We’ve all heard the deflating sighs and groans when a training day is mentioned in the office.

Traditional forms of training are increasingly becoming unpopular for education and development; it can be time-consuming, expensive and ultimately, dull and not engaging for employees.

That’s why learning management systems (LMS) are increasingly becoming an invaluable tool for education, training and employee development. LMS has transformed the availability of educational content and resources.

An LMS provides you with a centralized and customized educational HUB that offers online seminars, assessments and quizzes that can be accessed anywhere at anytime. This means that employees have e-learning on demand.

Not only can you create customized training to suit regulations, changes in the market and your own company policies, but you can also help your employees gain personal and professional skills.

From learning basic business math to practicing successful negotiation skills, LMS provides employees with all the support they need. In addition, employers can track their progress for efficient and effective development.

If you are thinking about making the switch to online learning, it is important to find out what different LMS can offer your organization.

Cornerstone operates as a software as a service (SaaS) LMS and is perfect for HR strategy, complete with recruitment, learning and performance features. It has 41 languages, as well as over 30,000 course titles readily available.

The simple and modern interface for end-users is the real highlight of Cornerstone, with mobile-friendly content for Android and iOS. There are testing and assessment features, as well as ways to track performance.

The social collaboration feature allows every user to have their own profile and newsfeed, as well as comment and interact with teams online. There is 24/7 support available for trouble shooting when any problems arise.

Cornerstone is not as simple for administrators as some other LMS on the market, making content creation confusing for newcomers to the e-learning system. In addition, no gamification feature is a discouraging aspect for end-users.

The LMS packages are generally catered towards bigger organizations, which means the pricing structure can be expensive and not cost-efficient for smaller companies.

Workday is a software as a service (SaaS) LMS that offers a complete HR suite with an e-learning module. End-users will benefit from its learning path that recommends training and assessments, based on their interests and requirements.

Courses are easy to customize with the ability to upload various document files, videos and surveys, as well as SCORM and AICC content. There are also instructor-led training options to suit company preferences.

Workday is oversimplified and basic compared to other options on the market. The learning feature is still relatively new to the Workday suite and has fewer features than you would expect. Bottom line: it still has some catching up to do.

As a cloud-based LMS, Bridge is accessible anywhere and benefits from sync capabilities that mean users can pause and resume a course from another device, without losing progress.

The Dashboard is simple and easy to navigate for a great user experience and content is totally customizable for administrators. Bridge is SCORM compliant and will import most files and embed outside sources.

In addition, to creating your own courses, there are over 20,000 third party courses readily available.

The Bridge interface is engaging with the creation of webinars, assessments and quizzes. Sophisticated analytical tools are perfect for checking scores, pass rates and assessing team performance.

Bridge is still growing and missing some features that would add more depth, such as comprehensive grading for courses. The pricing information is only available upon request, which means you have to enquire to find out more.

TalentLMS offers various plans to adapt to the needs and budget of an organization, making it affordable for small businesses. The Cloud-based LMS supports a variety of file formats and is SCORM and TinCan compatible.

It has an encouraging and user-friendly interface with gamification features, such as badges, leaderboards and levels.

Administrators can create fixed and randomized assessments for users, which are optimized for all devices. This LMS is easy and quick to use with no download or installation required.

TalentLMS falls short on advanced statistics and reports on learning. The style templates are also limited and other LMS offer more attractive layouts.

Another downside to TalentLMS is that the group user feature is currently restricted to up to 20 users, which is not ideal for bigger organizations.

At present, the support for troubleshooting and asking questions is not as good as the help offered by other LMS.

If you’re looking for an LMS that makes learning simple for everyone from learners to Administrators, try out Go1.

With an intuitive learner interface, your users won’t need to spend hours learning how to use the platform, and for Administrators, managing your learners and generating customized reports is as simple as a couple of clicks.

Go1 is the most user friendly LMS on the market for users across the board, and with more than 100,000 courses available in the course marketplace, it’s the total workplace learning solution to save time and reduce costs.


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Pros and cons of top Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Australian businesses are currently operating in an increasingly complex risk and compliance landscape – and that’s not set to change any time soon. In fact, upcoming changes to laws around data breaches have been a serious prompt for Aussie companies to get up-to-date with compliance rules.

All organisations, no matter whether you’re a tiny startup or a large multinational corporation, need to be compliant with the regulations of their industry. In 2017, it’s more important than ever for employers to ensure they comply with fast-changing regulations.

Why is this so important? To begin with, there are serious consequences of non-compliance, including legal proceedings, fines and penalties, and the loss of income and reputation. But paying attention to compliance is also a positive step for building your business.

Sarah Bartholomeusz, founder and CEO of You Legal law firm, sums it up well.

“Compliance and risk management don’t sound very sexy but they are crucial to having a sound business and are drivers to achieving business excellence – we call it future-proofing,” she says.

To help you understand more about this topic, we’ve outlined the biggest compliance risks facing Australian organisations right now. This will shed more light on particular areas you need to be compliant in, so you can start future-proofing your business.

Safeguarding against data breaches            

Those changes to data breach laws we just mentioned?

Well, Australian companies could now face paying civil penalties of an amount up to $1.8 million, making it one of the biggest compliance risks for businesses at present.

These changes have been made to increase the level of security for individuals, protecting customer data that companies have access to. Organisations will now have to prove that they are taking this issue seriously. Once enacted into law on 22 February 2018, businesses that fail to show they have the right measures in place – or are at least making efforts to – will face serious fines.

To minimise this risk, make sure you’re educating staff about data security and compliance. Investing some time and money in compliance training is worth the investment, to make sure your business is safeguarding against the event of a data breach.

Protecting your company against cyber attacks 

Throughout 2017, we’ve also seen various countries across the world affected by major cyber attacks involving ransomware. The ransomware, believed to be a malicious computer virus known as Petya, wreaked havoc on more than 200,000 organizations in over 150 countries – including companies, universities, government agencies and hospitals across Britain, Spain, Portugal, Russia and Ukraine.

Since this global ransomware attack hit Australia a couple of months ago, disrupting the operations of a number of Australian businesses, a lot more discussion around cyber attacks and compliance has been generated.

Again, make sure you’re training staff around this issue, as being prepared with increased cyber security is your best line of defense. Learn more about the precautions you can take to protect yourself and your business from malicious ransomware and the risk of cyber attack.

We’ve talked about being compliant with technology, but compliance is also critical when it comes to the human side of things – your employees.

Employees are “one of the most important elements of every business and because they bring with them a host of legal obligations.”

If you run a company or organisation, you’re responsible for providing your employees with a safe workplace, free from any hazards and health risks. Australian companies face considerable fines and business impacts if they fail to be compliant with current safety laws and regulations. Employers also need to provide appropriate workplace safety training, such as PPE awareness, for all staff.

Look also at the policies you have in place around sexual harassment, bullying and all forms of discrimination. Under Australian law, we all have a legal right to live and work free from harassment and discrimination based on gender, age, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Make sure you have strong policies in place around these subjects, and that employee training is ongoing to remind staff of these key messages.

Bartholomeusz recommends all Australian businesses do regular compliance housekeeping, to make sure they’re still up-to-date with all legislation and regulations. This is particularly critical if your business is growing.

“Perhaps your company took on more employees and has a higher turnover?  These are excellent indicators of growth and success but also have the potential to attract new legal obligations,” she says.

There are plenty of compliance training courses available online, if you’d like to learn more about this important issue. You can also click the ‘Compliance’ tag above, to see more articles from Go1 on this topic.

The biggest compliance risks in Australia right now

Do you have an intense fear of job interviews? You’re definitely not alone, with most people feeling anxious and nervous when placed in interview situations.

While it’s certainly normal to feel nervous before an interview, you don’t want panic attacks or intense fear to get in the way of you getting the job you want. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing that you have the skills, experience and competencies to do the job, but stage fright and nerves get the best of you on the day.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are techniques and strategies you can use that will help you feel more calm, confident and collected before a job interview. And a lot of it comes down to good preparation.

You can learn more about how to prepare for job interviews, and get some really good practical advice and tips, with this excellent 30-minute online course – Interview Skills.

This is a real world, up-to-date explainer course that uses animation to keep things fun. It’s designed for anyone who gets nervous at the thought of attending an interview, to help them feel more confident and deliver their best performance at their next interview.

The Importance of Preparation for Your Interview

Our nerves tend to play up when we are caught unawares, or have to think quickly on our feet. When you’ve already played over possible questions and scenarios in your head, you’ll be more able to respond in a calm and collected way.

As the course trainer says, “the preparation for your interview should start the minute that you find out your application has been successful.”

Scope out your prospective employer’s website in detail

Check out their social media feeds to see how they engage with customers

Learn about their values and corporate social responsibility

Have they won any awards or launched new products or services?

Can you identify what makes them stand out from the competition and why this makes you want to work for them?

“Find out more about the company you’re going to visit, make sure that you are confident and calm before you get there … know what you are going to say about your abilities and achievements.”

All of these things are important parts of your preparation.

Top Tips to Improve Your Interview Technique


The course also provides a section on top tips for improving your interview skills.

As they say, often it’s the little things that can make a big difference – and this is certainly the case with job interviews. You’ll learn about the importance of non-verbal communication, body language and posture. And certain things you should never say in interviews.

Interviews often end with the interviewer asking if you have any questions for them – and this can really trip some people up! You don’t want to get through all your answers unscathed, then unravel in the face of this question. This course will help you prepare for that.

You also need to always make sure you read the interview invitation or email carefully. Check to see if they’ve asked you to bring along certain qualifications or certificate. You might also need to show your driver's licence, passport or working visa documents. And don’t forget to bring extra copies of your job application and CV.

In this section of the course, you’ll even find tips for nailing (the dreaded!) interview presentations, and how to see them as a valuable opportunity to showcase your ability.

Learn the STAR Method for Answering Interview Questions

One of the best things about this online course is its attention to the STAR method. Haven’t heard of this before? Well, you’ll find it helps a lot with answering job interview questions.

The STAR method helps you create well-articulated, clear responses to interview questions that are based on competencies. The method is quite invisible to the listener, coming across as natural, but demonstrating to interviewers how you meet the criteria for each competency.

Situation – a brief description of the situation and context of the story (who, what, where, when, how)

Task – explain the task you had to complete, highlighting any challenges or constraints (e.g. deadlines, costs, other issues)

Action – describe the specific actions you took to complete the task

Result – close with the result of your efforts, including clear stats or figures to quantify the result if possible.

You can create a pre-prepared list of responses that you can use when questioned on possible competencies or skills.

My other favourite take-away from this course? Learning how to turn around the “what’s your biggest weakness?” question. You can make this question work for you. As the course recommends, “turn an area of weakness to your advantage and let the interviewers know that you’re prepared to upskill, with the outcome of bringing new skills to your role and sharing them with the team.” Very solid advice!

Hopefully the tips, tricks and learnings of this course will help you feel more confident and at ease about your next interview. If nerves hit, remember that almost everybody feels nervous about job interviews – and somehow, there is comfort in that!


Why not enroll in the Interview Skills course now?


On Tuesday August 22nd we ran The eLearning Assist for the first time and had a lot of fun sharing some of our knowledge with our attendees. We know that sometimes it can be hard to attend webinars, so to give everyone that was unable attend a chance to get involved we have put together a recap of the event.

Every episode of The eLearning Assist is run be a different member of the Go1 team so that you can tap into the knowledge within the team covering all aspects of eLearning from creating content, learning principles, improving processes, selling courses, compliance, and expanding your training program. Our inaugural host was learning design expert and account executive in the Go1 Brisbane office, Eduardo Gomes.

In Episode 1, we took a closer look at how to get started with blended learning in your organisation. Eduardo provides some great tips that can help you to plan and execute a successful blended learning program, and well as tapping into the informal learning elements that exist amongst your team.

Our live demo in this episode covered course creation within the Go1 Platform. Eduardo walked us through how to set up a course, add learning items, include in person events as a part of a course, and some best practices when it comes to how you should work through the course creation process.

You can view the full webinar video below to learn more: 


If you have any questions about any of the items covered in this episode please let us know as we'd love to help you out! Also, if there are any topics that you would like to see us cover in our next episode, let us know so we can make sure we include a demo to walk you through everything.

Don't have a Go1 Portal? Sign up for a free portal today!

The eLearning Assist: Episode 1 catchup - blended learning & course creation

Sometimes an employee of your organization may request to access the personal data you have about him or her. Such requests are also known as Subject Access Requests. “Personal data” is not just a figure of speech - it’s also a very important legal term when it comes to corporate policy.

For example, you may think that your name is personal data because it’s information that other people and organizations use to identify you. However, by itself, your name is not always personal data because there can be many people in an organization with the same name. At the same time, a combination of your name and other information that makes you uniquely identifiable, for example, you name, address and telephone number, do become personal data.

The Data Protection Act of 1998 is a law in the UK that deals with the issues of personal data collection, protection, and processing. It defines eight principles that organizations need to understand and adhere to in order to ensure lawful handing of personal information.

How organizations collect and use personal data

Your company starts to collect personal data about the employees from the moment they apply to work for the organization.

Personal data is not limited to obvious personal information such as name, address, or date of birth. It also includes employment history with, employee training, disciplinary actions, external website usage and more. This data can be contained in a variety of media - from print to electronic sources.

According to the Data Protection Act of 1998, employees have the right to know what information their employer collects about them and they also have the right to access the information.

While this may seem easy on the surface, it’s not. For example, during the tenure of an employee, an organization is likely to collect an array of information about external online resources that employees have access to such as website analytics, stock photo websites, news and blogs. This is a TON of information. Access to social media also poses a challenge. The organization may store personal data on central servers, individual computers, USB keys, external hard drives and mobile devices.

Organizations often use personal data to outline a path to accomplishing goals by analyzing personal relationships of their employees with customers, vendors, and employees of other organizations. For example, a sales manager may want to know which sales people have a background and connection in a certain industry before sending them to the industry trade show.

An organization may also use personal data to identify employees that pose risks to the organization or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are the best candidates for promotions.

Some of the recent issues about the privacy of employee data have appeared because of employer health programs. According to an article in Fast Company Magazine called “How Fitbit Became the Next Big Thing In Corporate Wellness,” employers all around the world are providing their employees with activity trackers to promote exercise and healthy lifestyles, which, in turn, decreases the rates of obesity, diabetes and cancer and boosts employee productivity.

In the United States, FitBit’s corporate customers include BP, Bank of America and IBM. The retail giant Target agreed to offer 335,000 Fitbit trackers to the employees as a part of its health program. Barclays offered the trackers to 75,000 employees.

These are just a few examples that come with sensitive privacy and personal data handling issues. For this reason, you want to be sure that you know what the law states when it comes employee data, subject access requests, and processing them properly. 

IBEC, a business and employer association for organizations based in Ireland, stated in an article from 2016 that the Data Protection Commissioner has observed a steady rise in the number of subject access requests in the recent years. Most of them are regarding complaints from individuals that occur after “relationship breakdowns.” If you want to avoid costly lawsuits and inquiries from the government about the ways your organization handles personal data, you need to make sure that you process all subject data requests as required by law.

Secure your business with data access training

For most companies, building a strong project management discipline is a key priority. Strong project teams help companies to reduce risks, cut costs, deliver on time, and produce results – all important things for any business.

As an employee, taking the time to improve your project management skills can be a great way to boost your career, while making yourself more valuable to employers. What’s more, project management skills are not limited to employees working in a project manager position – they are a set of techniques and tools that can be applied to any role, helping you to achieve goals and manage your workload more effectively.

Whether you’re managing small, relatively simple projects or rolling out complex, large-scale initiatives, a little extra study into project management will go a long way. These five online courses will help you understand and use project management tools and techniques, developing your skill set and building your confidence in this area.

The best place to start? With the fundamentals, of course. Project Management Fundamentals takes you right from the start, so it’s great for anyone who is new to the subject or is keen to start their study from scratch.

This online course explains the basics of project management, covering the following project steps:

Establishing project goals and objectives

You’ll receive plenty of practical tips for how to keep your project on track, manage your project team and report on project performance. You’ll also get an introduction to using the Microsoft Project software, which can help you manage the scope, budget and schedule of your project.

Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC) Simplified for Everyone

This next course is great for providing an overarching explanation of the project life cycle. Understanding the PMLC helps to provide a holistic view of project management, which is really useful for anyone who likes to have that ‘bird’s eye’ view of things.

The Project Management Life Cycle course walks you through each phase of the life cycle:

With each phase, you’ll learn what tools you need and how to use them, providing you with the tools to complete a Business Case, Project Plan, Project Schedule, and Implementation Plan. You’ll feel confident in knowing when to engage your team, how to prepare your schedule, how to create a high-level budget versus a low-level project budget, and much more.

This course is a great way to acquire the knowledge you need to manage a project from beginning to end.

Project Management: How to Manage Project Costs?

Want to focus specifically on the money side of project management?

A large part of project management is knowing how to manage costs, for the duration of the project. To be a successful project manager, you definitely need to know how to keep costs under control and not blow your budget. This is important for projects of all sizes and scope!

This online course does just what it says – teaching you How to Manage Project Costs. The course materials will give you a deep understanding of the cost management aspect of projects, teaching you how to:

Estimate costs required to accomplish project activities

Apply the best tools and methods for cost management

You’ll learn all the best practices of project cost management, with plenty of videos and quizzes throughout the eLearning course to keep you engaged and focused.

Project Management: Time Management for Project Managers

Aside from money, what’s the other precious resource that needs to be closely managed? Time.

While it’s important to know how to manage project costs and budgets, you also need to know how to effectively manage time, to ensure your project stays on track and delivers within the required timeframe.

As a project manager, time can be one of the trickiest things to manage, as there are often delays and interruptions coming from areas that are outside of your direct control. With Time Management for Project Managers, you’ll learn everything you need to know to master effective project time management.

As the course description says, we need to be aware of the “Triple Constraints of Project Management: cost, scope, and time. If any one of these constraints is out of balance with the other two, the project is unlikely to succeed.” This online course will show you how to master schedule management, activity duration, project schedules and more.

We’ll leave you with something a bit different – a snapshot of some cool software tools that you can use to manage your projects.

Choosing a project management tool isn’t as easy and straightforward as it sounds. Usually, the only way to find the right software tool for your project is to sign up to a program, give the free trial a shot, then see how the rest of your project team likes using it. Often you get stuck (or financially locked into!) using a program that isn’t really all that great for your needs, but you don’t have the time or money to look elsewhere.

With Project Management Software Previews, the process of choosing project management software is made easier, as it helps you to find the best fit for your needs.

This online course allows you to watch short videos that give you a window into the top-rated, established project management software systems. You’ll be able to see first-hand what major hosted project management software systems are available, and view the layout of each software system.

This way, you can quickly and easily access the information you need to further evaluate the software for your business, and choose one or two to test with your team. You can even show them the video of the one you like first!

Online courses to improve your project management skills

Many organizations only go as far as to comply with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements, without providing specific diversity training.

The scope of financial losses that an organization may incur because of the lack of diversity training is much broader than lawsuits and government investigations. If you have a diverse team and provide no diversity training, you will still be losing money even if you never incur any diversity-related legal expenses.

What Happens When Organizations Neglect the Issue of Diversity

Legal expenses of not training your employees in diversity can be huge. In the 1990s, the top management of Denny’s chose to neglect the discrimination problems that was running rampant within the company. As a result, a class-action lawsuit was filed and Denny’s had to pay tens of millions of dollars. In 1997, Texaco paid $176 million as a part of a class-action lawsuit settlement due to discrimination issues. In 2000, Coca-Cola paid $142.5 million to settle a lawsuit that very well could have been avoided if the proper diversity training had been used.

The definition of the term of diversity is “the state of being diverse.” The definition reflects of the reasons why diversity is such a controversial subject: it is a state of being. It is impossible to “do” diversity or “learn” diversity because a state of being is not a collection of facts or a description of a limited set of behaviors. Teaching something that “is” can only happen as a process and needs to include “doing.”

Diversity training always starts with awareness about the issue and then considering the goals of the organization. It’s also about understanding the various federal and state laws about discrimination that exist. In order to truly have a bulletproof diversity training program, the executive leadership and management teams need to be working toward the same training benchmarks.

Diversity awareness is a good place to start, but this is merely “square one.” Employees that are simply aware of the subject often lack the practical skills and guidance that they need to apply the diversity initiatives effectively. That’s why you need a clear and concise roadmap that takes your team from point A to point B.

While the issue of diversity training is relatively new, it’s based on very fundamental concepts about human psychology and the way that people behave. Effective diversity training is based on principles that psychologists and sociologists have known for many years, and one of the obvious and fundamental principles of human psychology is that people like to deal with people whom they understand and like.

Many diversity conflicts arise when individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities haven’t been given the opportunity to learn about each other. This lack of understanding can lead to conflicts and obstacles that can hold your organization back. As we mentioned before, it can also lead to very serious and costly compliance and legal problems.

Effective diversity training creates a new neutral space, a place where interactions between members of a certain group of people happen based on the individuality of its members and not based on their identity as a part of some other group.

When this happens, your team members can develop new relationships, create new connections, and communicate in a way that respects and explores everyone’s personal values.

Corporate practices that accomplish these goals can be formal or informal. They can occur at work or after-work. For example, common participation in sports is one of the ways that you can bring people together. Ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries, beliefs and practices have no impact on your ability to throw a football or go bowling, and so it goes with corporate initiatives as well.

Another way to illustrate the benefits of diversity is through storytelling. When people share stories about their lives and important events, people from very different backgrounds can see the similarities between the stories and realize that they have more in common than they previously thought.

Diversity training can help your organization in many ways. It can boost the morale and spirit of the teams within the organization, for example. It can also help your team members learn how to solve problems with creative solutions. When you are accustomed to looking at the world from multiple perspectives, you can see things from new and creative angles.

Many exercises in diversity training are based on problem-solving and decision-making, which can help employees apply these strategies to their work initiatives.

At the end of the day, diversity training isn’t just about compliance. It’s also a powerful way to train your teams to view the world from different perspectives and ultimately increase the productivity, efficiency and quality of your organization.

We understand that managing a learning portal can be tough work, so we want to make it as easy as possible for you!In our August update we have some exciting new tools that will streamline the way that you import and assign users to their managers, improve the way you track in person events, make updates on our social learning tools, and more.

Learn more about all of the updates below.

Administrators can now bulk assign users to a manager

When importing your learners into the Go1 Platform, you can now save time by setting up the import to include assigning users to a manager. Simply navigate to your User dashboard, click Add User, and select CSV file. Here you can download a template if you don’t already have one - this will ensure your data is in the correct format, or upload your CSV file. You can then preview your data prior to clicking Import.

Training GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Groups are a great social learning tool in Go1, and now you can further customise the display of your Groups by including a course image. When you are creating a new group, or editing an existing group, you will now see the Group Image option where you can add the image of your choice to represent your group.

Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Manually record a learning event or course completion

With the introduction of in-person or live learning events to courses, we have now made it easy for an individuals to record having attended a live event or having passed a course. This provides the user with more flexibility in how they manage their learning. This can be done by going into a users profile, selecting Learning Records, and completing the form as shown below.

Bulk actions added for Assigning assessors

Administrator can edit or delete a learning record

Improvements to Discussion areas for iPad users

User can now upload more than one file in their assessment submissions

Weblink LI's show warnings for site that set 'X-Frame-Option' rather than iFrame

Image and description fields have been removed from the LI popup in edit course

If an Admin clicks add new course, you are taken straight to the edit course page

Sign up for a free trial today and try it out for yourself!

If you have any questions about any of the updates and improvements listed above, please let us know and our Customer Success Team can help you out!

Try our new administrator tools in the Go1 mid August update

There’s no doubt that onboarding new employees can become very expensive and time-consuming for your business. Most hiring processes will involve writing job ads, running interviews, carrying out background checks, and organizing training for new hires, keeping HR managers and teams super busy. And pushing budgets.

In fact, according to Deloitte, the average US employer spends about $4000 and 52 days on hiring a new employee. That’s a considerable amount of time and money to invest in bringing new staff on board.

However, because onboarding plays such an important role in any business, it’s not something that you want to neglect or dismiss. Remember, each individual who enters your organization has an impact on your company culture. So you need to know how to deliver successful onboarding programs for your staff, while being careful not to blow your budget.

Sounds tricky, but it can be done! Here’s how to keep onboarding costs down, while still making sure the process is successful for both the employer and their new hires.

With successful onboarding, you’ll be able to reduce your staff turnover rate, saving you money.

Employee turnover is a huge problem in today’s workforce. Approximately 45% of companies estimate their total turnover costs to be more than $25,000 per person. From advertising to interviewing candidates and educating new hires, filling an empty position can add up to an enormous expense.

When you’re investing so much time, effort and money into this process, you want new staff members to stick around. To do this, you need to find the best solution for onboarding and training your staff. The best tech tool to use for this? eLearning.

Using eLearning to reduce onboarding costs

From software solutions to online resources, technology can be your best friend when it comes to reducing onboarding costs.

Using eLearning for onboarding allows you to develop a perfectly customized training program for each individual employee. With the right Learning Management System, you can create short, concise online courses that are tailored to the exact needs of your team members. Because the fact is, not all staff need to know the same skills or the same selection of company policies.

You want your onboarding program to reflect that, with content that covers only the relevant workplace safety, policies and procedures, and HR contacts that new hires need.  Taking onboarding online allows you to do this, keeping staff engaged and focused, while also providing an effective way for managers to monitor and gauge employee performance.

There’ll be no need for expensive training facilities, speakers, or printed materials that require updating – with all your modules, assessments and reports online you’ll save significantly over time.

Include mentoring as part of the onboarding process

Another way to reduce costs is to include mentoring in your employee onboarding process.

Mentoring is an easy way to use existing, internal resources, rather than spending money on external training consultants or programs. Pairing new employees with veteran employees in on-the-job mentoring, costs you nothing, while also working to reinforce a supportive and welcoming environment for new employees. It also allows new hires to receive informal feedback from someone who has actually been in the role, which can be invaluable for professional development.

Mentoring also has benefits for the veteran employee doing the mentoring. In fact, you might like to read our previous article on the many benefits of mentoring for employees – they include increased knowledge sharing, improved skill sets and the opportunity for constructive feedback and support.

In this way, mentoring relationships will not only save your company money, they also help contribute to a more collaborative, trusting and positive culture for all staff in your organization.

Yoav Vilner, co-founder of Ranky startup marketing agency, agrees that many big companies are using mentoring for onboarding, as “an easy and cost-effective way to train a new hire in the everyday roles and responsibilities of their new job. Moreover, the new hire has someone to turn to besides a supervisor for real advice, honest conversation and encouragement in their new role.”

Keen to read more about onboarding? Check out these two earlier articles on:

Why a Good Employee Onboarding Program will Reduce Staff Turnover

Using Online Learning to Reduce Onboarding Costs

How to keep onboarding costs down without cutting corners

We all love life’s little luxuries, don’t we?

But times change, and what were once luxuries become necessities. That’s the situation today with training for small and medium sized businesses.

Not so long ago, training for SMBs was a luxury that could not be afforded. Small businesses often had to spend most of their time simply keeping their heads above water, and dealing with the day-to-day costs of staying in the game. Highly effective training was just not a realistic option.

And then came the internet. This technological miracle seems to have changed every walk of life - and the business world is no exception. Now, thanks to Cloud-Based Learning Management Systems like Go1 Premium, small and medium-sized businesses can access exemplary training resources at affordable prices in ways that would not have been considered possible only 15 years ago.