How to Develop an Employee Training App?

With industries and niches getting more and more specific, employee training is becoming a necessity. Businesses now need to be focused more and more on employees aligning with the goals of the company, and it all starts with training them efficiently. Most corporations can agree on the fact that most of their employees take training lightly, and they have been trying to come up with more interactive ways to make training easier.

Things tend to get boring with conventional methods, and no one could blame the employees for not learning as much. With employee training apps, intuitive UI/UX can be implemented along with gamification features, making the entire training experience immersive and fun. While everyone would have different requirements, things like soft skills, company policies, and the other basics would remain the same.

Why do Businesses Develop Employee Training Apps?

Training is essential for businesses to upskill, sort, and acclimatize their employees. It sometimes is needed as a catalyst and helps them prepare for particular roles and technologies. Now, there have been legacy systems enabling learning sessions, video-based material, and tests based on what the employees learned. But the time has changed now, there are various ways including interactive quizzes, gamification, and real-time discussions, to help create a better learning environment for the employees.

An employee training app not only helps in better learning but in better assessment of your employees. While only a few things could be interpreted and assessment was only a namesake in legacy systems, a training app changes everything. Not only can you set aspects to assess upon, but also efficiently place the right people in the right job. With advanced analytics and interactive UI, an employee training app can help improve the entire training experience for both the employees and the employer.

Steps to Develop Employee Training App

Step 1: Making a List of Features

The features you choose and the flexibility to alter them according to different employees will be the deciding factors for your app. Separate employee training apps are not specifically built for each employee type but will have sections based on employee categories.

Even your business niche will play a part in what type of features you should get; the app development company you choose will help you with everything and end-to-end development. Below is a list of common features to include in your app; other than this, you can add on anything per your requirements when building a custom employee training app.

• Personalized Learning

Everyone learns at their own pace, and with a custom employee training app, that’s possible. The feature would let users choose the courses they want, see the completion status, and decide what to learn next.

• Gamification

Gamification can be implemented in various ways for an employee training app, and you can include it in features or simply use it to make the app more interactive. Whichever way you want to use it, this feature can surely make the app more efficient when used correctly.

• Video Playback

The majority of employees prefer videos over text and audio learning material, and this makes it important to include a video playback feature along with a video library in your employee training app.

• Course Creation

Course creation can be done directly by admins; they can pick modules and define categories based on the modules they add to a specific one. Course creation helps save the hassle of defining classes each time when a different module is to be included, saving a lot of time and effort.

• Progress Tracking

Everyone loves to track progress, and you can take it to the next level by adding different charts and completion metrics. It is a must-have feature for your employee training app as it can act as a motivator to finish the training as soon as possible.

• ERP Integration

The data gathered through the employee training app can be directly exported to your ERP solution. It not only helps in resource planning but ensures each employee can be utilized to the fullest of their abilities shown while training.

• Knowledge Centre

A knowledge center is a necessity in a training app, as it helps employees with resources they would need during the course. You can include audio, videos, e-books, quizzes, and more based on your requirements.

• Live Discussion

Live discussions are an emerging way to help employees train faster. For a variety of modules, employees can participate in live discussions to learn faster and explain their knowledge based on the other employees’ views.

• Actionable Insights

Insights to act upon are certainly a very important feature in a training app. Whether it be a good score or a fair score, insights could motivate employees to do better and improve themselves in the long term.

• Assessment

At the end of every training session, you will be able to assess your employees based on their skills. This feature would enable you to deploy employees to jobs best suited for them, based on various factors which you get to choose.

Step 2: The Development Part

The development part of an app requires various choices, starting from the platforms you want to target to the technology stack you want to choose. The choices you make here would not only cause a variation in cost and development time but also in the capabilities of the app. While it may seem like an overkill to create native apps for training in-house employees, it is usually a requirement in cases of such intuitive apps. On the upside, you would only need to maintain it for the coming time and update it based on new courses added when you add an entirely new department. Whatever you choose, make sure you avail a consultation from an app development company before investing time and money.

Read More: B2B Mobile App Development: A Complete Guide

The decisions you need to make include:

The Development Path for Employee Training Apps

Native Applications

Native apps are ones that are specifically created with supported technologies for each platform, Kotlin/Java in case of Android and Swift/C# in case of iOS. Building native apps is an intensive task and would require both more resources and time as you would be building two separate apps with almost nothing to be reused in terms of code.

Cross-platform Application Development

Cross-platform apps are capable of running on multiple platforms with minimal re-coding. This way of building apps has been more popular since React Native and Flutter, which both allow up to 90% code reusability, with Flutter offering iOS-specific design components and widgets. The only problem with the cross-platform development path, in this case, is an employee training app is a bit too complex, which would require an expert development team to build the app.

Choosing a Team for your Employee Training App’s Development

It takes various developers, designers, testers, and in a few cases, more than one manager to build successful applications. You need to choose based on the components you need to create, which would be in turn, based on the features you choose. Being extra cautious while hiring a team would help you save a lot of resources and save you from the trouble of re-hiring different members at the last minute. If you hire an app development company to build your app, you can skip this step as they will allocate the resources based on your requirements efficiently.

The following team members are part of an app development team:

• Project manager   
• Developers   
• UI/ UX experts   
• QA and testers 

Technology Stack

Based on the primary development path you choose; you will further need to choose technologies to go with it. Everything from databases to APIs to analytics tools all has a major impact on the overall functionality and performance of the apps you build. Choosing complementary technologies is vital as it would let the app components work together more efficiently. To get an idea of which technologies work together with the best, consulting and app development experts would be a good idea as they would have the most knowledge in this aspect. 

Below are the technologies you need to choose:

Step 3: Finally, You Need to Figure Out How to Build Your Team

1. Setting up Your Team

Setting up your own team or augmenting staff from an outsourcing company are both good options. However, since the app won’t need a lot of updates in the future and the course creation can be added as a feature, hiring full-time developers could be a waste of resources. Outsourcing is the best strategy in this case, as when your project is complete in a few months, you won’t have to lay off employees you hired for building your app. Staff augmentation is a handy option where you can augment development staff from a development company with no strings attached.

2. Hire an App Development Company

Hiring an app development company has to be the best way to get an app developed. Building a team is a very taxing task, and an app development company already has various teams for whichever development paths and technologies you choose. Going with the experts will save you money and time and would be a better option, especially in the case of an employee training app since it requires more intricate features and intuitive UI/UX.

Read More: 8 Tips for Choosing the Right Mobile App Development Company

Are You Ready to Get Your Own Employee Training Application?

Employee training is here to stay as no one would ever be a perfect fit for your organization, but they can learn it all with a little training. Many corporations are resorting to building their own apps to take control of how their employees are trained. If you are planning a similar app for your organization, we can build the perfect app for you with the features you want. As suggested above, this is going to be a complex app, and the experience of the developers will matter highly in this case.

If you have any queries, you can reach out to us, and we would be happy to provide you with a free quote and consultation. Our experts have helped shape various ideas for apps through the expertise of our engineers, and we can do the same for you. Share your requirements when you are ready with your idea, and our consultants will help you with the rest. You can contact us on the information provided below or by filling in the request for a quote form with your details.