We continue sharing stories of online entrepreneurs who became successful online courses providers. The thing is that a Learning Management System (LMS) can be used not only for selling online courses, it is also a great means of delivering corporate training, improving company’s performance and employees’ productivity.

To help you to take advantage of online corporate training and stop you from burning cash with a traditional face-to-face approach, we’ve decided to share this IT Services and Consulting Industry corporate training case.

A Learning Management System (LMS) for IT Services Corporate Training

Corporate training is a part and parcel of any business process, which brings the company a competitive advantage in the market, increases employee loyalty and reduces the turnover. Businesses all over the world understand that and invest in employee training and development.

However, a growing popularity of a remote working model in IT industry, geographically distributed teams, flexible working hours and time difference reshape the working processes, making a traditional instructor-led training approach almost impossible to implement on practice.

Rather than wasting time on scheduling training sessions no one can attend and taking senior employees from their main job duties, IT services companies choose the training delivered by means of a Learning Management System (LMS).

Not only does the LMS help IT businesses to reduce training costs but helps to integrate training into all business aspects (CRM, Talent Management, HR software integration, for example), ensures data security and allows monitoring developers’ progress.

Let’s turn to the NENS story and find out how to create seamless working experience for employees.

A story of New England Network Solutions firm and its VP - Josh Oakes

Breaking into the Club

New England Network Solutions (NENS) is an IT Support and Network Services firm providing leadership, projects and managed services to small to medium-sized businesses in the NE/Boston market.

The company has been providing outsourced IT services for over 20 years now. First started as a small IT company, NENS hit the list of the top 250 Progressive Service Providers, helping clients align their business and technology needs.

Growing Bigger

As the company grew, getting everyone on the same page was critical.

The only way to have a company keep a promise is to have a clear understanding of what that promise is and what exactly is required from everyone to fulfill it. To continue delivering and improving our service level training was the key for us.

“That said, deciding on increasing training was the easy part, how to do so was the real problem. We had to figure out who was the one who should train others. Different people had different skills and abilities; it was not the same person every time. And even when you did figure that out, scheduling was a nightmare. Everyone is busy, how do we accommodate everyone’s schedule?”

Solving the Challenge

We needed a way to magnify our efforts – recorded content was the only way to beat that problem. At first, we looked into creating simple videos but there was no tracking and interactivity. How would you succeed without tracking and monitoring?

More than ½ of the battle is enrolling, verifying participation and scoring. A simple video does not come even close to accomplishing those success factors.

Where to start?
At first, it was fun to think of all the areas you can make training content for, we just let our minds unleash a torrent of great ideas. Then, after a couple minutes, you realize that you really need to pare down what you are going to deliver.

Failure is a Part of the Journey

We made a lot of mistakes: biting off more than we could chew, bad initial content, poor sound, vastly underestimating the time to clean up and edit...

In short, we missed the effort required for getting it done.”

Learning from Mistakes

Scripting is critical! You need to write everything out in advance. Often trainers/speaker improvise a bit. A live performance vs a recording that will be watched again and again has a different requirement for success.

Know what you want to teach, what you want them to retain. Write a script to hit those objectives.

Cut out all unnecessary filler – really – there is no need nor room for spackle. 
Great planning, clean scripts, and practice reduce time lost trying to save content with master editing skills.”

Looking Ahead

We will continue using an LMS training approach to help our team deliver exceptional IT services in Boston. We are considering expanding LMS training services to our client base, creating additional content and more extensive interactivity with our course materials.”

Advice for Online Entrepreneurs

Use LMS as a training platform for employees. It is part of our onboarding process and continual training efforts. It is critical to your operations.




Learn what your audience wants and if you have a great way to deliver that content/education to them and a great channel to do so you can go quite far. That said, do not assume that if you build it they will come.

You need a channel to sell it. You need a solid marketing and sales plan. Make sure you know a way to attract paying clients.”

We hope that the stories we share within the “How I’ve Successfully Launched an LMS-Based Project” blog series will help you make your digital business stand out. So, if you’ve been thinking about implementing online corporate training, now is the time to do so!

If you have any questions to Josh Oakes, he is open for your questions at www.nens.com and on LinkedIn.

We’ll be back next month with another story to teach, inspire, and encourage you along your journey.

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