A broad acceptance of remote working has been one of the most important professional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns.
Almost every manager has learnt to include services such as Slack, Zoom and Teams as part of the toolset as they oversee distributed teams. But many managers also need specialist tools to meet the challenge of scaling their teams remotely.
Learning and Development (L&D) professionals, especially, must find new online collaboration tools. Principally, they need to ensure that everyone who has been hired, but not always met face-to-face, is set up for success. This includes onboarding new staff, upskilling them where necessary and helping them from working relationships with their team.
As part of this, L&D managers need a new toolset of learning and development software to assess competencies and to develop tailored learning programs.
From ensuring the mental, physical and financial wellbeing of their colleagues to maintaining the levels of English fluency necessary to facilitate effective company communication, there is a lot to consider.
To save you time, we’ve shortlisted five of the best training technology tools on the market for L&D professionals today.
Eduflow is an LMS that is focused on making online learning engaging, collaborative and active. It can be applied to any learning context, from new employee onboarding to sales training. It combines a wide range of learning activities together in a ‘learning flow’ on the basis that real learning is achieved through peer interaction and problem solving.
“They helped me scale as a one-person team thanks to their social learning features…that means I can be minimally involved with a cohort-based or async course, and the learners still get a really human learning experience.”
Cassandra Naji, VP of People Development at Animalz
Pricing:
Eduflow has a free plan which gives access to 3 active courses with 50 learners in each. Paid plans start at $20/month and allow access to more courses and more admins and learners per course.
ELSA Speak is an engaging and effective app and learning management platform (LMS) that enables remote teams to speak English with confidence. Powered by AI, it provides detailed feedback on pronunciation and fluency. It also tracks progress as learners interact with thousands of exercises on over 120 topics. Industry specific modules are available for airline, hospitality, IT and call center professionals.
“It's the only perfect English learning app with AI technology and it is an organized and practical platform I have ever seen. In addition its motivation and reminder notifications play an important role in my goal progress process. Thank you!”
Omar A - Digital Marketer, Egypt
Pricing:
ELSA offers a free trial after which pricing starts at less than $5 per user/month for up to 50 users.
Oliva provides on-demand, professional-led mental healthcare for employees and managers through a user-friendly digital platform.
Created by a team of tech founders and experienced clinicians, Oliva has developed its own care model based on proven, evidence-based care approaches. To deliver on its promises, the platform has recruited a team of mental health professionals and is setting a new standard in workplace mental healthcare.
“Our team is our most valuable asset, and we recognize that a person’s mental health is critical to our collective wellbeing and overall success. With Oliva, not only can we give our team members easy access to mental health support, but we can also develop a culture that is more inclusive and work to minimize stigma with Oliva’s training and insights.”
April Hoffbauer, Senior Director of People at Maze
Pricing: Available on request from Oliva.
Zavvy helps L&D managers create meaningful onboarding experiences for their employees. It connects team members regularly and fosters employee development plans.
L&D Managers can use the no-code workflow builder to quickly build their own training materials and add other forms of content to the service. To speed this up, the service also offers templates for virtually all the standard use cases.
"The first days in a company are overwhelming for any new employee. It’s important to give new team members a warm and supportive onboarding experience. At the same time, we’re growing rapidly and need a reliable and scalable onboarding solution for both remote and in-office across 50 locations in 12 countries. Zavvy gives us exactly that. Our manual work is drastically reduced and new team members highly rate their onboarding experience.”
Barbara Imm, Head of HR at Roadsurfer
Pricing:
Zavvy’s pricing starts at €6 per user/month.
Adobe Captivate is an eLearning authoring tool that empowers L&D managers to easily create all kinds of fully-responsive eLearning content, without programming.
It supports the inclusion of randomized quizzes, branched scenarios, software demonstrations and simulations. Courses can be highly-interactive (leading to better engagement) and integration with other Adobe software makes for visually rich content.
“We train a LOT of systems that are constantly changing to a virtual workforce across the globe. Captivate makes it easy to create software training videos that are engaging and interesting. We also use the screens, use cases, and scenarios from the software training videos to create simulations to allow users to practice what they've just watched.”
Gabriel Nance, Curriculum Design at Thryv
Pricing:
Adobe Captivate offers a free trial after which pricing starts at $39.99 per month, which must be paid as an annual subscription.
Remote working in some form or another is here to stay and many professionals will need specialist tools to do their jobs effectively in this environment. Thankfully, for L&D managers who need to scale teams remotely, there is now an excellent selection of learning and development software available to meet their needs.