In your agriculture business, training new hires often falls at the same time as the height of your busiest season. You need your staff working on the machinery and in the fields with growers, but without proper training, they aren't ready to work efficiently, safely or competently.
Training new employees in any industry is crucial. When employees receive thorough training, they are more likely to stay with your company longer and work more productively, so you avoid costly staff turnover and gain more skillful staff at the same time.
For an agricultural business, specialized training is hugely important. You need your new employees to install implements, make common upgrades for planters, and troubleshoot service calls, and you need them to learn these crucial skills as quickly as possible.
Companies in other industries are increasingly turning to learning management systems (LMS) to train their employees. We think training staff via an LMS could be pivotal for agricultural businesses, too.
We'll help you explore whether an LMS is the right tool for training your agriculture business employees.
What is a learning management system?
Learning management systems are software products built specifically to help people learn. They could be used by schools or universities to facilitate online learning, by medical businesses to offer accredited continuing education, or by an online company that wants to sell their expertise as an online course.
A well-rounded LMS allows you to create:
- Lessons
- Quizzes
- Tests
- Reports on student progress
Businesses use a variety of content to create their courses, such as instructional videos, training pdfs or manuals, or PowerPoint presentations that have already been made.
The powerful thing about an LMS is that all your training material is gathered in one well-organized system, so employees know where to find it, and you know what they're viewing. Outdated material is easily erased or edited, and you can track which staff have received and passed which modules.
How can an LMS work in an agricultural business?
In an agricultural business, your busy season is often strictly defined. So you're usually busy in a narrow time of year, and most likely, it's the same time of year when you tend to hire your new staff to meet the season's demands.
A learning management system can help ease some of the pressure of the busy season by ensuring that your staff training is properly trained without taking time from your own schedule.
You'll know that all your employees have received the same educational materials at the same quality standard. They’ll feel empowered from a customer-service angle, too, as they’ll be thoroughly trained on how to place orders for growers, which questions to ask before they head out to a service call, and how to conduct follow ups with growers.
Instead of distracting your current staff with simple questions, your new employees can consult the LMS if they forget a lesson or need a refresher.
Plus, new skills acquired through a learning management system are more likely to stick in the minds of your employees. Learners who review materials are
far more likely to remember their lesson.
You'll also know which of them are struggling to understand or apply the training material with progress reports, evaluation, and results tracking within the LMS.
Which LMS is right for my agricultural business?
There are several solid learning management systems on the market, but we think these three are among the best for an agricultural business.
LearnRight is an LMS that offers all the features of a traditional, learning-focused platform, such as course creation and learning communities, but with an intentional focus on product training, compliance training, and employee onboarding.
Its market advantage is that its creation continues to be informed by education-industry experts. LearnRight isn't just another piece of software but a targeted, deliberate way of teaching employees so that they learn faster and retain more of what they've learned. You can
take a tour of the software here.
We also like that LearnDash gives you a dedicated onboarding specialist with advice and support to help you launch your employee training program.
LearnDash is a WordPress plugin, so if your website is built on WordPress, this option will allow you to add learning content to your website. The courses could be available only after payment or publicly available for anyone to view after filling out a brief form or survey (a handy way of attracting new leads).
If your business is centered around selling products that require specialized training, LearnDash may be the right option for you. But LearnDash is focused on selling courses to third-party students outside of your organization, so it might not be a perfect fit for training your employees in-house.
LearnUpon offers the course creation and community building you want from a learning management system. It is billed as a "people-focused platform" and encourages business owners to build learning communities within the system.
Some of LearnUpon's standout features include gamification of learning content to engage users and a mobile app for learning on the go. Like most learning management systems, it supports webinars and video, lets you organize learners into groups with different permissions, and allows you to track and report on their progress.
Let's get started with an LMS in your agriculture business!
If you're ready to explore how an LMS could work in your agricultural business, a good place to start is to
contact the folks at LearnRight. We think you'll like how their onboarding specialist makes launching your training program straightforward.
And if you're ready to market your ag supplier or equipment dealer business through web design and development, digital marketing, and brand strategy,
contact us. We're experts at selling agricultural businesses
because we know them, and we'd like to get to know yours next.
You can email us at info@agtivation.com or call 937-335-3286.
