3 Ways to Organize Employee Training (in Confluence, Jira, or G Suite)

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Whether you plan to create a new certification program, ensure a smooth onboarding process, help your employees keep up with the latest industry trends, or regularly check their knowledge, you need a robust solution to create courses and quizzes.

We will highlight three different ways to refine employee education, create engaging materials and tailor them to the needs of your team using the solutions you are familiar with.

In your dreams

Let's assume that you've just got hired as a new learning and development manager at a company with a distributed team. One of your priorities is to create training courses on HIPAA and Cyber Security. You also need to update existing training materials on Customer Support and Workplace Safety.

Sounds like a lot of work to do, but there is more since you have some expectations:

1. You want to create valuable training materials that are easy to digest.
2. You want your colleagues to quickly adapt to the tools you will use for their training.
3. You want to track their progress and check course results with a single click.
4. You want to have an opportunity to reuse materials.

And, of course, you want to establish continuous training processes that would save time and effort for you and the whole training team even if it scales.

Let's see what options you have when it comes to the tools you can use for employee training.

Courses from scratch with the tools you are used to

You can follow the path of least resistance and take advantage of either Google Suite or Microsoft 365 to create materials for employee training. If you decide to use any of them, you will save some time on explanations since everyone knows how to work with these tools.

You can use the combination of Google Docs with Google Slides or MS Word with PowerPoint to produce training materials. Documents and presentations will serve as training modules with various videos, texts, and pictures. When it comes to creating quizzes and knowledge assessments, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms can come to the rescue. You can create different types of questions there and share them with your team.

Once shared, you can track progress, checking if your colleagues finished the quiz or not. For your convenience, you can copy results to Google Sheets or MS Excel.

Can your dreams come true? 

You will have to do a lot of things manually from the search of required materials in your company's drive to the creation of new documents. You will also need to structure them properly, adding them to the required folders. And you will have to repeat it a couple of times for all the courses you have to create or update.

Confluence in a bundle with Jira Work Management

Another solution is to take advantage of the tools your company uses every day. Yes, we are talking about Confluence and Jira Work Management Cloud.

You can start with a project in Jira Work Management Cloud and a dedicated space in Confluence you will use for internal training. You can create multiple pages with rich training content: PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, Google Docs and Slides, and more. Paste the link to a quiz you created with the help of Google Forms to the required Confluence page.

Use the Task Tracking template in Jira to organize the tasks in your training project.

In the List view, every task can work as course enrollment for each course participant (Assignee). You can set the due date. Once created, the course participant receives notification, reads the description in the Jira task, and opens the Confluence pages linked to the task.

When participants read all the materials and took the quiz in Google Form, they need to mark the task as Done. If the tasks include subtasks, they need to check all of them too.

Add links to the Confluence pages with training materials. If you create a course with a lot of information, you can add subtasks with course details in the task description.

To make your job easier, you can create a task template and clone it together with the links and subtasks when you need to enroll new participants. All you need to do in this case is to add the participant's name and assign the task with the due date.

The course administrator can open the Calendar view to check who is about to take the course and who hasn't taken it yet.

Using the same view, participants can check courses assigned to them with the help of the filter Assigned to me.

You can create a learning dashboard in Confluence to make life easier both for course participants and administrators. To make it useful, add links to all training resources and embed your training calendar from Jira.

If you use a Google Form in your course, you can create a separate Confluence page to track course results. You just need to embed a spreadsheet with answers to this page and it will be updated automatically.

Can your dreams come true?

People can use tools they know, however, participants have to switch between Confluence and Jira constantly since they need to read content in Confluence and after that go back to Jira for the next task. They also can't mark the place they've stopped at in case they want to take a pause.

Course creators have no dashboard with the list of all available courses in Jira since the List view and the Calendar show only participants' courses. It can also be hard to assign the course to a group of participants.

And again, you will have to repeat all these manipulations for all the courses you need to create and update.

Turn Confluence into a learning management system 

izi - LMS for Confluence is an app that allows you to create courses and quizzes right in Confluence without switching between multiple tools.

If you already have some useful information for your training in Confluence, you can use it for your courses. Just add existing pages to your training modules or create new ones right on the course administration page.

Take advantage of Confluence pages with rich text, adding images, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, YouTube videos to avoid monotony and make your content more engaging for course participants.

When it comes to checking the understanding of what people have learned, you can easily create quizzes right in Confluence and incorporate your courses with them on the fly.

After installation of this app, you can see the Learning tab on the Confluence top navigation bar. This tab opens the Learning catalog both for course participants and administrators:

• Learners can find all available courses and self enroll to the ones that have this option, and, of course, resume their courses from where they left.
• Course administrators get an overview of all courses and quizzes they or other learning administrators created.

The Learning tab is also a place where course and quiz creation or export of valuable reports are just a click away.

Course administrators can get a bird's-eye view of how course participants perform. They see the list of course participants and track the progress and status of every learner. Moreover, you can export course reports in CSV in case you need to share course results with your management or auditor.

Can your dreams come true?

izi LMS allows you to empower Confluence and turn it into a full-fledged LMS you can tailor to your needs: onboarding and orientation of new hires, employee, customer education, and product training.

Resume

You can try any of the options we described in this article to make your dreams of successful employee training come true. All of them have benefits and you are the one to choose your learning strategy.

Feel free to share what tools you use for employee training!