatest’.
Cloud-Based Deployment
A cloud or "SaaS-based" LMS deployment, offered by a third-party vendor, offers the flexibility and cost model that is well-suited to support a consulting business model. Unlike an on-premises (self-hosted) deployment, there is not requirement for a large, up-front investment is software and hardware. And the cloud vendor handles the ongoing management and maintenance of the system, so your team can focus on selling and delivering great consulting engagements and training experiences for your clients.
And with a cloud LMS offering, expanding your use of the system is as easy as choosing a subscription-based plan that support your current feature and capacity needs.
LMS Portals: eLearning to Grow Your Consulting Business
LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows our consulting business partners to grow their business by adding eLearning and corporate training to their client offerings. Using our platform, you can launch and manage multiple eLearning environments from a single, centralized console. And each portal can have its own unique branding and includes powerful supporting tools to ensure the best possible eLearning and training engagement.
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