How to Build an Employee Training Software like Docebo?

Are you interested in building employee training software?

You have come to the right place, as in this article, we are going to discuss how to develop a market-competitive learning management system for employee training.

Developing employee training software requires a deep understanding of full-stack software development, advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud computing app infrastructure, etc.

That is why, for such complex projects, it is essential to have a professional team with relevant expertise from a software development company like DevTeam.Space. More on this later.

According to a Forbes report, the global LMS market value is expected to reach 44.49 billion USD by 2028, growing at an impressive CAGR of 18.7%.

Let’s dive into the details of building employee training software like Docebo.

How to Build Employee Training Software

You need to go through the following steps to develop employee training software:

Decide Your Software Type and Specifications

You should decide on the type of employee training software you want to build. Your online employee training software can have one or more use cases from the following:

• Employee Onboarding: Your training LMS can help with the onboarding process of new hires so that new employees quickly learn how things work around the organization.
• Employee Development and Retention: Your LMS can help with talent management and ensure that your employees acquire the latest relevant knowledge and skills. It can also be used to delegate any changes in the business process or product to every member of your organization.
• Compliance Training: Compliance with specific industry standards is necessary for every business. To ensure compliance standards are met, you may want your employees to undergo some training or certifications. An LMS can help you in implementing such training programs.
• Sales Enablement: Employee training LMS can help you with the training of salespeople. Especially for new salespeople, finding the right content to close down deals quickly can be difficult. You can use an LMS to give the required training instantly.
• Partner Training: Your LMS solution can help with the training needs of your company’s business partners, including resellers, etc. This helps you ensure your business standards are met in all your partnerships.

Next, plan on features you want to add to your employee training software solution. Start the process by gathering all the information related to your product features, market competitors, and target user demographics.

Analyzing the employee training solutions already present in the market would help you identify what features you want to work on.

Some prominent features of an employee learning management system, including Docebo, focusing on two types of users – administrators and learners, include the following:

• Personalized Experience: You should provide a customized learning experience to each employee. This means suggesting courses relevant to their interest based on the online training courses they have previously completed.
• Learning Paths: A sequenced learning path takes learners through training modules without unnecessary enrollment hassles.
  • A learning path contains all the training materials and skills necessary for specific job training requirements.
• Course Management: The feature consists of authoring tools for admins for creating online courses and uploading e-learning and training content, and managing it effectively by creating catalogs, etc.
  • This feature also helps admins to enroll learners in training sessions, track employee training reports, view employees’ learning paths to provide targeted training, etc.
• Certifications: You can offer certificates on completion of employee training, such as sales training, compliance training, etc. Also, you can add a feature to keep track of each employee’s learning by facilitating assessments and quizzes, etc.
• Content Integration: This ensures interoperability by supporting learning content development according to standards such as SCORM, xAPI, etc.
• Gamification: The gamification technique is now widely used to keep learners engaged with the learning platform. It includes leaderboards, awards, badges, etc., to encourage users to keep learning, thus, increasing employee engagement.
• Social Learning: Promote idea-sharing and collaboration between learners through discussion forums, experience-sharing, and peer mentorship.
• Blended learning provides a richer learning experience through collaborative learning and informative interactions.
• Third-party Integrations: Third-party integrations enhance software functionality by integrating platforms like CRM, video conferencing, social media channels, etc., with an online employee training program.

Next, we will go through all the steps necessary to develop employee training software with the above-mentioned features that help the training managers.

Build Your Development Team

Building a competent team is crucial to give life to your software idea. Your software development team must include the following:

• A business analyst;
• A UX/UI designer;
• A front-end developer;
• A back-end developer;
• An application tester;
• And a project manager.

Decide Product Development Methodology

A well-defined product development methodology helps give better estimates regarding required resources, software delivery time, etc. Moreover, it would help you better manage different stages in the product development life cycle.

Agile methodology is widely used in software development. According to a report by Project Management Institute, 71% of organizations are now using agile approaches.

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Agile implementation frameworks, like Scrum, encourage the iterative development of software products. Each iteration is called a sprint.

At the end of the sprint, a software deliverable is presented to the customers to seek their feedback. The scrum approach manages software development tasks among small cross-functional teams.

The project manager is called the scrum master. Your project manager should be able to set appropriate development tasks and identify pitfalls beforehand.

Read more about adopting a scrum management approach in our article, “How to Build a Scrum Team”.

Implement Development Infrastructure for Employee Management Software

After building a development team and deciding on your software development approach, you should start the development process.

It begins with the implementation of software development infrastructure and the selection of tech stacks. Software development infrastructure includes servers, data stores, file systems, operating systems, networking channels, API services, etc.

Today, businesses actively invest in cloud infrastructure. The cloud service provider hosts and manages your development infrastructure, while your software developers solely focus on application development.

You have multiple options, like AWS Amplify, Google Firebase, Microsoft Azure, etc., for the cloud infrastructure of employee training software applications.

These cloud-based service providers help software developers to create scalable applications efficiently. They provide features like real-time database management, remote configurations, hosting, authentication, etc.

Moreover, they offer several APIs to enhance application features like payment, subscription, push notifications, etc.

An experienced development team would help you select the most suitable cloud service provider according to your product development needs.

Read more on suitable cloud solutions for businesses in our blog “The Best Cloud Storage Solutions for a Small Business”.

Design an Intuitive Employee Training Software User Interface

An important characteristic to keep users engaged with your learning software is an interactive yet simple user interface.

Assign competent UX/UI professionals to design a user-friendly layout of your software, including elements’ placement, color theme, font styles, etc.

Develop a Minimum Viable Product

A minimum viable product has all the essential features of your software. An MVP enables a business to evaluate its business idea in the user market right from the early stage of the development process.

Developing a minimum viable product saves you from investing in features that are not welcomed by your audience.

The key is to develop the core features of your software product, present them to your customers, and gather their feedback. To develop employee training software, your software developers can choose from multiple tech stack options.

Apart from programming skills, several other technical expertise skills are required to build market-competitive software that is both robust and secure.

We discuss these development skills below.

Technical Expertise Required for Front-end Development of Employee Training Software

To design the front-end layout, your developers would work with the following:

• HTML – a markup language used to define the structure of web pages and perform linking between them;
• CSS – a cascading style sheet language to style a web page independent of HTML;
• JavaScript – a scripting language to build interactive web functionalities.

Today, numerous frameworks, like Angular, Bootstrap, and libraries like jQuery, assist developers in building dynamic web and mobile front-ends in less time.

These libraries help front-end developers build interactive layouts by providing design templates for typography, forms, and other front-end elements.

Technical Expertise Required for Back-end Development

Multiple backend tech stacks are available that you can use according to your development team’s skills. If your software developers are proficient in PHP, they can use the Laravel framework. Similarly, they can use Django with Python.

For the C# programming language, there is a .Net framework available. Ruby on Rails is also commonly used for developing robust web applications using the Ruby programming language.

All these frameworks enable your development team to execute the MVP development process efficiently by making use of built-in libraries, run-time debugging, smart code editors, etc.

Full-stack software development stacks are quite common today as they help software developers to build both the front-end and back-end sides of software applications. Popular tech stacks include:

MEAN with MongoDB as a database, Express.js as a back-end framework, Angular as a front-end framework, and Node.js as a runtime environment.

MERN with MongoDB as a database, Express.js as a back-end framework, React.js as a front-end framework, and Node.js as a runtime environment.

LAMP for the Linux operating system with Apache as the back-end server, MySQL as the database, and PHP as a programming language.

Technical Expertise Required for Mobile Application Development

According to Dobeco mobile learning stats, learners are 45% more likely to complete a course when using a mobile application. Moreover, 71% of the millennial generation prefers mobile apps for learning and development content.

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Given these stats, you must invest in a mobile application for your employee training software to achieve better results in terms of user engagement.

The mobile app development stack is different from the web app development technologies. Depending on the target user market, you need to decide on the mobile operating system you want to build a mobile learning app for.

Such OS-specific mobile apps are called native apps. They give better performance in terms of optimized memory and processor use since they are developed for specific mobile device hardware.

Android App Development

To build a native Android learning app, your software developers should be familiar with programming languages like Java and Kotlin.

Kotlin is very popular today for building Android apps due to development features like data classes, operator overloading, smart casting, null safety, etc., that are unavailable in Java. Moreover, Kotlin provides complete Java interoperability.

Android IDE like Android Studio and Eclipse help developers efficiently build and debug apps given the features that come with them like integrated libraries, emulators, intelligence code editor, visual layout editor, etc.

It is necessary to follow the design guidelines provided by Android for your learning app to perform better on the Google Play Store. 

Your app developers can refer to Materials Design Guidelines to design and develop an app according to the UX/UI standards of Android.

iOS App Development

Your software developers can build iOS apps for Apple products using programming languages like Objective-C and Swift. 

Swift is more commonly used today for iOS app development and is also recommended by Apple. 

This is due to several features that come with Swift programming language like functional programming patterns, built-in error handling, fast iteration over a range of objects, structures to support methods and protocols, etc. 

Moreover, Swift has an easy-to-use English language-like syntax that provides developers with a low learning curve. It is also compatible with Objective-C, previously used for iOS development.

Your iOS app developers can use programming IDE like XCode to develop robust apps in less time.

Its features like source editor, version editor, simulator, GUI-based debugger, etc., greatly assist app developers with efficient coding and testing of iOS apps for different Apple devices.

Apple provides Human Interface Guidelines to iOS developers to build consistent iOS apps that are intuitive in design and integrate seamlessly with Apple products. 

Your app developers should adhere to these guidelines to develop an app that works better on the Apple store.

Technical Expertise Required for Database Handling

Database systems are needed to store and manipulate application data. Your software developers should be skilled in efficient data retrieval and modification queries. 

Moreover, your development team should be familiar with popular SQL and NoSQL databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc. 

These database management systems will help your developers to structure and store business data in a secure manner that is also easy to access and modify.

Technical Expertise Required for API Development and Integration in Employee Training Software

APIs or application programming interfaces are a huge part of software applications today. APIs help to enhance software functionality by integrating it with several third-party services. You can add APIs for push notifications, secure payment channels, track GPS locations, and much more. 

APIs can also make your development process more efficient as you can create a feature once and deliver it on multiple channels. You can quickly reach a wider audience by customizing API output according to a specific web or mobile UI context. Moreover, API can be used to automate workflows like content updates, etc.

To develop secure and scalable APIs, your developers should be experts in REST architecture to design and build compatible APIs. 

Your API developers should be familiar with concepts like JSON, OAuth, JWT, etc., to build APIs that are simple, secure, and integrate easily with mobile and web applications.

Your development team can use API development tools like AWS API Gateway, Runscope, etc., to design APIs, test their response, manage API versions, etc.

Technical Expertise Required for DevOps

DevOps or Development and Operations enhance the agile product development and delivery process through continuous integration and continuous delivery practices. 

DevOps promote close cooperation between entire teams to build, test, deploy, and maintain a software solution.

DevOps software development teams use tools like Kubernetes, Git, Docker, etc., to perform tasks like continuous development, testing, packaging, release, configuration, monitoring, etc.

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These DevOps tools provide features like distributed development, hosting code repositories, dependency management, automating application deployment, etc.

Technical Expertise Required for Using Emerging Technologies

Latest technologies like IoT and Artificial Intelligence help build features that enhance the overall user experience.

Creating the personalized software experience that we talked about before, like personalized learning paths, require AI expertise.

According to the Salesforce Marketing Analysis Report, 52% of customers are likely to switch to a different product brand if they do not get a personalized experience in the form of messages or recommended content.

Machine learning algorithms help you achieve this personalization in your software for training employees. These ML algorithms train on data to understand how users engage with your software. Depending on the individual user’s activity, the ML system recommends content to each user.

Your software developers can use third-party services like AWS Personalize to implement such machine learning models without going into the nitty-gritty. 

Your developers need to format and upload user data or provide real-time events of user interactions, select a training algorithm, train a part of the user data on this algorithm, validate it on another part of the data, and deploy it on the application.

Some other software services for customizing user experience include Microsoft Personalizer and Google TPU.

Test Your Employee Training Software Application

Testing or quality assurance is an important aspect of agile software development. Your software developers should ensure that each software module or feature is working as required. 

They should run test cases for unit testing, integration testing, user interface testing, database testing, security testing, etc.

After rigorous QA and code review sessions by senior developers, you are ready to deploy your software product so that your users can try it.

Your application testers can use automated testing tools like Selenium and Telerik Test Studio.

These testing tools provide features like debugging, cross-browser compatibility, easy-to-use test commands, integration with IDEs, support for multiple programming languages, etc.

For testing mobile applications, your app developers can use automated testing tools like Espresso for Android apps, XCTest and XCUITest for iOS apps, and Appium for hybrid mobile apps.

Your software developers also need to test your application’s APIs to validate their responses, etc. 

They can use software tools like Postman and Katalon Studio to test APIs including, web API, public API, composite API, etc., through features like CI/CD integrations, automated exploratory testing, debugging, GUI, etc.

Release Employee Training Software and Collect User Feedback

After the release of your minimum viable product (MVP), you will focus on gathering user responses. There are multiple tools available to help you gauge your employee engagement data. 

For example, SurveyMonkey helps attach a feedback survey form to your emails, Typeform can help you integrate a survey form in your application, and Appcues help with an in-app Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey.

You should also invest in providing quick support in case your employees have queries regarding product use. Your development team can use AI to provide enhanced user support through chatbots. Read more about it building a smart chatbot in our blog.

Improve Your LMS Product

At this stage, you have all the user feedback and engagement data to improve your MVP accordingly in your next development iteration. 

Your business analysts and software engineers can use tools like Google Visualization, Looker, etc., to perform data analytics on this data and extract actionable insights.

You would use this data to rethink your development strategy, improve and enhance training software by working on user-suggested features, again test your software, and release it for employees’ use.

In this way, with each development iteration, you would be able to improve your learning management software according to the users’ requirements.

Planning to Build a Training Software?

Owing to the long-term benefits that employee training programs bring to businesses, companies are willing to engage their employees with a learning management system.

Developing customized employee training and learning management systems is a comprehensive project that calls for great business analysis and software development skills. 

If you are developing an employee training software application and need to scale your team with additional skills and expertise then take a moment to tell us about your project requirements here.

One of our dedicated tech account managers will be in touch to show you similar projects we have done before and share how we can help you

Top FAQs on How to Build an Employee Training Tracking Software