Glossary

Software Training Platform

What Is a Software Training Platform?

A software training platform, also known as a software training program or virtual training platform, is software designed to facilitate a company’s virtual training efforts. The platform can be used for either employee education or customer education, with many companies leveraging the same tool for both. As the name might suggest, software training platforms are frequently used to deliver online training. 

Learning Management Systems are the most common type of software training solution. These all-in-one tools allow a business to create and deliver both courses and learning materials, track and report on progress, and handle administration and documentation. Some vendors even take their LMS a step further and equip it with features such as virtual labs to facilitate hands-on training.

Others are simply designed to integrate with other learning and development tools.  

Why Should You Use a Software Training Platform?

As a software company, training platform software is the most effective way to teach both customers and employees about your products. Properly deployed, a training platform empowers your business to streamline learning, education and professional development. Perhaps more importantly, it does so while reducing costs and enabling new training modalities.

It also bears mentioning that training is itself central to your success as a business. 

First, software training has been linked to a 68 percent uptick in product usage and 56 percent more utilization of key product features. For customer education, effective onboarding can potentially improve customer lifetime value by 500 percent and conversion rates by up to 80 percent. Additionally, companies that fail to invest in employee training are around 24% less profitable than those that do.  

Benefits of Software Training Platforms

There are many advantages to using a software training platform to support your corporate learning and development initiatives.

First and foremost, there’s lower overhead and increased accessibility. Your business doesn’t need to spend as much on travel, venue rentals, physical materials and instructors. Because virtual training can be accessed entirely via the Internet, people can easily dial in and learn from anywhere. 

Training software can also help consolidate existing training infrastructure. Instead of having a different platform for customer training, employee training, and vendor training, your business can bring everything together into a single place, reducing sprawl and complexity.  

Learning software provides analytics functionality, too. This allows your business to track a wide range of different metrics and KPIs. Not only does this help you more effectively monitor learner progress and the overall effectiveness of your training, but it also allows your organization to embrace continuous improvement. 

Automation is another significant benefit. There’s a wide range of mundane tasks associated with learning and development, such as scheduling. By offloading this busy work onto the training platform, your instructors save both time and energy – which in turn allows them to create and deliver better training. 

That increase in quality is only further enhanced by the fact that training software makes it easier to generate and manage a range of different materials while unlocking new methods, such as hands-on training. Consequently, this can increase learner engagement, knowledge retention and overall satisfaction. 

Core Components of a Software Training Platform

While the specific details will vary by use case and industry, a software training solution should generally offer the following functionality:

• Integration with other software, either via API or through built-in connectors 
• Support for artificial intelligence 
• Customizable administrative and user dashboards
• Interactive learning elements such as polls, quizzes, and more
• Courses, course catalogs, and scheduling
• Mobile e-learning support
• Online collaboration tools such as forums and video conferencing
• Analytics and reporting
• Communication tools such as messaging and email
• Content management
• Built-in security and privacy