This is a 2019 SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition (#SHRM19) Interview is with Brainier, a unique provider of scalable LMS. Below is a quick Q&A with the company’s Senior Vice President of Sales Kent Walker.
Who is Brainier!? Tell us everything, just as you would someone approaching your booth and asking you this question at #SHRM19 in Las Vegas.
Brainier is a division of BI-Worldwide, based in Minneapolis. We are part of a 70 year old company that focuses on employee engagement. Brainier comprises the brains of the learning group, (pardon the pun), at BI-Worldwide, that serves to educate, engage, and empower organizations with a user-friendly experience for both the admin and the learner. The Brainier LMS is our flagship product and was created to provide solutions to the training needs of organizations across many industries.user
Let us in on the magic. What’s the training process like at Brainier? How do you utilize your own tech and processes to teach your employees?
It’s a little less magic, and a bit more of a science. We are fortunate enough to have relationships with industry-leading content providers from which we curate the resources to solve whatever learning objective that arises. Inhouse, we address: new employee on-boarding, ongoing training, and leadership development training. Naturally, new employees use the LMS to learn critical business and industry information. There, we assemble everything from documented best practices, to simple, how-to videos for internal processes, pre-recorded product videos, and even Kirkpatrick Level three evaluations of key performance activities.
In addition to on-boarding, all customer experience associates are provided the necessary training to prepare for their Project Management Certification. The Brainier sales team uses curated content from a variety of vendors for sales training as well as refinement of skills on critical desktop applications. The Brainier LMS is also used as a searchable repository of reference material for our sales team. Brainier staff members have access to sample proposals, product sell sheets and other critical materials.
What are the biggest challenges companies face when training their employees? How do they overcome those challenges?
Some of the biggest challenges are change management and communication. Any new learning initiative will require leadership to be successful both in the planning phase, and in selling that plan to the people in the organization. Brainier works closely with new clients to help facilitate that success by the role-out, suggesting relevant content for training, and the essential communication around each stage of the process. This strategy allows users to feel very comfortable with the functionality of the new system as well as how it fits into both the broad, organizational goals and the more focused, individual goals.
What do you wish more HR professionals and recruiters knew about eLearning and in-house training?
We find the more successful eLearning professionals will consciously take into account the learning preferences of their audience to optimize the outcome. Addressing the organizational goals with a training program is great, but not aligning the delivery method to your audience’s needs and strengths is risky. The big problem we see is clients that purchase huge libraries of content but never curate. By doing this they really leave a lot to chance. We know the average amount of time allocated to training is falling every year, so the quality of time spent needs to be enriched. Users have the potential to get lost if the library is too large, or not specific to their individual needs. And once they are lost, they will never come back.
There are many eLearning companies in the market today. What makes Brainier unique?
We believe the product and the service model are both significant differentiators for Brainier. The Brainier LMS is a feature-rich platform, offering a multi-tenant design that gives clients the ability to segment not only their learning audience, but even the content that they can see. Users can belong to multiple groups and have assignments and optional content available based on group membership, this makes sure that users are only seeing what they need to see, and not seeing what they don’t need. As for support, the Brainier support model offers unlimited support for all system users, this means that every user has “fingertip access” to a learning expert at any time while using Brainier.
For anyone who won’t be able to make it to the Brainier booth in Las Vegas, what do you want them to know?
Brainier is a true pioneer in the LMS space, our innovative learning platform and our high-touch service model make us the best choice to be your LMS partner. At the core, we’re a bunch of midwestern folks that have a passion for learning and never get tired of talking about it. And, of course, we’d love to show you the product.
Visit the Brainier booth #1356 at #SHRM19!
Brett Farmiloe is the Founder and CEO – and currently CHRO - of Terkel.io, a platform where business leaders can answer questions related to their expertise and get published in articles featuring their
insights. Brett is a #SHRM22Influencers and has also been a keynote speaker at several state SHRM conferences around the topic of employee engagement.
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