Finding the right learning technology for your company is not an easy task, especially in a constantly evolving world in which every day new solutions appear on the market. The digital learning space is largely divided into two types of providers: big corporations with a huge client portfolio, which tend to offer learning services to complement their offering; and some niche companies that specialized on specific learning functionalities to address unique needs in an innovative way.

Deciding which path to take with so many learning technology options available can be challenging.

If you are facing this challenge, consider the following steps to select the right learning technology for your company.

• Define your criteria: There isn’t any technology currently available on the market that is going to meet all of your needs. Spending some time deciding which are your main criteria will help when conducting your benchmark and putting the focus on what is important for your company. What problem are you trying to solve? Are you looking to provide career development opportunities? Train people on internal processes? Is reporting critical for you? What about languages available and learning formats?
• Do some research: When you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and you have completed your benchmark based on your criteria, you can start the comparison and get a view of the market by referencing industry reports and research.
• Involved your learners: Once you have done research and narrow down the list of potential technology vendors to a couple of finalists, your learners should have the last word. Why don’t you select a sample group and do a pilot with them to understand their views. Don’t marketing firms release their new products to a sample group to understand their experience before doing a big release? Give it a try for a week or two and make sure you collect learner feedback and quantitative and qualitative data about usage and satisfaction to base your final decision on the learner inputs.

Once you have made the decision on the platform, follow these 10 tips for implementing your new learning technology.

1. Create a project plan and involve all the internal stakeholders (i.e., legal, IT, HR, communications and marketing) to make decisions about timelines and critical steps for the implementation.
2. Integrate the system with your employee database to make sure information is up to date and include relevant attributes such as region, role, language, etc., that will allow you to segment audiences in the future.
3. Make sure you implement single sign-on (SSO) and if possible, link your new system with the communications tools available in the company (e.g., Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc.).
4. Brand the site with your logo, corporate colors and internal images, and include your company brand in the URL so the platform will be easier to find for learners.
5. Create a communication and engagement plan as part of your implementation project with specific actions to drive adoption, including general campaigns and initiatives with ambassadors, and early adopters such as roadshows and demos.
6. Streamline a process for internal requests and governance for administrative work in the new platform.
7. Decided what type of content will be available based on your learning needs and what content should be created internally as it must be personalized to your company.
8. Evaluate if you need to acquire a license for additional software to create internal content that will be hosted in the new platform.
9. Determine your primary key performance indicators (KPIs) for reporting and measurement.
10. If you are changing providers, make sure you transfer content curated from one platform to the other and don’t lose any historical data.

By following the steps outlined above, your new platform — and your learners — will be set up for success!